“As a full time professor, I would be able to stop worrying about survival and give my family and community all I have to offer.”
So says one of the stories shared by a contract faculty worker in a new initiative of the We Teach Ontario (WTO) campaign. The initiative seeks to highlight the work being done, and the challenges faced, by a group that is carrying out an increasing amount of the undergraduate teaching in this province.
“We often think of professors as individuals with strong job security, benefits, and good pay,” says the WTO website. “But a large—and growing—number of professors work on contract, from course to course.”
WTO was originially launched in 2013 by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA).
Graeme Stewart, OCUFA communications manager, says the biggest reason that contract faculty have taken on such a larger role in teaching is chronic underfunding by the Ontario government, which has caused the hiring of full time faculty to stagnate.
“Ontario now gives universities 30 per cent less per-student funding than they did in 1990,” he says, adding that the province has the lowest per-student funding in Canada at 34 per cent below the national average.
Stewart also places some responsibility on university administrations. “Employing people on contract gives university admins greater workforce flexibility, at the expense of good working conditions,” Stewart adds.
Andrew Langille, a Toronto labour lawyer, says the situation with contract faculty reflects broader changes in the nature of employment. “The move towards insecure, precarious employment isn’t just a feature of academia. It’s a trend that can be found in every industry,” he says.
Both say that the challenges faced by contract faculty relate to the labour strife at U of T. “The CUPE members at U of T are striking for pay above the poverty line, which the administration says it cannot grant due to financial constraints,” says Stewart.
“What we’ve seen specifically at the University of Toronto… is the increasing reliance on a precarious, temporary, disposable workforce marked by poverty level wages, huge amounts of unpaid labour, and the inability to maitain a secure, dignified existence,” Langille explains.
Stewart says that data on contract faculty is hard to come by, but some trends can be detected by looking at publicly available information from individual universities.
A CBC report from September 2014 highlighted statistics from Laurier University. In 2012, 52 per cent of students were taught by contract faculty, a 38 per cent increase from 2008, but their salaries only took up approximately 4 per cent of the budget.
“We don’t know much about them, or the extent of their employment in Ontario’s universities,” he says, adding that the insecure nature of the work makes it difficult to gather information.
The CBC also stated that, while full professors make between $80,000 –$150,000 dollars a year, contract faculty average only $28,000.
A report entitled “The “Other” University Teachers” was published in 2014 by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, an agency of the Ontario government, seemed to concur with both Stewarts assessment of the data, and some trends as well.
“Most Ontario universities do not report the number of non-full-time instructors, but relevant data are available on the websites of five institutions,” the report says.
Looking at data from five universities including U of T, “it is clear that the number of sessional instructors has increased in recent years at four of the five universities.”
In the short term, the goal of WTO is to build solidarity between full and part time faculty, as well as to explore how existing labour legislation can be amended to better protect contract faculty.
“In the longer term, we will continue to call or renewed investment in Ontario’s universities,” says Stewart. “Increased public funding will mean more full-time faculty, lower tuition fees, and a better quality education for every student.”
