Dear Sad Goodbye,
        For the most part, I have resisted responding to blog comments, choosing instead to follow mutely the dialogue that develops in the various reader responses to my posts. But I just can’t bring myself to remain silent about your comment (see comments on A silent promise).
        I want to respond first by thanking you for your thoughtful words on our shared predicament at Acadia University. I can find nothing to disagree with in your assessment of the university and its systemic problems, nor in the immediate solutions you present as conditions for staying. And I do not in any way begrudge you your decision to convince your spouse to leave, though it does sadden me.
        Nevertheless, I also want to respond with a commitment. And I fully understand that this commitment may do little to change your mind about Acadia’s potential to solve its own problems and, therefore, may do nothing to counter your belief that you and your family must leave to reclaim the dignity Acadia has taken from you. One of my first acts upon returning to work, should Gail Dinter-Gottlieb still be President of the university, will be to co-sponsor a senate motion of non-confidence in her presidency. This motion is already in the works. However, while writing my post yesterday, I thought of another motion that I would like to bring before senate, and reading your response to that post has convinced me of its merits. So I am also committing to sponsor a senate motion of non-confidence in the executive of the BOG. I do not know whether Acadia’s senate has ever debated such a motion before, but if ever there were a time for such a debate, it is now. While on the line Monday morning, I will discuss the implications of that motion with senate colleagues in hopes of finding a co-sponsor. I’m not anticipating any difficulties.
        Unfortunately, even if they pass, these motions (and the counterparts that most assuredly will be brought before Faculty Council), will only be the first corrective steps on a long path towards recuperating and rebuilding Acadia University. In that sense, while I sympathize with the urgency of your demands because I would like to see the same changes effected immediately, I am convinced that many of us will have to commit to a long struggle before we will be able to lay any claim to victory in achieving them. We can only hope that we do not suffer the irreparable faculty hemorrhage that your comment anticipates before that victory has been achieved.
        
Yours in sympathy and solidarity,
John

As a condition of mediation, AUFA has agreed to a media blackout again. Our media team has been silenced. But, of course, we’re still on strike. And though our negotiating team has been removed to Halifax by the provincial mediator, we still want and need to show them — and undoubtedly, each other — how strong and unified we are.

We showed that strength with collective silence on this third Friday of our strike. Four abreast and silent but for the lone drummer marshalling us, some three hundred filed in unison through the streets of Wolfville. All carried signs with a simple phrase: “Broken Promises.”

We were protesting against the promises broken since our last strike. We were protesting the fact that we had to be on strike at all to force the BOG to honour those promises.

However, there was more to it than that. In our disciplined silence today, we were registering our determination and our power to withhold our services — the unique voices we bring to the classrooms and committees that enliven the institution– until the BOG fulfils its promises. Our silence emphasized the silence of a campus without us and our students. Even more importantly, I think, we were registering our determination to fulfil the promise that Acadia has represented and can represent again when we have a voice in its governance.

For too long now, the BOG executives, through the senior administration, have effectively silenced the academic sector on governance issues. Their decisions carry the power to strengthen or weaken the academic culture and integrity of Acadia University. Yet few of the people rendering those decisions have any discernible understanding of what a university is and should be. Few, indeed, have any basis for that understanding because so few have worked as academics in academic settings.

So, in light of our march today and in light of so many conversations on the line this week, I think we need to promise ourselves something at this point. And we cannot break this promise. We need to promise ourselves that when this strike ends and we have won — and, make no mistake, we have to win — we will not be silent. We must first take it upon ourselves to teach the BOG what a university is and should be. We are teachers, after all. This should not be impossible. But we must also begin the process of taking over the BOG itself, particularly through its executive. Only when we have educated BOG members in this way and only when we have real executive power over academic issues at the university will Acadia truly fulfil its own promise.Below is a video of our silent march against broken promises to remind us of a promise that we must keep.

No post today. Instead I’ve spent my time on a clandestine video project for AUFA. Apologies to those of you who don’t have high speed and who aren’t able to watch this. But to the rest of you, enjoy! And thanks for the serenade on the line today!

Sorry for the delay. I just couldn’t bring myself to publish the initial version of yesterday’s post. It was just too mean. You see, given that we have entered the realm of fantasy, at least in terms of the salary figures spouted by the admin, I had constructed an elaborate post based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Scott Roberts, chief spokesperson for the university, featured as The Mouth of Sauron, and well…you can just imagine the rest.
        While the post was meant to be funny, I decided not to publish it because I just couldn’t bring myself to characterize the other side as evil, even in fun. Yes, it is true that I have very little respect for the BOG exec, their negotiating team, and their chief spokesperson for the values they espouse. I even have reason to question their competence. But I know they’re not evil. Scott, for instance, is just doing his job. He’s probably just reporting what he’s being told to report. So while I might question his character for his willingness to misrepresent reality, and while I do think that the ill feeling he has created amongst the faculty will stick to him for as long as he’s at Acadia University, I know also that there is absolutely no sense in answering what I see as his wrongs with one of my own.

So here it is, Tuesday’s expurgated post:

The media campaign has begun again. The blackout is over. And the gloves are off. We even knew it was coming, or at least we should have. So I was a bit surprised at how troubled and angry some of us were when it actually came.
        I saw the anger first thing in the morning when I entered HQ. The front page of the Chronicle Herald read “Acadia Faculty Reject Offer.” That much was true. And if you read the entire article, you’ll see that it is balanced in its representation of the positions taken by the two sides. Indeed, I think our side comes off quite well. But the article begins with what can only be described as a whopper.
        Scott Roberts, chief spokesperson for Acadia University, paints faculty as greedy and self-interested. Apparently, we’ve just rejected an offer that would bring the average salary of an Acadia faculty member up to $100,000 by the end of a 4 year contract.
        Of course this is nonsense. We all know it. It’s even laughable. And eventually we got from anger to laughter by comparing our current salaries with Scott’s. We determined that he makes more money than 93% of Acadia’s faculty make. A couple of us broke out the current contract and roughly estimated that it would take the average full-time tenured professor about 20 years to attain Scott’s salary. That assumes an initial appointment at Assistant Professor, grid step 5. I know of a good many people in the Arts who were appointed at much lower levels, so you’d have to add a few years for them. The calculation also assumes a typical career path, which means that the faculty member isn’t a woman. It doesn’t pay to have ovaries at Acadia because they have a way of interfering with a “typical” (read male) career advancement. So add a few more years again for women.
        We probably should have been more angry when we actually figured all this out. But we weren’t. We knew that this exercise was irrelevant and had no bearing on the current negotiations. Nevertheless, our abilities to quickly tabulate the screwed up values of the university admin brought us back to where we were the day before: feeling very secure in the values we were upholding. And it’s a feeling we carried with us to the line and shared with our colleagues.

        So what is this new phase in the media campaign meant to do?
        First and foremost, I think it’s meant to demoralize us by turning public opinion against us. The generous public support we’ve received from people who understand the issues — from students, parents of students, local businesses, individuals, and other faculties across the province and country — has been very encouraging. And the idea that some of it could be withdrawn on the basis of utter nonsense is demoralizing. When some of my colleagues expressed that concern on the line, my response was twofold: Scott ported out the same rhetoric last time; and much more importantly, strikes are won on the picket line through solidarity, not in the court of public opinion. I think it is important that we remind ourselves of this fact on a regular basis as we enter the gloves off stage of the media campaign. We know that our strike is principled. We know that when we sign a principled agreement, it will protect and ensure the academic integrity of Acadia University. And were the entire province to think otherwise based on spurious information provided by the admin — I, for one, just won’t believe that people are that stupid — we could still take comfort in that shared knowledge.
        Of course, the Admin’s new campaign also means to divide us by doing a runaround on the negotiation process. It’s their way of trying to negotiate with the membership directly because we’re obviously being duped by the radicals in our midst.
        This strategy is getting a bit tired, I find. It’s also more than a bit insulting to all of us. First, it assumes we’re too stupid to do basic math. Then it assumes that we’re greedy sell-outs. I’m supposed to react by thinking, “Hey, I’ve been here for 11 years, and I’m not making anywhere close to $100,000. Maybe if I sell out a particular group, like part-timers, instructors, librarians, or CLTs, I will make $100,000. I should push for a vote now!” Not surprisingly, my colleagues and I didn’t even need to talk about this new iteration of the old strategy. We’re all trained to distinguish fact from bullshit (I would say “fiction” but to do so would be to impugn the word.). And, as Richard Cunningham’s sign registered on the line, we’re also smart enough to recognize that “Misinformation is not negotiation.”

        So what are the possible effects of the university’s new misinformation campaign? Well, I can see three very significant effects, none of which help them with their problems:

1. We get angry and we get stronger as a result.
There’s no way around that one. I’ve already seen it on the line.

2. They alienate students from faculty and ultimately make the university’s enrollment problems worse.
Alienating students from their professors with misinformation that characterizes us as immoral and self-interested is just a bad idea. I’m sure some students who aren’t fully aware of the issues already think this way. But adding fuel to this fire with misinformation is just plain silly. We are the people that interact with students the most. We provide the education they get at Acadia. Surely, if we are as immoral and self-interested as the admin is suggesting, we’re not fit to provide any education except for an immoral one. Any sensible student who believes this misinformation should run as fast as s/he can from such an education.

3. They attempt to get parents to put pressure on faculty by providing them with the same misinformation and ultimately make the university’s enrollment problems worse.
I’m not sure whether the misinformation they’re sending to parents is meant to provide some sort of reassurance that the university is looking out for the interests of students, but if I were the parent receiving such information, I would really think twice about sending my daughter off to an institution where the professors were so immoral and self-interested.

Biased though I am, I don’t think it takes a sophisticated reader to recognize the contrast between their media campaign and ours. Ours is informed by the old adage “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.” When I read the Chronicle Herald article mentioned above, I see Andrew Biro saying the same thing he has said since day one: Acadia University is a great place to get an education, and we must make changes now to keep it that way; we can’t afford not to act. While many may disagree with the union’s decision to strike, and while some may even disagree with the values we espouse, most would have to agree that our media campaign does not denigrate the institution and the education it provides (yet again, through us) to get some leverage on the other side.

I had to get that last post out of my system. A little shouting does one good every once in a while. And today’s special meeting of AUFA was so invigorating that I had to shout about it, even if it was only in CAPS on my blog. The fact is that I have never been prouder to be a member of the Acadia University Faculty Association than I was this afternoon when the packed house reiterated the animating principle of this strike: “Nobody will be sold out.”
        After meeting with the BOG team for 5 days and getting nowhere, AUFA’s team decided to consult with the membership about a new strategy for negotiations. They could see no benefit to continuing on the current path. The BOG team has continually brought to the table packages meant to set us against each other. The question our team must have been asking themselves by the end of each protracted meeting was this: “I wonder who they’re going to ask us to sell out tomorrow?”
        It’s a great strategy when you think about it. Appeal to our dark sides. We all have them, after all. So make us an offer that will benefit a particular group at the expense of another group. It’ll probably have to be a group that has more power than any other, say full-time, tenured people. And once you divide us into self-interested factions, you conquer all.
        The problem with that strategy? We’ve already decided that it won’t happen. We’ve even told the BOG team that we won’t let it happen. But for some reason, they don’t seem to believe us. We’ve spent two weeks walking the lines, we’ve just begun our third, and we’re prepared for as many more as it takes. We get stronger — and more pissed off — every day we’re on the line and not in our classrooms. Yet people in the senior admin and on the BOG team seem to think that the majority of us would vote out of self-interest were we only given the chance.
        Apparently we’ve even had to tell some of the administrators to stay off our lines and stop trying to negotiate with our members directly. What amazes me about these direct interventions — as I understand them, actual breaches of labour law — is the fact that these people think they still have credibility left with the faculty. They must not understand that the stink accompanying their behaviour and this divide and rule strategy will stick with them forever at a small institution like Acadia. It’ll even stick with them after they retire or leave. Alternatively, it might just get some of them permanent positions in the senior admin.

        Today in the meeting, however, we said as loudly and as clearly as we could that we trust our team to uphold the principles animating our strike. And we endorsed their strategy.
        So here it is. The BOG team was given three options: 1. Sign off on our current proposals. 2. Agree to independent mediation. 3. AUFA will file for provincial mediation. We knew option number one wouldn’t fly, but we had to try. Apparently, they would have gone for option number two had we been willing to call off our strike. Yeah. Right. So, no surprise for me at least, the BOG team chose option number three.
        Why is this a step in the right direction? Well, mediators write public reports. While their findings aren’t binding on the parties, the actions and behaviour of the two teams will now become matters of public record. We should have no more verbal agreements one day, then no agreements the next. Mediators won’t let the BOG team get away with that. Nor will mediators let them get away with the asinine notion that they can punish us for exercising our legal right to strike (That’s the way one of our negotiators characterized their reaction to our suggestion that the $800,000 they have now saved from strike is almost exactly what we’ve proposed as an increase to the academic sector for the first year of the new collective agreement. Apparently that money would be better used on the football field.). Most importantly, however, mediators are actually in their positions because they understand how to mediate or bring opposing sides into agreement.
        Eventually, we were going to end up at mediation anyway, unless we caved. So there is no sense in waiting for the province to intervene when we know — no matter what the BOG and senior admin think, no matter how they soft-peddle their proposals through direct interventions — we will not be divided. Nope, ain’t gonna happen.

So it turns out that no news is actually bad news. Note the absence of quotation marks. No irony is intended except in as much as the standard phrase “no news is good news” requires some rejigging and inversion if you work at Acadia University. My guess, though, is that the BOG and their team won’t get the irony even after I’ve unpacked it for them. Because getting it — whatever “it” is — is not one of their strong points.
        So let me make it simple for them. Jim Sacouman, our chief negotiator, stood up at the front the Anglican Church Hall in Wolfville today. Behind him was his negotiating team. But behind them all was the united faculty of Acadia University.
        Nope. That’s clearly too complex and metaphorical for the BOG executive and their team. They won’t understand what “behind” means except in the anatomical sense. And they’ll only understand the word in that way because their heads are so familiar with their asses.
        So let me be a bit more specific.
        Jim was wearing a sign while he stood at the front of the hall. It was a sign that I have worn since last Wednesday, the day the AUFA and BOG teams went back to the negotiating table. That sign contains a simple message, but a clear one. It says, “Nobody will be sold out.” That is a commitment.
        Get it?
        No?
        I’ll make it even clearer:
        THERE IS NO IRONY INTENDED.
        WE ARE NOT JOKING.
        NOBODY WILL BE SOLD OUT!

Since my arrival at Acadia, I’ve seen many faculty leave, including some very good friends. So why do so many of us stay?
        Before returning home on Friday to tell Gisele of another faculty departure, my buddy Rich and I considered this question. We were having coffee together at Just Us, something we don’t get to do often enough during the term. The CBC camera was filming Wolfville to show how barren it was without the students. The President of Acadia herself walked by and smiled awkwardly. And together we sipped our coffees and talked about what was keeping us here when both of us could go elsewhere and do other things.
        For me, the answer is that I like my job and I like the people I work with. I work in a functional and supportive department. We tend to treat each other with respect and even like each other, despite personal and ideological differences. This positive experience extends beyond my department as well. I’ve met good people from every department on campus. I also know, given my experience with the grievance office, that there are many terrific people in the admin (Unfortunately, some of them have left too.). These people administer the university and the collective agreement guided by the principles of fairness, shunning the arbitrary exercise of power that can make the workplace toxic. And, given my one brief meeting with the BOG (to demonstrate a pedagogical innovation), I know that it contains good people too.
        The fact that so many students have come to Acadia and have had overwhelmingly positive experiences during this troubling decade in the institution’s history is a testament to the quality of the people I work with. While I’m sure that many students have noticed the tensions between faculty and admin during this time (because it is difficult to miss), I know also that many of us have tried to protect them from the toxicity of institutional dysfunction that seeps into our daily lives. That protective shield is meant to be enabling. It’s meant to give students an opportunity to learn in a functional environment. It’s meant to give them the opportunity to engage in a world of ideas, uncontaminated by our local institutional problems (even if they aren’t really local or unique to this institution).
        If that protective shield is now down and our students now exposed, it is because things have gotten so bad that we have no other way of cleaning up the mess we’re in. We must act before toxicity destroys the institution and the fragile ideal it still represents: a quality education. Our commitment to that ideal and to the people who share it unites us on the line. Over these two weeks of walking with my colleagues, that shared commitment has drawn me closer to them and their families. And over the past 11 years, it has kept me and my own family walking with Acadia.

        A quotation from John Donne’s “Meditation XVII” has been haunting me as I’ve been writing this post and contemplating my own reasons for staying in light of one person’s decision to leave:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

To me, this quotation speaks indirectly to what happens at Acadia when we lose faculty members and their families. The institution and all who work and study here are diminished by the departure. So while I think I know why so many of us stay, I’m still troubled by the fact that for some, things are so bad that they feel the need to leave. I can’t help but feel that we’ve let them down somehow. And I feel their loss.

When I came home on Friday afternoon, my last shift for week 2 of the strike over, Gisele was waiting for me. “I hear you guys are having way too much fun on the picket line,” she said. She’d gotten this bit of information from my daughter, Nicky, who had picketed with me that morning. It was Family Day. And my 22 year old just happened to be the oldest of the children joining parents on the line for the morning shift. I was proud to have her there with me, just as the other parents were proud to have their children with them.
        Unlike Nicky, most of these children are too young to really understand in any sophisticated way the struggle their parents are engaged in. But then, it doesn’t take an adult mind to figure this out either. In fact, children, just by virtue of being small and vulnerable, are probably more attuned to our particular issues than many adults. From the signs they wore–many of which they designed themselves–they showed how they conceive of their parents’ struggle. And as they understand it, this strike is about fairness.
        After this lovely morning, I had to agree with Gisele and Nicky. Despite the stress and anxiety caused by this struggle for fairness, AUFA members are having fun together on the line. While Friday gave our children the opportunity to enjoy face-painting, craft-making, chalk-drawing, and bubble-blowing — and, really, just the opportunity to be with us and play together — many of us have been enjoying a comparable experience every day. During our daily walks together, we’ve gotten to know each other. More importantly, I think, a lot of us have gotten to like each other.
        Nevertheless, I also had some sad news to share with Gisele. While having lunch at HQ, I learned that another young faculty member and her family were leaving. I wasn’t totally surprised. I had met this woman shortly after she had arrived at Acadia and shortly before she had given birth to her last child. The meeting was grievance related, so I can’t go into details, but suffice it to say that one of the administrators gave her some grief about taking maternity leave. More grief followed when she was finally on leave. And things obviously didn’t improve much when she returned. So why would she stay given this unfair treatment? Yes, AUFA tried to look out for her through our grievance office. Yes, I’m sure that her colleagues were also supportive, though from what I know, many of them are facing similar difficulties. But that wasn’t enough to keep her and her family here.
        When the working environment is as toxic as the one I’ve just described, the danger extends beyond the workplace. Families are on the line. And leaving is a very appealing option because it’s a way of protecting one’s family from contamination. Unfortunately, I know firsthand that while this particular faculty member’s situation may be extreme for Acadia, it’s not unique. So I understand why she is leaving, and I certainly don’t begrudge her the decision. But I am saddened by the fact that I won’t get to know her and her family, as I am slowly getting to know and value my other colleagues on the line.

On family day, AUFA Strikers were treated to this little performance.