YUFA
News
22 Mar 02 - Before yesterday, there had never been concurrence among YUFA, the Employer, and Senate on tenure & promotions. When YUFA negotiated its first collective agreement in 1976, the three parties went their separate ways on the issue.
More than 25 years on, the three parties are finally reading from the same page. In yesterday's vote, Senate overwhelmingly adopted the proposed reforms.
The process of implementing the new procedures will begin immediately.
For full text of the new tenure & promotions procedures for professorial-stream faculty, choose one of the following links:
It's been a long, often trying process. The current attempt, which followed several failed ones of the '70s and '80s, began in 1999. The three parties agreed to reform the tenure and promotion process during that year's round of collective bargaining.
The purpose of this reform was to render the process “more transparent and … less complex, less daunting to individual candidates, and less time consuming to both candidates and adjudicators” (Appendix S, 1999-2001 Collective Agreement).
A steering group of Penni Stewart (then YUFA Chairperson) and Brenda Hart (Executive Associate) for YUFA, Harriet Lewis (Secretary of the University), Robert Drummond (then Chair of Senate), Ted Spence (Office of the President) and Liz Veness (University Secretariat) began work in early 2000.
Satisfied that the negotiations had achieved as much as they could by last November, the YUFA Executive recommended the new procedures to YUFA members. YUFA members ratified them by an 84% margin on the 18th of January.
Not all the innovations sought by YUFA were achieved. Processes of negotiation such as this one require compromises on the parts of all three constituencies in the interests of moving forward. Gaps and inconsistencies persist. For example, the rather daunting task of articulating standards at unit, Faculty and Senate levels remains, and YUFA expects that other issues will emerge as we begin to put the procedures in place. With this in mind, the parties to the Collective Agreement have agreed to review the procedures, if ratified, no later than February 2003.
YUFA wishes to thank the steering group - with special thanks to Brenda Hart for more than two decades of work on this issue.
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