Innis College town hall erupted into a cacophony of dissenting voices last Friday as a proposal for a massive restructuring of Student Affairs was presented to staff and students by Vice-Provost students David Farrar. Worried staff and angry student union representatives voiced concerns about several different aspects of the new structure.
The reorganization announcement took Student Services employees by surprise, and a meeting was hastily organized on May 3 to present the concerns of staff and student representatives.
Mary Bird, a representative from the United Steelworkers of America, an international labour union that represents over 4,000 administrative and support staff at the University of Toronto, echoed the suspicions of other panelists who held their own town hall on May 4 to react to the reorganization.
“Student Services seems to us to be being dismantled, rather than reorganized,” she warned.
Bird urged the crowd to give special thought to the reorganization’s plans for the part-time doctors at U of T’s Health Service. The approximately 27 doctors have been informed that part-time workers are being phased out.
“It sounds as if they want full-time doctors. There’s not a physician in the city who will work full-time for Health Service…Do they not know that, or do they actually want to eliminate the doctors?” she asked.
Panelist and APUS VP internal Jeff Peters denounced the reorganization, accusing the administration of taking deliberate steps to exclude students from the process.
“It’s no coincidence this is happening at the end of April and the beginning of May. It happens in such a way that students don’t have a chance to really engage in the process,” he fumed.
The Student Housing Service has been told they are redundant and will be replaced with an online-only service, prompting some severe concerns.
One woman confronted Farrar about the possible consequences for students. “The housing services [at UTM and UTSC] have essentially disappeared, and I think the service that’s used out there is just an internet site called ‘Craigslist,'” she contended at Friday’s town hall meeting.
Student unions in particular were most deeply concerned about the restructuring’s planning process. It began last summer, when, according to Farrar, “We spoke to all three student unions in the summer last year.”
UTSU VP internal Faraz Siddiqui, who was in a focus group for the restructuring, pointed out that student involvement was not equitable.
“In our group of six or seven students, there were no women, and most of us were hand-picked by Farrar himself,” Siddiqui said.
The concern was echoed by Margaret Shalma, president of the Students for Barrier Free Access. “The whole restructuring process has been full of administration jargon,” she accused.
Farrar called the Council On Student Services a “confrontational” body, adding that COSS had rejected seven out of he last eight Student Affairs budgets, and said that it is “something that will have to be worked on.”
Farrar’s call for feedback was taken skeptically by some of the audience. The SBFA executives claimed to have given Farrar a “counter-proposal” weeks ago, but were disappointed about not having received any positive response.
“Two phone calls, four emails and nothing has been returned,” stated Shalma.
Shalma and her fellow executives at SFBA are also worried about the possibility that Disability Services may be regrouped with medical, psychiatric and counseling services.
“The universities have a particular conception of how to deal with disability-disability as a technical issue. While I do not deny this importance, we at SFBA feel that we should not be placed strictly within a health cluster,” Shalma insisted.
