The Unpublished Op-Ed Piece

A few weeks ago we tried to get an op-ed piece supportive of the part-timers into The Cord. The attempt was unsuccessful. However, due to the wonders of the blog-o-sphere, you can read it here. While it is somewhat outdated in time and the threat of a strike is much more possible, it's ideas are still prevalent. Please enjoy:

Students Should Support Part-Timers

Anatolijs Venovcevs

Perhaps it is a cliché to start off an op-ed piece with a reference to a work of literature or popular culture. In which case, I’m sorry. However, of late, I could not help but see the ongoing arduous negotiations between the Contract Academic Staff (CAS) and the administration, its ever-ominous implications, and the student body’s relative apathy toward it as parallel to Nevil Shute’s post-apocalyptic world in his novel and later movie adaptations of “On the Beach.”

In it, after the people living in the northern hemisphere destroy themselves in a nuclear holocaust, the last survivors of humanity in Australia try to live out their lives as normally as they can while deadly radiation poisoning seeps in from the north to kill them via airways. While much less apocalyptic, we, the students, try to live out our lives as normally as we can when in the meantime negotiations between the CAS and the administration drag on beyond anybody’s expectations and the spectre of rumours for a possible CAS strike slowly stalks the hallways of the campus.

But I digress, my goal is not to scare anyone, something so drastic is not imminent and much legal process has yet to take place before Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association (WLUFA) has a strike vote. My goal here is rather more basic than that – an appeal to the most basic of human logic.

It’s simple: Does equal work deserve equal pay?

The answer is obvious – yes, that has been the demand of every repressed minority for the past century of political and social activism. There is no logically justifiable way that equal work, equal experience, equal quality of service from different individuals not deserve equal pay, benefits, and job security. Regardless of sex, colour, creed, age, sexual identification, etc. it is undeniable that equal output deserves equal value.

This minutia of reasoning seems to escape some members of this university’s administration when it comes to providing benefits to some of the hardest working members of the faculty body who are probably one of the most mistreated individuals out of all the universities in Ontario.

The term “part-timer,” as the CAS are sometimes called, is a misnomer when many individuals teach as many (and often larger) classes than their “full time” counterparts. It does not represent any deficiency in schooling when most of the CAS have Ph.D.s from equally-accredited universities nor sometimes experience with research in their fields nor even value of publication as sometimes a quick search of peer-reviews journals may reveal names of some very familiar professors.

What is it then? The issue with the CAS is a simple rebranding of fine men and women into the demeaning term “part-timer” as if they are only partially valuable to the function of the school. Forgive me; I fail to see how 400 “part-time” profs can only be “partially valuable,” regardless if you’re just starting out in university or about ready to graduate.

Yet, the administration fails to budge to the demands of the WLUFA bargaining team when it comes down to simple decision making of the negotiation process let alone finding a compromise to the CAS wishes for greater job security and office space to meet and answer questions of their students. That is the living definition of incompetence at its finest.

To most students, I would imagine, this sounds like some high-ended labour law skull drudgery which does not concern them in any way. While this might be true to an extent, it’s certainly would not appear so when the distant thunder of a possible strike becomes a hurricane of picket lines, cancelled classes, and very upset tenured profs. Neither will it appear so if the stress and workload of the CAS members of the faculty continues unabated to put an ever-increasing dent in our pursuit of education. Nor will it appear so if in ten years we would look and see the academic landscape of Ontario become a minimal cost-maximum profit endeavour no different than that of Wal-Mart with students as the customers, degrees as the poor quality cheap goods, and the professors as the most educated and most mistreated members of that dystopia. In that light, skull drudgery does not seem so irrelevant after all.

Students are not powerless in this affair. We have a voice that’s louder than we realize since our tuition is the fuel that keeps the university running. When we are not happy the administration must answer for its service. I urge everyone reading this to do something – write an e-mail to the administration, wear a pin, join the student solidarity group supporting the CAS endeavour, or at the very least, pass this article on to a friend and make sure they read it. Spread the word. Part-timers do give full-value.

And if our efforts, both of the CAS faculty and the students that support them, fails and fizzles out, I fear it will be like the last introductory lines to Nevil Shute’s novel, borrowed from the last lines of “Hollow Men” by T.S. Elliot:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.