The Windsor University Faculty Association (WUFA) has been on strike since Wednesday, 17 September. WUFA consists of all faculty, sessional instructors, librarians, and other academic staff. As a result, there are no classes.
As someone who pays around $270 a week for my education here, I went down to the picket line to find out what the hell is going on. Fortunately, WUFA has a pamphlet titled “What the hell is going on?,” which I will share with you verbatim. Remember, this is one side of the story…
What are they striking about?
1. Poor treatment of sessional professors. Sessionals at the UofW are the lowest-paid sessionals in the country, with no job security, no benefit plan, no assistance from a GA/TA. Sessionals typically get last-minute notice about the courses they’ll be teaching… or whether they’ll be teaching at all.
2. Unqualified professors. The UofW administration wants to bring in a new wave of profs–ones that only have a Masters degree and don’t do any research. These profs will teach up to ten classes a year even though they don’t have the educational requirements that we deserve to have in our professors.
3. Gender inequity. The administration wants to reduce what is called an “anomalies fund,” which is established to fix inequalities in payroll that still exist across Canada according to things like gender, race, etc. The previous faculty contract has an anomalies fund of $100,000, which still wasn’t enough to make up for every instance on inequity. The UofW administration wants to reduce this number to $20,000.
4. Exponentially growing administration. In the last ten years, the administration at the UofW has nearly doubled in size. These salaries are paid for by student tuition. More administration also means fewer professors, which also means fewer available courses.
5. Horrible financial decisions. VP Finance, Stephen Willetts, was hired at the UofW to create long-term financial planning. So he hired an outside consultant team to come in and do hid job for him. Ross Paul was paid $615,000 for leaving the school (hard work, we know). The new logo cost $1.5 million dollars. And we wonder where our tuition fees go?
6. No contract. WUFA has been working without a contract since June 30, 2008. They aren’t being unreasonable; faculty at this university is asking to be paid wages that are standard throughout Ontario universities. The administration is offering the faculty members wages that are below the provincial standard, as well as below the cost of living in Windsor.
Why should I care?
So WUFA has good reasons–how does this affect students?
You’re paying to be here. This is your education. Is there anything more important?
Canadian students pay between $230 and $277 a week to be here. The administration doesn’t care if we miss a week or two of school, and no, there will be absolutely no financial compensation to the students for classes missed.
By the way, if you’re an international student, you pay about three times that much.
A university without professors or students is just another corporation.
My thoughts are with the law students who must endure exponentially increasing tuition, a largely third rate faculty, and now this. Its simply mind boggling to think of U of W law profs walking the picket line when in my experience they were the most unaccountable group of slackers I had ever seen. I guess that means this message will be “deleted without notice”. So will a lot of donations from alumnae.
It’ll be interesting to run the stats in a few years to see if the ratio of management-side/union-side labour lawyers shifted for students impacted by the strike.
Over the last few years, I am very disappointed with the quality of education provided by some of the professors in the engineering faculty and these professors don’t do anything to help students. For example, the professor doesn’t take the responsiblity to inform the breakdown of our grades after final exam even after emailing him/her. They don’t respond to emails and they act as if their hands are full, forgetting that they have a responsibility towards the upbringing of the students. Their marking schemes are the most poorest schemes that I have ever seen and they tend to make things very hard. After overlooking the quality of education provided by these profs, I can’t wait to get out of this university.
Special thanks to all of those who are permanently active in the movement and let it be known that many of us who are currently not involved, do find sentiments in their efforts and support them very dearly.