It’s official. The hair on my chin is thicker than the hair on the my head.

        But depending how you look at it, yesterday saw a small sign that this strike might be over before Christmas, and that I might be shaving earlier than I anticipated. This morning, the picket line was abuzz with discussion of a cryptic, Sunday afternoon missive that faculty received from AUFA President Peter Williams: “In the spirit of promoting communication, informal discussions on demographic modeling took place this afternoon between representatives from the two parties.”
        Of course, many of us weren’t sure what Peter meant because the message came without any explanation of the type of demographic modeling discussed. Nevertheless, I had a pretty good idea what Peter meant. And I confirmed my understanding late in the morning: AUFA and the BOG are discussing how to count.
        This has to appear absolutely bizarre to the outsider, but there is a bit of history here. Last year, while I was senior grievance officer for the union, we filed two grievances against the admin concerning faculty complement (ie. the number of faculty employed at Acadia). It all started in the fall of 2006 when AUFA, suspecting that the administration had not fulfilled their contractual obligation to maintain a full-time complement of 214 professors, asked for a detailed accounting of complement from the admin. Informal discussions took place, but ultimately, the admin refused to provide the requested information. At the time, we tried to make it clear that if we couldn’t agree on how to count faculty before negotiations began, we were heading towards big trouble. The then acting VPA agreed, but his hands were tied (The arbitration concerning the admin’s refusal to cooperate on this and other issues is scheduled for December.).
        So, based on the information we could ferret out of our own records, we launched two grievances: first, on the number of CLT positions at Acadia (we asserted that the BOG had hired more than allowed by the contract); and second, on the number of tenured faculty positions (we asserted that they had hired fewer than the number prescribed by the contract). And no, we don’t receive copies of all the administrative records on full-time hires, so it’s quite difficult for us to do the calculations necessary to prosecute our contract in this respect. I’m not going to bore you with details of the cases because they are sure to come out in the very public wash of arbitration. The point I want to make here is that these grievances were about how to count.
         The demographic modeling, as I understand it, is related to these grievances on how to count because one has to be able to count before one can cost. That is, the two sides are informally discussing how to count faculty at their various ranks and ages (to deal with potential retirements) as a prelude to or as part of a discussion on how to cost proposals. It may be baby math, but I would guess that it’s also an important first step–admittedly, a baby step–towards real discussions. If we can agree on how to count and how to cost, perhaps we can have more meaningful discussions.
        These informal discussions are just baby steps, though, because, first and foremost, they are informal. As far as anyone on the line knows, no formal negotiations have yet been scheduled. And we need formal negotiations before we can resolve the issues that led to this strike.
        What is dispiriting about these baby steps, and what led me to hint near the beginning of this post that they might not really be meaningful signs of a potential resolution, is the fact that we even have to discuss how to count at this point. I know for a fact that AUFA tried to initiate these informal discussions before formal negotiations began, but for whatever reasons, the senior admin prevented them from occurring. Hence the grievances and the arbitration case mentioned above. Obviously, I find it somewhat frustrating that we only now seem to be making progress that we could have and should have made long ago.
        So I begin this new round of posts at the beginning our second week on strike by expressing a little bit of hope, tempered by a good deal of frustration.
        At least the weather is cooperating.