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.

As I had on the night before the strike, on Wednesday night I sat in front of the computer, waiting for an announcement. This time though, I wasn’t waiting with hope. I was looking for confirmation that talks had broken down yet again.
        While I wanted to think that our guerrilla picket and the student rally had had some effect, I just didn’t see the BOG team coming back with a reasonable offer so quickly. If they hadn’t budged since June, why would they budge now? We hadn’t really cost them anything yet, except for bad PR. And again, they are saving roughly $400,000 every week we are out, which means we are saving them approximately $57,000 every day by striking. So by the end of day three, they had only saved $171,000.
        That savings speaks to the difference between an academic strike and a factory or construction strike. When workers at factories or construction sites strike, they try to make companies see reason by hurting the bottom line. Strikers in these particular unions speak to companies in the only language companies and their shareholders seem to understand, the language of profit and loss. Profit and loss is reason (read “logic”) for the company. The company’s willingness to settle, then, depends in large part on the depth of company coffers and the long term outlook for profits. But universities aren’t companies. And when we use the word “reason” in a university, it doesn’t need to be glossed parenthetically to indicate its association with a long tradition of logic.
        So here’s the problem with Acadia and here, also, is the logic of a potentially long strike (not what I’m hoping for, but what I’m expecting). There is a great disconnect between the executive on the BOG–businessmen of the deep pocket variety–and the faculty, when it comes to the word “reason.” We are not even speaking the same bloody language, and we bring to the negotiating table seemingly irreconcilable visions of what a university should be.
        From the faculty perspective (and for once, I’m pretty sure I’m not just speaking for myself on this, but for faculty the world over) universities are not geared to make profit (private institutions excepted). When times are good–for example, during the early years of the double cohort from Ontario–more money comes in. And if that money is managed wisely, it will still be there when times are bad to get us over whatever hump we need to get over. If that money is really managed wisely, it will be invested–generally, through effective recruiting–to ensure that those bad times don’t ever arrive.
        But that isn’t what has happened at Acadia. We reached a student peak of 3900 in 2003-2004. I’d go so far to say that we were overrun with students at the time. Acadia isn’t designed either practically, given its faculty complement, or physically to take so many students. Nevertheless, the admin admitted them at the time and quite happily took all the tuition they could get. That was the same year our new President, Gail Dinter-Gottlieb, joined us, so she shouldn’t be blamed for the admission influx and the culture of institutional greed. It existed before she arrived. But, in my opinion, as the President of the university and its chief manager, she is in large part to blame for the gross mismanagement that followed.
        Administrative spending continued on its upward trajectory under Gail’s leadership, at the same time as funding to the academic sector began to decline. Now, had that administrative spending actually been well managed, instead of leading to the creation of more and more administration (apparently we now need a Vice President of Administration to administer to all the administrators at Acadia), we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in now. Administrative projections from earlier this year were that we would be sitting with around 2800 students at Acadia. That’s a decline of 1100 students since this new President entered the office (Apparently we’re sitting at around 3000, but I have trouble believing any of the numbers I get from the admin now because the way they calculate the numbers has changed. It’s probably ENRON math.). So where the hell did all that money go if not to effective recruiting?
        It’s not a rhetorical question, but I don’t have a real answer either. What I know is that the money didn’t go into the academic sector–we’re back to the “reason” of universities, here–and it did go into an ever growing administration. Last year seemed to see a leveling, perhaps even a reduction, of administrative spending. But the latest figures (ie. within this past week) show that Administrative spending is up again this year. The figures show an increase of 105% from 2000, 22% since 2004. If my tone is starting to give away my absolute frustration with administrative incompetence at Acadia it’s only because I am absolutely frustrated with administrative incompetence at Acadia. And after making the point above that universities are not and should not be run for a profit, I’m going to change tack here and suggest that if they were, by any measure, the BOG executive would have fired Gail’s ass long ago.
        Why can’t they do so now?
        There’s no one left to run the place. There is no senior admin left!
        Since I returned from sabbatical we have lost our Vice President Academic, a damn good one too. Last year, we also lost our acting VPA, who was also the Dean of Science. He’s been replaced by another acting VPA and another acting Dean of Science. More recently we lost our Chief Financial Officer and our Head of Human Resources. The VP Student Affairs was forced to resign (she’s one of 6 former administrators suing the university). The Dean of Students was made redundant. Basically, we have two senior academic administrators left to take the helm: the Dean of Arts, who is in his second year in the position (and who is persona non grata with the President), and the Head Librarian. Yes, there is also a brand new Dean of Professional Studies and a couple new directors, but these people are not in any position to take the helm. There is a power vacuum that makes it almost impossible for the BOG to fire the President, despite sure signs of administrative incompetence.
        Now, what makes a perfect storm, almost guaranteeing a long strike in my opinion, is the combination of the great disconnect mentioned at the beginning of this post and the fact that the BOG negotiating team has experienced a dissolution similar to the one described in the paragraph above. The Dean of Arts began as the BOG chief negotiator and then resigned. Another Chief Negotiator with very little experience or knowledge of Acadia stepped in, but he has since been fired for reasons unrelated to his duties on the BOG team. The Chief Financial Officer, charged with costing BOG proposals, found greener pastures, and left the university as well as the BOG team. The Head of Human Resources, the BOG team’s most experienced negotiator, saw the wisdom in the Chief Financial Officer’s actions and decided to copy them. What does this mean? There is only one person on the BOG team who was there when negotiations began, the Head Librarian.
        How bad can that really be for negotiations? Well, when AUFA’s President, Peter Williams, has to help the other side cost their proposals because they can’t do it themselves, we’re in big fucking trouble.
        On the brighter side of things, my beard has grown long enough that it isn’t itching any more. There’s also the fact that I’ll be able to play Santa much more effectively this year, even if I won’t have anything in my gift bag.