Jacques St-Pierre, 12th president of CAUT, and Université de Montréal professor emeritus, died March 29, 2016 at age 95.

The participation of academic staff in the governance of universities and colleges has long been seen as a key component of academic freedom. Today, however, collegial governance, and by extension academic freedom, is facing a critical challenge from new managerial practices and an increasing concentration of power in the administration.

Students graduating from UK universities and entering a hostile global economic climate with tens of thousands of pounds of debt are right to fear for their futures. What they probably don’t realise is that most of the highly qualified experts who teach them face the same insecurity year in, year out.

In the award-winning 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, violence and marital discord unfold against a deeply dystopian vision of academic life: one where a university president enjoys unilateral license to prevent publication of a novel he deems inappropriate, or to block the promotion of a faculty member he dislikes.

The Carleton University Academic Staff. Association knows it takes vigilance to defend academic freedom and collegial governance. The growing secrecy around board meetings prompted academic staff, students, and other campus groups to come together to voice concern.

It turns out that the highest earners in Ontario’s academic sector are the managers of the University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation (UTAM). President and CEO William Moriarty ranked third among the province’s top earners in 2015, pocketing a salary of $1.47 million.

On the final scheduled day of medi­ation prior to a looming strike deadline, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology Faculty Association and their employer reached a tentative agreement.

The 2016 federal budget provided a long overdue boost to Canada’s knowledge infrastructure.

Austerity is increasingly the watch-word at post-secondary institutions across the country. But the facts question many of the cries of poverty. Last year, almost 75 per cent of Canadian universities and colleges posted a budget surplus.

An inquiry into Laurentian University has concluded that senior officials have routinely violated aca­demic freedom and principles of collegial governance.

The principle of objectivity is supposed to guide the scientific world. Remove personal biases, emotional involvement and other interests, and society will succeed in finding the truths of the natural world.

After years of austerity measures and attacks against science and scientists, Canada needs a new vision to get science right and improve the accessibility and quality of post-secondary education.

At the beginning of this year, the University of Texas began permitting guns on its campus, including in the classroom. In response, I’m beginning a personal boycott. I will not accept invitations to speak at any university where guns are allowed in class — and I’d like others to join me.

It’s 2016, and for the first time in history we have finally begun to achieve gender balance in government — at least at the symbolic level of federal cabinet posts. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many other areas of Canadian society, including post-secondary education.

Healing people with polymers has been the life work of University of Toronto biomedical engineering professor Molly Shoichet, and her research in regenerative medicine could someday improve the lives of critically ill patients.

No more than three-quarters of the students on courses at Scottish universities should be of the same gender, the country’s funding council has ruled.

The Federation of New Brunswick Faculty Associations gave a cool reception to the provincial budget tabled by the Liberal government on Feb. 2. The federation says the government broke its promise to spare the education sector from its latest round of austerity measures.

Student opinion surveys and how they are used have been hotly contested in academia for years. But new research points to growing evidence that the surveys are biased and discriminatory.

In the spring of 2015, the federal Conservative government introduced legislation to expand both the maximum payable weeks of compassionate care benefits under EI and the maximum number of weeks of compassionate care leave without pay available under the Canada Labour Code (Part III).

The fundraising campaign launched by the CAUT Refugee Foundation last fall to help victims of the civil war in Syria was a major success.