After nearly nine years, the University of Waterloo and the Faculty Association of UW (FAUW) have agreed on revisions to policy 76 (which focuses on faculty appointments) and policy 77 (which pertains to faculty tenure and promotions). The changes promise to improve work conditions for faculty in the teaching stream, which in turn is supposed to improve students’ quality of education.
So what exactly does that mean, and will the revisions really have that impact?
UW has various faculty streams, including a tenure stream focused on research with less teaching responsibilities, and a teaching stream focused on teaching with less research responsibilities. However, up till now, the method of career progression throughout the teaching stream at UW didn’t align with that of the tenure stream, something the FAUW says it hoped to address through the policy 76 and 77 revisions.
Peter Wood, the chair of the lecturers committee and co-chair of the policy development committee, described the discrepancy between the tenure stream and teaching stream before the revisions. The tenure stream had a standardized system where new hires begin as assistant professors on a probationary appointment after which, if they are successful, they gain tenure and the title of associate professor. Success in this role then leads to promotion to the position of full professor.
“But on the teaching stream side, on the lecturer side … there was no language around how appointments work and who approves what … it was all very mixed up. That’s the whole idea, is that the teaching stream now parallels the research stream. They look the same in that sense of career progression,” he said.
Canadian universities have seen an increasing number of lecturers at a disproportionately larger ratio than increases in tenured staff, with a 2015 report demonstrating a decrease in the ratios of contract to tenured staff between 2001 and 2010. According to the Canadian Association of University Teachers, 29 per cent of academic staff worked on temporary contracts in 2019. “What’s also very common … is to have what they call precarious faculty members, they’re just on very short-term contracts,” Wood said.
However, other schools like the University of Toronto have implemented similar structures for their teaching stream faculty, something which up till now, UW had been missing.
“Neither [the FAUW or UW] wants the university run by people who are here for four months and then they leave,” Wood said. “[Permanent contracts] create that long-term vision for everybody, as opposed to with a contract, ‘I’m just teaching this term and then I’m gone … so what’s the point of investing in anything, innovation or course improvement, because I’m not gonna be here.’”
“So what’s the alternative of these … short-term contracts? The alternative is a professional teaching track. Which is essentially what we’ve created,” he said.
According to Wood, it’s also very common in Canadian universities for those with permanent status to have a lower teaching load while precarious teaching faculty have a higher teaching load. Unfortunately, this creates a financial incentive to continue hiring definite-term staff because the lower course load allocated to permanent staff makes them more expensive on a per-course basis.
“By aligning [the maximum course load assignments], it doesn’t make a difference if deans hire a definite-term person or a permanent person … there’s now no financial incentive to [continuously] hire definite-term,” he said.
However, not all lecturers are pleased by the revisions. An anonymous lecturer writing on Lecturers Connect University of Waterloo, which identifies as a grassroots movement to unionize lecturers at UW, stated that FAUW made “major concessions” to the university. In a blog titled “8.5+ Years of P76/77 Negotiations …For New Titles?,” they wrote that FAUW’s concessions characterized lecturers as “teaching only, not teaching intensive,” citing the FAUW’s agreement to “concede the ability of lecturers to be recognized for conducting research” as one such example. According to the lecturer, this would discourage research collaboration amongst faculty and “frustrate” their ability to secure internal and external research grants, thereby making it more difficult to fund graduate and honours students under their supervision. James Nugent, a continuing lecturer in the faculty of environment and a member of Lecturers Connect, explained that though 15 per cent of surveyed lecturers have research as part of their duties, only in “exceptional” cases will it be included in an assistant professor (teaching stream)’s contract, without which lecturers cannot apply for research grants.
Nugent acknowledged that the policy 76/77 revisions do come with some improvements. One main improvement, he said, was the entrenchment of the ability of contract teaching faculty to earn course reductions, or semesters with no teaching duties, which gives lecturers time to prepare and improve their courses and teaching skills. Another improvement was the clarification of the process of hiring permanent teaching-stream faculty, something Nugent pointed out as especially important when the increasing “casualization” of work has made it more difficult for lecturers to secure permanent work. He echoed Wood’s sentiments that it is crucial to have educators who are invested in long-term curriculum development and overall participation in the university.
However, Nugent pointed out that the revisions don’t address the core issue fueling the financial incentive to hire definite-term faculty in the first place.
“Well-meaning deans may still be incentivized to hire definite-term lecturers or contract teaching-stream faculty if the broader economic situation of the university … is not doing well… because it gives them financial flexibility, because they don’t know what might be coming in a few years from now,” he said, referencing UW’s budget deficit, which is predicted to increase to $15 million for the 2023-2024 operating year. Though the agreement will ensure definite-term teaching-stream faculty have the same cap on their teaching load as permanent faculty, “[t]his agreement, just to be clear, does not prevent deans from hiring contract teaching-stream faculty.”
The tentative agreement states: “For those whose first definite-term regular appointment was made after [IMPLEMENTATION DATE], no further definite-term appointments can be made beyond the fifth year; however, they may be considered for probationary appointments.” Nugent pointed out that this may create a problem where “until the financial [deficit] is addressed, or the financial logic is addressed in terms of hiring decisions, you could end up having some people who have been hired on contract for five years no longer allowed to continue working at the University of Waterloo because they’ve reached that cap.”
The lack of long-term solutions was also clear to Nugent in the amount of time it took to reach this agreement. He cited the administration’s ability to effectively veto policy changes, as well as the lack of a unionized faculty, as reasons behind the nearly nine-year-long negotiations.
“Changes to policy 76 have taken almost nine years because the university administration is not required to bargain or to negotiate any changes to policy, unlike in unionized universities, where every three or four years, the administration and the faculty association would sit down and negotiate everything,” he said, explaining how such schools are able to negotiate many more policies in a more timely manner under a particular legal framework of collective bargaining under the provincial government.
Wood acknowledged that the process had taken longer than it should’ve, but that during his time on the committee, negotiations with the university went very smoothly.
To mitigate similar issues in the future, Nugent emphasized the need for collective bargaining driven first by unionization, which he said is about “creating a legal, clear, transparent process that resolves issues in a much more timely manner than what we’ve seen here at the University of Waterloo.”
