I’d like to start by congratulating our colleagues at Acadia University for the impressive gains they made on many fronts following their recent three-week strike, including improved salaries, workload, research funding and precedent-setting pay equity provisions. I witnessed firsthand during my visit to their picket lines how well organized they were, and the high level of energy and solidarity of all engaged in the strike. Bravo! Collective action and determination do pay off.

I now want to return to a topic first broached in my September column, CAUT’s presence on the international front, which was intended as the first instalment of a two-part series. I had to interrupt the sequence to deal with the flawed report of the New Brunswick Commission on Post-Secondary Education, in my October and November columns. So now, back to the international scene.

In recent months, I have had the pleasure of representing CAUT at two international meetings — Education International’s World Congress held in Berlin in July and their International Higher Education and Research Conference held last month in Malaga, Spain. The first event is now held every four years, whereas the second is convened every other year.

EI is a global federation representing more than 30 million teachers and education workers through 390 member organizations in 170 countries and territories. With more than 2,000 delegates attending, the Berlin Congress was the largest gathering of educators ever hosted by EI.

Prior to the event, CAUT’s associate executive director, David Robinson, was chosen to be a member of EI’s resolutions committee, where he played a key role in guiding resolutions to the floor. I had the privilege of presenting a CAUT resolution on fixed-term higher education teaching personnel that sets out rights of contract academic staff. The resolution, initiated by CAUT’s contract academic staff committee, was approved unanimously and represents a crucial addition to EI’s broad range of policies.

CAUT also played an important role in the forum on public-private partnerships or 3Ps, where we voiced our concerns over ambiguous language in a motion put forward on these models. The motion also called for EI to create a task force on 3Ps and I suggested it would be important to have someone from the higher education sector named to the panel, since the challenges posed by 3Ps in higher education are different from those associated with other education sectors.

At EI’s higher education conference in November, David chaired a workshop on combating commercialization and privatization, where delegates passed a motion in opposition to public-private partnerships in any form. The motion was later ratified by the general assembly and notice sent to the EI executive.

The higher education conference was organized on the overall theme of “The Status of Higher Education Personnel 10 Years after the 1997 UNESCO Recommendation,” and coincided with the 10th anniversary of the UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel. The international agreement established guidelines for the treatment of academic staff, including provisions for the promotion of academic freedom and tenure, for collegial governance, for advancing gender equity and for ensuring decent terms and conditions of employment.

The recommendation, I’m proud to say, came into being largely due to the work of CAUT, and in particular Donald Savage, CAUT’s former executive director, and Pat Finn, the executive director of the Carleton University Academic Staff Association.

The importance of this instrument cannot be overstated. In recent months, we’ve heard from colleagues in Tunisia, Latvia, Uganda and Australia thanking us for taking the lead in developing the recommendation. By all accounts, the recommendation has been a critically important tool in pressuring their governments to respect the academic and employment rights of staff.

In fact, the first ever complaint of a violation of the recommendation has now been filed with UNESCO on behalf of the National Tertiary Education Union of Australia over the former Liberal government’s gross violations of key principles enshrined in the 1997 recommendation. Our Australian colleagues have asked me to convey their heartfelt appreciation for CAUT’s commitment to promoting the rights of academic staff around the world. Indeed, we should all be very proud!

Among other topics discussed at the conference were the growing threats to academic freedom largely due to globalization, commercialization and privatization; the challenges posed by OECD initiatives; the importance of promoting the rights of fixed-term staff and early-stage researchers, as well as advancing gender equity; and the responsibility of addressing climate change.

CAUT recognizes the importance of working internationally on the same issues confronting our member associations nationally and locally. I am extremely proud of what we were able to achieve in both Berlin and Malaga and of the opportunity for CAUT delegates to play central and substantive roles. In addition to chairing the key workshop on public-private partnerships for the Malaga conference, David was also asked to present in two different sessions and I had the privilege of chairing the conference panel on recent OECD initiatives. More about those in future Bulletin articles. Stay tuned.