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Conference Report

CAUT Women’s Conference: Mobilizing in an Era of Restructuring

16-18 October 2008, Ottawa, ON 

by Janice Newton, Political Science, York University

20 Oct 08 – Below is my report on the CAUT Women’s Conference. I discuss the keynote address in some detail, and briefly outline the important issues that arose in the other sessions. I will focus on both the problems and the solutions that arose in the discussions.

Introduction:

The introduction to the conference began by re-casting the title of the conference to “Mobilizing in Somber Times.” Three trends were highlighted: 1) changes in organizational culture; 2) changes in our regulatory environment; and 3) changes in academic culture.

1)     Organizational Culture:

Changes in organizational culture have had a negative impact on our capacity to address equity issues. Some institutions have diminished the number of equity offices, or conflated different equity offices into one organization. While this seemed logical, the changes were accompanied by a diminished role for community involvement, less advocacy for women, sexual or racialized minorities, and diminished capacity for collection of equity statistics. The advocacy roles of the previous offices were replaced with professional staff lawyers and counselors. In the process, we lost the systemic understanding of equity issues and in its place were left with an individualized complaints process. Even the policies designed to encourage workplace respect were seen as problematic because they obscure power relations and circumvent collective agreements.

2)     The Regulatory Environment:

The programs to monitor equity have been marginalized. Institutions are not required to report or publish progress in equity and this makes it challenging to assess national trends in equity. The speaker urged local staff associations to share equity data.

3)     The Shifting Academic Culture:

The pressure to increase an institution’s research profile encourages competition among academics and creates a false competition between equity and merit, which in turn, hurts equity in hiring, tenure and promotion. It also obscures and diminishes the value of different paths to knowledge, for example, community based research. Staff associations need to press for equity language in their collective agreements, and put more effort into building a culture of inclusivity. Equity should be prioritized in bargaining, and used as a key part of renewal for staff associations.

Keynote Address: New Managerialism in an Era of Restructuring, by Rosemary Deem, University of Bristol, UK

Rosemary Deem focused on five key questions in her presentation. First she asked: What is new managerialism (NM) and what is its impact in higher education? Deem characterized NM as primarily an ideological phenomenon linked to neo-liberalism. The emphasis is on hierarchical management as opposed to self-governance, rewarding excellence and merit, external assessment and performance indicators. NM is now being used in higher mass education, not elite higher education. It allows government greater control of public spending to shape higher education to the needs of government and industry, not civil society. The new managerialism emphasizes the three Es: effective, efficient, and excellence. The fourth E, equity, disappears in NM.

I wondered about the logic here. If one desires higher education to serve civil society or encourage equity, one would still need tools to be able to assess and evaluated whether education had achieved those objectives. Is it the tool that is the problem, or the ends it serves? If we set equity as our goal, what tools would we need to assess whether we have made progress? Would we not expect effective and efficient processes for an equity agenda?

Deem briefly outlined the history of managerialism from the neo-corporatism of the 1960s to neo-liberal managerialism, with its emphasis on consumers and the market, to neo-technocratic managerialism of the 1990s. She argued that these developments were not gender neutral. NM replaced cooperation with competition, encouraged a particular framing of knowledge that valued male subjects, and shifted emphasis onto tolerance and respect instead of equitable redistribution of resources. As a result, we have seen feminist challenges for equality transformed: diversity instead of equality, equality as simply an individual life-style choice, and the argument that gender has been done. These changes de-politicize equality claims and reduce activism.

Deem’s research into the different management styles of men and women shows that women do leadership differently than men, and women are not promoted at the same rate as to men. In the NM regime, it is clear that excellence trumps equity. One of her more intriguing insights was how the NM culture shifts from a democratic one to a surveillance culture. The introduction of quality assurance, for example, demands more self-management and accountability. Men tend to be “teflon coated” and see it as a game; women feel more invaded by these measures and take it seriously. In effect, women self-manage and feel guilty if they think they don’t measure up. This is a culture that values research and devalues the work that women do in the academy, such as the pastoral care with students. Performance measures are very problematic. Not all students are the same, some take much more time than others. Measures of how many graduate students one supervises significantly distorts the real work behind those numbers, and the gendered nature of student / faculty relationships. Workload models often undervalue gendered tasks, assume a standard student and assume a workweek unencumbered by life.

The NM is perhaps on the wane with the increased emphasis on distributed leadership (DL). Deem cautions us to be wary of this too. She argues that DL sounds good but it often means distributing responsibilities downward, without accompanying control of resources.

Where is Higher Education going?

Deem noted a number of troubling trends:

• the shift from education as a public service to a private good,
• the obsession with tables that compare universities (league tables),
• cost-cutting disguised as “increased creativity” (merging disciplines),
• work intensification,
• the treatment of public work as a private resources (e.g., academic journals),
• the new technologies that are still gendered.

Where are the spaces for Women?

• curriculum development that is interdisciplinary in teaching and research,
• we need to develop fair workload models,
• academic networking sites,
• promote real distributed leadership,
• interest women early on in leadership roles,
• develop our own equity and inclusion rankings; co-opt the management tools to our ends; equity score cards,
• look to other kinds of organizations for different models of management (NGOs perhaps).

Working in a Time of Scarcity

David Robinson

In a nutshell, Robinson summarized the funding trends in higher education and demonstrated that while resources have increased, more of it has come from private sources (tuition increases) and less of the funding has gone to faculty salaries. Universities face new accountability demands, with governments demanding performance measures for teaching and research. Robinson cautioned that these new measures have the potential to harm equity progress. For example, the introduction of merit pay harms progress on equity. He also expressed concern about the move to assess learning outcomes, because of its impact on curriculum and professional autonomy. He concluded that we have to develop our own vision of research and teaching.

Pat Armstrong

Armstrong examined the several problems with research funding by asking what gets funded, who decides what gets funded, and what for? She is concerned that we have become more managers not researchers, and that the selection committees are dominated by industry. Seldom, if ever, is curiosity-driven research funded. Although we are encouraged to seek community partners in our research, few community groups or advocacy have the resources or time to participate. This distorts who gets funding and what kinds of questions are researched. She also argued that the gender policy is ignored in the peer review process for research funding. Other concerns are the need for adequate funding for students and faculty members can find the time to devote to research without hurting our teaching? Finally, she is concerned with the pressures for outside organizations to influence curriculum design and research.

The Unsustainable Job

In this section of the conference, panelists reflected on how the structure and restructuring of the academy has shaped their work, profession and personal lives and how they responded to these pressures.

Chris Ferns from Mount St, Vincent spoke about how we have been pressured to work harder, but not smarter. Class sizes have increased, and the nature and context of our work has changed. He also noted the shift from a collegial to a corporate model of work, and the irony of his University’s mission statement that belies what is really happening on campus. Caroline Baillie spoke about the challenge of staying alive and true to your own convictions in an academic setting, or how to live and be an academic.

When we broke for a smaller discussion after the panel, our group of about nine faculty members discussed a wide range of issues that made our jobs unsustainable: the enormous volume of email, the changing competitive culture, the long hours of work and the pressure to publish. Most striking, in our conversation, a number of faculty members – from the newly hired to senior faculty members – admitted for the first time in public to having debilitating bouts of depression as a result of the pressures of managing life and work tensions. Clearly the sustainability of our jobs is a pressing issue, as is the need for employers and staff associations to reflect on how to assist faculty members who at present suffer in silence.

Building Inclusive Staff Associations

Panelists in this section presented various approaches for achieving equality within our associations and identified future challenges for activists and associations alike.

Lorna Weir discussed her case, which is ongoing, at the University of British Columbia. A student complaint lodged against her has been dragged out over the past seven years. As an activist and a lesbian, she feels that neither the university nor the staff association acted appropriately at the outset of the case, and the result is that it has dragged on for years, taking time away from her ability to do research. She argued that the case threatened her academic freedom to do research and teaching in controversial topics. She cautioned faculty members to never respond to questions about a complaint via email, because all that will come back to haunt you, and she urged us to seek legal help at the outset of a complaint, especially if the student has legal representation. She argued that one’s minority status produces an uneven playing field. She urged faculty associations to become more pro-active and aware of the gender and sex implications of the teaching environment.

Carl James spoke about how we still have work to do on equity. He urged us to reflect on the voices that are not present at the table. He also cautioned us to be reflective about the terms that constitute the narrative of the university: democratic, accessible, non-discriminatory, neutral, objective, rational, research informed, merit based, collegial and academic freedom. The reality is that we also have competition, individualism, differentiation, and much less academic freedom that we suppose. We need to reflect on this space into which we invite minorities: are we expecting them to conform to that space, in what ways does that space silence their distinctiveness? Are they expected to hide their difference at the door? In short, it is about increasing the numbers of racialized minorities, but it should also be about changing the culture. James argues we need to build a culture of caring; one that cares about the voices that are missing. Until we have more equitable representation on faculty, drawing in diversity of class, sexuality, and race we will miss the people, the voices and the experiences that make for a richer academy.

Brenda Austin-Smith, the final panelist, focused specifically on the role of staff associations. She argued that we have much work to do to make our staff associations more equitable. Are our buildings barrier free? Is it easy for members to attend meetings? Do we reach out to new hires? Can we think across traditional barriers, for example, to create a generation gap committee to reflect on the different needs of junior and senior faculty members? Do we review our collective agreements or bargaining planks for equity concerns? Do we mentor junior faculty to bring them into the union? Do we collect and share equity statistics? She urged us not to get swamped by the immediate demands of the position with a lovely metaphor about the game where gophers pop up randomly and you have to hammer them down each time. Do we take the time to step back from immediate crises and reflect on our long-term goals? We should also honour those “loyal thorns” that criticize the staff association; we can learn from their criticism. Finally, echoing the point that Carl James made, she argued it is not enough to get more representative bodies involved in the union, the union also needs to change to meet their needs.

The discussion that followed summarized many of the issues that were raised over the past two days, most of them echoing the main points raised by the panelists. A critical concern was raised: organizers left the equity concerns to the end of the conference when it should have been integrated from the outset.

This was the first CAUT conference I have attended. I think the conference provided valuable insight into the gendered and equity impact of new managerialism and the increased pressures to value research. I remain unconvinced, however, that all of the tools of new managerialism are all negative. I would have welcomed a more nuanced discussion of where these tools can be used and have a positive outcome. From the context of teaching, asking questions about what I want my students to learn, then thinking about how I might assess that learning (classroom assessment techniques) have proved invaluable to me in my teaching. I believe assessment techniques can also usefully be applied to curriculum. The key is who is setting that agenda and who does that agenda serve? After all, if we value equity, we will also need to reflect on how we might assess whether our equity goals are achieved. To do that, we will need assessment tools, one of the core tools of new management. Let’s not throw it all out without reflecting on what might be useful for an equity and social justice agenda.

Other YUFA Delegates from this Conference:
Lorna Erwin
Mitzi Mitchell
Narda Razack