Faculty woke up Thursday morning to an announcement from the negotiating team. If you’ve read my last post, you won’t be surprised that it wasn’t a positive announcement. Negotiations had broken off again.
        The good news, apparently, is that the BOG team now seems willing to use the word “equity” in the collective agreement. The bad news is that they want to make it absolutely meaningless. The philosophy behind such a proposal: throw the dog a bone and he won’t even notice that there’s no meat on it.
        I don’t mean to be unkind to our canine strike force (you’ll see them on the line every day, showing their dogged support) when I suggest that members of our negotiating team are smarter than your average dogs. It took them no time at all to sniff out the fact that there was no meat on this bone. And from inside accounts, I gather that they growled at the BOG team to let them know it.
        That said, our team didn’t leave the room, contrary to what Acadia PR man Scott Roberts suggested in press releases Thursday morning. Jim Sacouman told the BOG team in no uncertain terms that they had better come back with a real offer addressing equity issues in a meaningful way. On Tuesday night, he and the team had promised Acadia faculty that they would fight for them, and they were doing exactly that. The BOG team then called for a caucus–a standard procedure whereby one team leaves the room to confer out of earshot of the other team before returning to the room. Forty-five minutes later, the Provincial Conciliator came into the negotiation room to tell our team that the BOG team had left the building.
        There is no doubt that we rejected the BOG offer out of hand. But our team was still sitting there, ready to talk.

        So life on the line was a bit subdued Thursday morning. Not only was there disappointment, but there was an emotion I hadn’t yet seen, anger.
        Academics tend not to be too good at showing anger. We live in a world that privileges reason as an ideal, after all. It’s not that we don’t get angry. We’re human. It’s just that we tend to suppress it and therefore register it in more abstract ways. Not so Thursday morning. I hadn’t heard that many expletives since my last visit to small town Saskatchewan. Most of them were probably coming out of my own mouth.
        Now the good thing about all this is that it has hardened the faculty, as if we weren’t already galvanized. People may have been subdued, but they weren’t cowed. In fact, I think they were just bracing themselves. It’s hard for any of us to contemplate, but I think the very real possibility of a lost term began to dawn on most people.
        So we walked, sharing our uncertainties and our concerns with each other. And if there was still hope on Thursday morning, it was to be found in that willingness to share and the refusal to tear each other apart for the meatless bone they threw to us.