On Mar. 19 York University faculty went out on strike. The CAUT Defence Fund promised $1,000,000 for strike pay and financial support for the operations of the union during the strike. Individual faculty associations also offered donations with the Association of University of New Brunswick Teachers leading the way with $10,000.

Thank you for drawing to my attention the views of CAUT on the financial barriers that you believe may hinder the mobility of students at the post-secondary level.

I was delighted to read John McMurtry’s timely letter in the February CAUT Bulletin. A general debate on the question of management rights in the university context is much needed and I hope that Dr. McMurtry’s letter will trigger such discussion at a national level.

In the February CAUT Bulletin, Bill Bruneau outlined his concerns about differential roles for faculty. He based his argument on a particular document that circulated at UBC a few years ago. I haven’t seen that document, so my comments come from a more general consideration of the issue.

In the aftermath of the strike at Trent University before Christmas and the subsequent mass exodus of senior administrators, the board of governors set up an external review of the administration of the university. The committee was composed of Professor Joyce Lorimer, past president of CAUT and Professor Harry Arthurs, former president of York University.

Advances in information technology will profoundly reshape the Canadian university — but in what shape, exactly? Technological soothsayers predict not only the end of the library, but also the end of the university as we know it. Rather than surrender to technological determinism, however, almost 200 professors, librarians, administrators, researchers, publishers and government officials met in early March in Vancouver at the Scholarly Communication in the Next Millennium conference to consider technological, legal and financial dimensions of scholarly communication and to craft Canadian responses and strategies to meet the challenges.

While spring may have come to the rest of the Canada, educators and librarians continue to face wintery resistance on the copyright front.

Recently I returned from a foreign land, as foreign as the desert to someone who had experienced only lush green fields in the past. That foreign land was the 1996 CAUT Status of Women conference in Halifax, N.S. I was being offered an opportunity to interact with like-minded women who had made major contributions to the struggle for equality for women in Canada. I expected that I would be able to learn more about this struggle; to take part in dialogue about substantive and important issues; learn how to do a better job of representing women faculty on my campus; and, learn how to provide more inclusive and equal classrooms, to fight for better circumstances for part-time faculty, and to deal with setbacks and disappointments following experiences that might stem from my gender.

Within weeks a federal election campaign will likely be called. Your CAUT Executive, along with our staff, are already thinking about questions we shall ask the parties and the candidates. We aim, as usual, to make post-secondary education a central issue in the election. Strange, perhaps, but this has a lot to do with the strike at York University.