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.