Carleton University is the site of steady labour unrest. The long and vocal CUPE strike of the year’s beginning was probably the most overt display of labours’ resistance to capitalist exploitation, that Carleton has recently seen. But resistance is not always so loud or well seen. On Thursday March 27 a meagre few will participate in a silent demonstration outside monthly administration governance meeting to express discontent with University Administrations’ insistence on hiring short-term, part-time, contract instructors – this as opposed to extending faculty level positions to field specific experts, trained academics, “teacher- first” types. There is no conspiracy theory underpinning Carleton’s hiring strategy. Contract instructors = cheap labour.
Discovering what is lost or gained for the quality of students’ education when contract instructors are hired at the expense of the extension of tenure tracked positions is debatable. The claim is not that contract instructors are “bad teachers” and that faculty members are good ones – we all know this to be simply not true. Some contract instructors are great, highly skilled and knowledgeable in their field. Similarly, some faculty members are brutal, seemingly uninterested in their teaching duties. What is certain is that when Universities resort to flexibility and cost effectiveness in their staffing rationalities, by hiring short-term contract instructors to teach classes the collective security and value of academic labour suffers a fatal blow.
Contract instructors Canada wide are paid far less than full time professors on a per term basis, they receive little if any holiday or health benefits and are completely ineligible for sebembattical leave; this being a time and space most cherished by teachers for research production. If Carleton and other Canadian Universities continue to opt to fill their teaching voids by extending contract-based positions, students and academics alike could see the faculty position completely phased out. Indeed, the phasing process has begun – it need not continue. To nominally appreciate, in the eyes of Carleton University Administration, the value of the labour that contract teachers produce one might consider that contract instructors belong to the same union as teaching assistants. Students and faculty at Carleton are expressing their concern over the devaluation of academic labour that results when Universities refuse to fill vacancies with highly qualified experts, and instead opt for the purchase of flexible and cheap labour power to satisfy the demand for teaching and education.
Carleton University has a disgusting amount of money. The size of programs are expanding, which means more capital (student tuition) coming in. Many graduate programs have doubled in size this past year, with the catching up of the Ontario double cohort year. Graduate class sizes went from 10 in years past to 20 – same number of teachers twice the amount of students. Roughly, this means that twice the amount of student tuition went directly into the pockets of Carleton University Ltd. Where does the money go? Well, on-campus residence buildings are going up left right and centre, as the view from atop Carleton University’s MacCudrum library attests. Property investment is, an any lay-economist knows, an extremely profitable form of capital investment. Residence apartments, priced at about $700 per unit, which is well above the local area’s average, will yield huge long term profits for the university.
The, ‘we’re doing this (hiring contract teachers) to keep students’ tuition costs down’ argument is not only weathered, but completely unfounded. Carleton University and other Canadian Universities that are run on a corporate model have a disreputable history of exploiting not only thier student’s consumption power, but also the value of their staff’s labour power.
W. Baxter Carleton University Dept. of Law M.A. Candidate.