A strike is an emotionally draining affair. This would be true anywhere, anytime. But the feeling at the Trent University strike was particularly sharp.

At Trent, the sentiment was of an academic community undermined by its own administration. After years of working toward a University budget with strong commitments to teaching and research, and years of effort to keep up the high quality of Trent's professoriate and programs, our Trent colleagues found their administration uncommitted to open decision making or to quality.

It is always demoralizing to be faced by a mean-spirited and uncommunicative administration. It's even worse when it happens only five years after a similar experience in the early 1990s.

After all, universities are the homes of reason and evidence and careful argument. We think of them as communities where the political emotions are of a particular kind. Teachers, students, staff members, and administrators arrange their decision making and their daily lives with first concern for openness, fairness, and respect for others.

That is the theory. In the case of Trent, how could things have gone so wrong only five years after the last strike?

Like most readers of this Bulletin, I know just some of the reasons for the recent crisis (elsewhere in this issue you will find coverage of those reasons); but I do recall earlier times when things were different. Think back to the strikes and social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I remember a public-sector strike in downtown Toronto where the administration came out to talk to union leaders, and said they were as puzzled by the speed of economic and social change as were the workers. At the negotiating table, those administrators were tough as nails; but they were willing to describe their vision of the whole enterprise, and to talk about "re-visioning" as part of negotiations. I wish I could say that this 1970 strike (and similar events in the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and elsewhere) ended with bosses and workers putting roses on each other's desks. They did not. But they did arrive at a sensible collective agreement to which both sides were faithful.

There won't be roses at Trent, either.

In saying it would not pay an average Ontario teaching wage to its faculty, the Trent administration went back on a deal it made five years ago. In refusing to say where it stood on the questions of professorial complement and budget proportionality, the Trent administration implied it was ready to increase class size, to hire more part-time and sessional instructors, and to change the Trent University community.

In trying repeatedly to get its hands on the pension surplus of its own teachers, the Trent administration showed disdain for the usual standards of community and honesty in the academy.

Through it all, the people at the centre of the administration -- the President, the central committees of the Board of Governors -- were invisible. A Trent colleague described the behaviour of one very highly placed administrator as that of "Casper, the unfriendly ghost."

This is the behaviour of a managerialist, Presidential administration. In keeping their heads down, and keeping silent about their vision of Trent University, the administration suggested they were concerned about money, efficiency, performance indicators ... but not about the Trent community.

We are, of course, hugely relieved that the strike is over. Our Trent colleagues and their leadership came through this hard time with undiminished commitment to one another and to high-quality public university education.

This was a strike about educational quality, and about the way power is taken and used in the academy. The Trent administration now must show by its deeds that it can keep its promises, that it accepts the duties of openness and due process, and that it cares for the Trent educational community as passionately as the Trent profs do. After two weeks on the picket line, we know where our colleagues stand.