A new year always brings change, and 2015 is shaping up to offer more than its share of possibilities. Canadians will go to the polls for the sixth time since 2000 — and only the 42nd since Confederation. After five years of Conservative minority governments, followed by four of a Conservative majority, there is much for us to reflect on as we consider the path we want to see our country taking in the years to come.
As university and college staff, we have sometimes been dismissed as an apolitical demographic whose voices and interests can be ignored. “Eggheads” was the term scornfully deployed by Richard Nixon in the 1952 U.S. presidential race, and it has returned to general use in recent years among right-wing populists and anti-intellectuals on both sides of the border.
Yet, as others are starting to realize, we are in fact a political force to be reckoned with. For some of us, politics and public policy lie at the very heart of our academic disciplines. Others have been politicized by seeing the academy in general, and sometimes their own research areas, trivialized, marginalized and defunded over the years. Whatever our professional experiences, we are highly educated, articulate and motivated individuals with a commitment to safeguarding the futures of coming generations — those of our students, if not our own children and grandchildren.
As the countdown to the election gets underway, we need to take stock of policies implemented by past governments, along with the promises of those who would have our endorsement in the future. The markers are sobering. Overall Tri-Council research funding in this country has fallen by more than 6 per cent in real dollar terms since 2007. SSHRC funding alone saw a net drop of 10.5 per cent. Perhaps more troubling still, much of the remaining outlay of federal research funding is increasingly tied to for-profit industry partnerships. Research without immediate commercial application has steadily fallen off the funding radar, while potentially “inconvenient” research — in environmental science and social statistics in particular — has been muzzled or otherwise suppressed in some government circles.
There seems to be a fundamental lack of comprehension, bordering on willful ignorance at times, for the ways in which a robust and diverse community of basic, curiosity-driven scientific research forms an essential ecosystem for technological innovation, environmental equilibrium and social health over the long term. Any steps to reverse this situation, from across-the-board increases to research funding disbursed on a peer-review basis, to restoration of long-form census analysis at Statistics Canada, to the creation of a special Parliamentary Science Officer, would be welcome changes to current trends.
Reversing years of neglect, misdirection and downright erosion in the academic research sphere would certainly be a laudable objective for Canada’s 42nd elected parliament to set itself. But the damage done to university and college campuses over the last decade and more, in the name of “austerity,” “crisis,” and “rationalization,” goes far beyond research alone. Ours are simply no longer the workplaces they once were, and the academic job has become both less sustainable, and less desirable, as a consequence.
We have witnessed an ever-increasing series of attacks on the integrity of academic work such as corporate-minded boards and administrators seeking to bully our members and strong-arm our academic staff associations into accepting concessions at the bargaining table, long-standing collegial government practices that are ignored, or reinterpreted, to remove faculty voices from educational decision making, and sessional contracts replacing tenured positions. Intellectual significance, and long-term viability plans are forced to take a back seat to the short-sighted considerations of a constantly diminishing bottom line.
These changes in our working lives cannot be directly blamed on the federal government. They have, however, been exacerbated and accelerated by the tendency among recent governments to emphasize private interest over the public good in all aspects of policy. And they will continue to fester if the current direction in anti-union and anti-labour legislation is sustained. Bills C-525 and C-377 are but the first in a series of moves that will undoubtedly make it easier for university employers — and all employers — to continue the degradation of working conditions in the future. Voters in Ontario said no to the anti-union “Right to Work” proposals of Tim Hudak’s Conservatives last year; it is now important that Canadian voters make their own decisions about the future of labour rights at the federal level.
We live in interesting times. Our colleagues in the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, the union that represents our federal scientists, are preparing an unprecedented action plan and advertising campaign for the upcoming election. Others will undoubtedly wade into the election campaign. CAUT for its part has a long tradition of actively lobbying federal parliamentarians on issues of post-secondary education, research funding and labour rights. These issues have taken on a new urgency in recent years, and we will do our best to bring them up once more in 2015. “Eggheads” or not, our voices will be heard.