Leah HennigSure, sometimes I groan about assignments or drag my feet on my way to class. Who doesn’t? The alternative is sleeping in and doing nothing. But without the dedicated professors, teaching assistants (TA), and non-academic staff who keep this campus running, I doubt many of us would stick around for four or more years.
It seems that the University of Alberta leadership recognizes that too. Sort of.
On October 22, the U of A hosted a launch event for its new strategic plan: Forward Together: The U of A People Strategy. It’s a brand new plan on how to make the university a supportive workplace for all of its employees. It sounds great on paper, but I’m still scratching my head a little bit. If the U of A really wants to properly support staff so badly, why can’t it just do it? What exactly is standing in the way?
Sure, a strategic plan can be a mechanism for accountability. Something for people to hold the university to. But when actually reading through it, the plan seems to be more about ensuring the university can achieve the ambitious goals laid out in its 10-year strategic plan SHAPE.
The website for the People Strategy only mentions SHAPE once. Looking at the full plan, however, it seems like SHAPE is guiding this more than the people actually are. It almost seems like the university is only looking to change how it treats staff so SHAPE can succeed.
SHAPE lays out the university’s plans to increase enrolment by 16,000 students and climb in national and international rankings. Some people simply may not care how much the university increases enrolment or how the U of A ranks. But it will undoubtedly change some aspects of the university experience for both students and staff. Put simply, if the university can’t retain its world-renowned staff, that could prevent the U of A from both climbing in the rankings and attracting top students.
When the university held the launch event for the People Strategy, bargaining with academic and non-academic staff was still ongoing, as it is currently. The Association for Academic Staff U of A (AASUA) and the Non-Academic Staff Association (NASA) have been in negotiations with the U of A for new contracts since the summer.
One of the big concerns AASUA has raised is the huge portion of academic teaching staff (ATS) that are on short-term contracts. According to AASUA, about 60 per cent of ATS are “trapped in short-term contracts.” That’s a pretty bleak outlook for a university that claims to care so much about their employees.
If staff are on short-term contracts, they don’t necessarily have benefits like dental care. They also have no guarantees that they will have a job next year. These are people who are dealing with the cost-of-living crisis, who have kids, who are trying to plan for retirement. It feels entirely insincere to have “prioritizing health and well-being” as a major theme when there are ATS without benefits.
This lack of job security may lead to more than just anxiety. It also creates a power imbalance between employees and the university. How are you supposed to advocate for yourself when you’re worried anything could jeopardize the renewal of your contract?
And for a university that wants to “empower” people — which is one of the four major themes of the People Strategy — this doesn’t seem like a good way to go about that. How do short-term contracts empower people? The U of A wants people to be invested in its “mission,” but seemingly won’t invest in fairer, more stable contracts. As a student, it’s difficult to believe the university is making every effort to support staff when over half of its staff are on short-term contracts. Staff might be far more worried about securing a job for the next year than building community. And I can’t blame them for that.
There’s also been concerns over the increasing workloads of ATS. AASUA has said that the workloads for many are increasing, yet wages have been stagnant. And once again, how can someone advocate for fair pay when the university could just refuse to renew their contract and hire another short-term ATS?
Anecdotally, class sizes have also been increasing, and with that, workloads for ATS are increasing. In addition to increasing workloads, office space for faculty seems to be an issue. Last December, an electrical fire in the Humanities Centre (HC) led to it being closed for months. That meant not only classes were relocated, but staff lost access to their offices.
Now the university can’t predict when these things will happen, but deferred maintenance has been a persistent issue. Personally, I heard from multiple of my professors that the university did not provide them with alternate office space. Rather, it was other coworkers and friends that helped find them temporary office space.
And while the HC is functional again, the university is looking to get rid of the HC at some point in the next five to 10 years. This is part of the U of A’s plan to “optimize” the use of space. The university plans to scatter the faculty of arts across campus. But sure, the university wants to facilitate community building and connection.
On top of all that, the U of A underwent massive academic restructuring in the name of making the university more efficient and saving money. One major change was lumping faculties into colleges with a dean for each. Some faculty were concerned it would diminish faculty’s power to contribute to big decisions.
A concern that seemed to be present at every stage of the academic restructuring process was the seemingly performative consultation. Where was the “people first” attitude then?
And a few years later, how successful this was at making services more centralized and fostering interdisciplinary approaches is unclear. What we do know is that academic restructuring cost over 1,000 people their jobs.
Even though the university says people are the foundation of everything it does, this people-centred plan seems to come a little late. It comes long after SHAPE, and even longer after academic restructuring. To me, it only reinforces that people are an afterthought in the university’s grand plans.
At the end of the day, a lack of a specific strategic plan wasn’t holding the university back from improving staffs’ working environment. It could just do it. And this plan isn’t going to magically yield results. The university can make promises, but until leadership actually shows some results, it’s just pretty words.
