Below, by special request, are pictures of AUFA members unshaven near the end of week 2.

And this is just the morning crew.

On Wednesday night I received a call from HQ, asking me to participate in another guerilla picket. This time, we were going to send a small strike force to the Irving Building. I didn’t know why we were going there at 7 am, but I immediately confirmed that I would be there. And now, almost 12 hours later, I can only assume that nobody else could make it. Oh yeah, and that the person who contacted me forgot to call and tell me that nobody else could make it.
        Yes, I was the lone picketer in front of the Irving Building in the darkness at 7 am (And I was without a sign–which sort of defeats the purpose of picketing–because someone else was supposed to bring mine.). Yes, I dropped my wife off at work 30 minutes early so that I could make it there on time. And yes, Mike and Leo, you do owe Gisele a nice bottle of wine. She likes Merlot. And fortunately, she’s very good about sharing it with me.
        When I got to HQ at 7:30 am, only Robert Seale was there getting ready to make signs for Friday’s Family Day on the line. Not surprisingly, the first question out of his mouth, after I explained why I was there so early, was “Have you heard anything?” I had checked my email first thing in the morning, so I knew that I hadn’t received any messages from the exec or the negotiating team. “No news is good news,” I said. At least I hoped so. And that probably explains why I wasn’t in the least bit pissed about my lone picket duty experience (I’m still not. But I can’t speak for Gisele. So Mike and Leo, you know the drill.).
        The cone of silence that descends when negotiations begin in earnest is hard to take for information junkies like me. But the consolation in this case seemed to be that negotiations had really begun in earnest. Given that the BOG team hadn’t budged in any meaningful way on financial issues since making their “conciliation offer” in June, and given how quickly things had gone pear-shaped on the Sunday before the strike began, the absence of news was promising. So when news did arrive via walkie-talkie on the line, no one was terribly surprised that it was “good.”
        Okay, “good” might seem an overstatement here. All “good” means in this case is that the two sides are still talking: they talked until 11:30 Wednesday night, and they agreed to meet to talk some more beginning at 1 pm Thursday. But given how bad things have been, we’ve had to recalibrate our expectations for the word “good.”
        I’m not willing to recalibrate my expectations for negotiations, however. I want to reclaim the word “good” and make it meaningful so that I don’t have to put quotation marks around it to indicate irony every time I use it. And the only way to do that is to get the deal we need that addresses our issues and that prevents a strike three years from now. That’s what good (without the quotation marks) really means. That’s what it has to mean by the time we’re done.

In the meantime, Acadia’s President has returned from China. That’s “good,” isn’t it?

On Wednesday, the picket captains got word from HQ that the two sides were headed back to the table. And after my previous day walking around quashing rumours, it was nice to share that joyful little fact.
        We all understood the importance of staying strong and holding the line at that point. I didn’t need to remind my colleagues and my team. But I did anyways. And a few people beat me to the punch, giving me the same encouragement.
        Given the news and the newfound hope, it also seemed appropriate that I was wearing my new sign on Wednesday. It says “Nobody will be sold out.” I had asked Robert Seale, AUFA’s truly talented and humorous sign guy, to fashion it for me. It wasn’t to remind our negotiating team of their principled commitment to the membership. I know these people, and I trust them to honour their commitment and to come out with the best and most principled deal they can get for us. Instead, I wanted to wear this new sign to show my own commitment. I wanted to wear this new sign to remind myself, my established colleagues, and, most importantly, our most vulnerable colleagues of the promises we’ve collectively made to each other.
        The signs we wear (and carry) really do, I think, testify to our collective promises. Some of them seem merely humorous in their trajectories: for instance, “Bad President. No Banana.” Yes, I get a good chuckle every time I see this one. But I also recognize how it works. Humour is a powerful weapon in the way it unites us as an interpretive community in opposition to the misguided (and unevolved) values of the BOG and its chief representative. We get the joke together. We understand that together we must change those values. Other signs are funny but make more blatantly serious statements. For instance, one of my team members carries a sign with a big hole in it for a belly distended by 8 months of pregnancy. Around that hole is the phrase “Mom, striking for daycare.” It’s funny to see, it’s probably much more practical for her to carry than a sign without a hole, but it reflects a real issue and an inspiring level of commitment to make Acadia family friendly. As a supportive aside, I’ll report that even though this faculty member was having contractions on the line, it took several of us more than a week to convince her not to walk her full 2.5 hour shift each day. And finally, there are the signs–somehow, so appropriate for academics–that contain graphs and charts reflecting the financial mess the admin has gotten us into. These signs reflect our collective refusal to pay for that mismanagement, but also our collective commitment to correct it.
        The signs we wear are too numerous to mention and analyze here. But as we approach the end of our second week in this struggle for the values of Acadia, I personally take great reassurance in many of them and the collective promises they represent.

[For a recent journalistic article referring to Acadia signs, see Peter Duffy’s “Picketing with Panache” in the Chronicle Herald. Robert Seale is getting the recognition he deserves.]

Acadia students rallied in support of their faculty again today. The following are videos of this student driven event.The first video shows the student march through Wolfville.

The second video is a medley of songs adapted by students in support of AUFA.

The final video is an address to students by Greg Allain, President president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

Thanks to the student organizers and all the participants. These rallies really do keep our spirits high. And yes, together, We are Acadia.

I had one of my less admirable moments on the line today. I’m not proud of it, but I went off on a fellow faculty member who was spreading a false rumour that we were going to be engaged in formal talks at 3 pm today.
        Okay, saying that I went off on him might be a bit of an exaggeration. When he approached me, I told him he was an asshole for spreading rumours and that I didn’t want to talk to him. That is going off for me. It was still bloody childish of me to resort to name calling, and I regret it. And about five minutes later, I did talk to him. Later, I reported my own bad behaviour towards him on an incident report designed expressly for such altercations.
        Why? Because I was in the wrong. There are always going to be some people who don’t support the cause, for whatever personal reasons, and who actively undermine it. Sometimes they even do so with good intentions. And it doesn’t help to get angry with them. In fact, souring the mood on the picket line with angry outbursts at this juncture is probably just as bad for the cause as the spreading of false rumours.

        For the record, according to the two members of the negotiating team who were on the line this morning, one of whom is AUFA’s chief negotiator, there were no formal talks scheduled. There might be more baby math lessons planned, but that’s it. Still, rumours can have a life of their own. And by the time I began to quash this one on the line, it had already spread to HQ, where our people began to field inquiries from faculty and students.
        So why is this kind of rumour a problem? Because, as my own outburst might suggest, it preys on our emotions and could potentially weaken our resolve and therefore weaken our line.
        Obviously, I’m assuming that maintaining emotional equanimity is difficult for more than just me at this point. We’d all rather be teaching and researching and attending those endless committee meetings that make our lives as university faculty meaningful. Add to that the fact that there are people on the line who are in very vulnerable physical and financial positions because of this strike. Spreading an unsubstantiated rumour that has to be quashed, then, preys on the need we all have for hope and preys on the vulnerability we all feel. It can bring us down. I saw that myself as I walked through the line telling people that the rumour was false.
        So why was my anger a problem? Well, because anger, when it is uncontrolled, has the same potential to weaken the line as false rumours. Reason and good humour, in pretty well equal measures, have characterized life on the line to date. I’ve seen the benefits of these characteristics in my picket team’s continued commitment. We’d rather not be out, but while we’re out, we’re supporting each other. We’re keeping each other up. And anything that brings us down threatens to weaken us. Today, my anger was one of those things.
        Clearly, if we are going to win this battle with the BOG over the values of Acadia, we are going to have to privilege all our faculties for reason and all the reason of our faculty. If we are going to hold to the principles guiding our strike and avoid a three-peat (three strikes in three successive contractual negotiations), we have to stay strong now and hold the line, even when, sometimes, it’s so tempting just to go off on someone.

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.

On Friday, 19 October 2007, the fly-in pickets arrived from around the country to join us on the line, then to join us on the streets of Wolfville, and finally to join us in Clock Tower Park for a rally. The first video that follows shows our spirited march. The second shows some highlights from the rally.

My favourite part of my video from Friday’s march through Wolfville is the part where students and faculty are chanting together “We are Acadia!” I know the phrase is a take-off from the recent film “We are Marshall,” so it’s far from original. But I can also tell you that its lack of originality didn’t make the phrase any less meaningful to me as we walked and chanted on Main Street with the empty campus and University Hall as a backdrop.
        Without the students and without the faculty to teach them, Acadia, its lovely grounds, its beautiful buildings (okay, a couple of them are butt ugly), and its new $4 million football field are all meaningless. What gives Acadia meaning, what gives it life, are its faculty and its students. We are Acadia.

        I want to make this point, here, not only because I’m still charged by Friday’s rally and I haven’t had the chance to celebrate it in writing until now, but also because of a conversation I had with one of my picket team members last night.
        My teammate is friends with a BOG member, and she told me about the conversation she had with her friend. Basically, she told her friend what was going on, what the issues were with the strike, thinking that she would get some friendly support. She was therefore a bit surprised by the negative response she got concerning “troublesome faculty.” It seems that our little strike is having an impact on the university’s capital campaign. This BOG member can no longer knock on the doors of the well-heeled expecting money. And that’s our fault.
        I admit that this was all a bit surprising to me too because I know her friend, and I would have at first thought of her a moderate and a force for good on the BOG. It seems pretty clear though that I was wrong. This BOG member is also suffering from the great disconnect.        
        Think about it folks. Her concern at the moment is the difficulty she is having raising money for Acadia’s capital campaign. That is the money that goes into buildings and renovations, such as the renovation of the football field or Patterson Hall (I’m sure some money goes to student scholarships, as well, but I know that Acadia’s scholarship programme is pretty dreadful, so not much actually makes it there). Her notion, then, seems to be that Acadia is its buildings. And I’m sure that as a BOG member, she takes some satisfaction in building Acadia by contributing to its capital.
        And therein lies the great disconnect: a failure to recognize that people are the real capital of Acadia. For the students and faculty, the buildings and the grounds are the backdrop for the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual lives we lead and develop while at Acadia. What ties us to this place are the interactions we have with the people here. What produces an alumnus willing to contribute to the institution is not the memories of great buildings, but the memories of great people, faculty and students, encountered while here.
        
        Despite administrative statements to the contrary, this strike is not about money, though money is a necessary factor of such a struggle. It’s about diametrically opposed values. What I’m fighting for daily while I picket for AUFA, then, is a reconfiguration of Acadia’s values. We collectively have to wrestle with BOG members who see themselves as the arbiters of Acadia’s values and who calculate those values in buildings and line-items in on an accounting page. We have to make them understand that the values they uphold are fucked up. And given that these are powerful people, used to getting their own way and not used to taking criticism well, we have a hell of a fight on our hands.
        As you’ll gather if you take the opportunity to watch the video of Friday’s rally, we have allies in this struggle. Faculty and students from across the country are facing the same ideological struggle against the corporatisation of universities. And we are acting together and supporting each other.
        So on Friday, I found my hope again in the common cause. I’m not saying that I’m not angry any more. And I’m definitely not saying that I’m hopeful for a quick resolution. In fact, I’m getting more pessimistic about a possible resolution as each day passes. My hope comes from the promise of solidarity that I saw on the streets of Wolfville and in Clock Tower Park on Friday.
        We are Acadia. And we are not alone.

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.