Rachel F. Stapleton, University of Toronto; follow-up letter to Dean Gertler

September 23, 2010
Toronto, ON

Dear Dean Gertler,

          I would like to thank you for your engagement this afternoon at the first town hall meeting. I hope you will ascribe any “inflammatory” language—both earlier and in this letter—to a deep and abiding concern for the University. Having used only 1:10 of my allotted 3 minutes in my questions to you, I have taken the liberty to write to you now, in the spirit of consultation that you invoked at this afternoon’s meeting. I thank you in advance for your consideration of this letter, and I hope to receive a engaged response from you at your earliest convenience.

          Firstly, I want to state that I—and all of my colleagues—are fully aware that the status quo is unsustainable. Even those most unaware of budgetary realities understand that an annual deficit of $22 million is unacceptable, even for a public institution which. I believe that the proposals outlined in the Academic Plan are not those best suited to creating a long term, sustainable solution to the current crisis. At the same time, many of the major structural changes proposed in the Plan seem vague at best, and specific question that we have asked concerning the changes have been met almost entirely by, “Well, we hadn’t thought of that.”

           Secondly, let me say that I take as given that the intellectual “rationales” provided to the affected units at the end of June were misinformed, and I will therefore not address any arguments here towards those “rationales”; as you mentioned, your office has been inundated with letters from academics—and dare I say, experts—from around the world who have discredited those statements more eloquently than I can.

           When I asked you this afternoon about how the current Academic Plan aligns with two of your five pillars—enhancing student experience and leveraging excellence in research and graduate education—you focused your answer on a big picture view. I was not more specific in my question, but allow me to elaborate: given the parts of the proposal directly affecting graduate units (the Centre for Comparative Literature (my home department); the Centre for Ethics, the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies; as well as the graduate sections of the five departments proposed to form up the “School of Languages and Literatures”), I hope you will see that we do not feel that the proposals currently on the table will in anyway enhance—or protect—our “graduate student experience.” I respectfully put to you that, no matter the opinions of the SPC or of any external reviewers, we, the graduate students, are the ones most capable of forming an opinion on our own experience at the University; indeed, we are the experts whom it behooves the Faculty to consult. Ask us how our graduate experience and education might be enhanced. I can guarantee you that it would not be by the amalgamation or disestablishment of units.
          In addition, let me tell you the personal effect this Plan has had on my “graduate student experience.” I have literally lost sleep over the proposed disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature over the course of the summer. The news that my academic and intellectual home was under imminent threat of closure—and a timeline of 12 months, start to finish is certainly “imminent”—caused me much distress over several months. While I am extremely pleased that Professor ten Kortenaar and your office have had discussions that may alter the implementation of the Plan, I cannot overemphasize the impact that the threat of disestablishment has had on myself and my fellow students. (I use “threat” advisedly, and in no way intend it to be inflammatory; I merely alert you to how the proposal was presented to us in the early memos that we received, and in how we perceived the proposal to disestablish our Centre, and, in effect, our discipline. A collaborative program is in no way equivalent to supporting the discipline as it currently stands.)

          Another question I asked you was for your office to release hard financial figures. I was disappointed with what I saw as yet another “dodge.” When Vice-Dean Baker was good enough to meet with students from Comparative Literature on August 24, we requested the same information from him; he indicated that he would check with you as to what data could be shared; we never heard any more. I speak to my perception, not necessarily to the intentions behind the lack of sharing of those figures. I was heartened to hear you say towards the end of the town hall that budgetary memos were available on the FAS website. However I will mention that this was the first time that we have been directed to that information, despite many requests. And while I realize the difficulty of fielding so many questions from an audience, I will also mention that you only directed us to those memos after at least three different members of the audience had asked you to release budgetary figures. (At the same time, I would appreciate it if you or someone in your office could send me the link, as I have been unable to locate the budgetary memos you referred to on either the FAS website or the Provost’s website.)
          Much of the hesitance to share these figures—in addition to the suspicion it raises in the minds of an already-distrustful constituency—seems to be based on the “complexity” of the University and the Faculty’s budgets. While I am not an accountant, I respectfully maintain that any one of the Faculty’s 3,685 graduate students— most of whom live in Toronto on an annual income of $15,000, and some of whom support families—would have a very good understanding of budgets. I challenge any single one the University’s administrators to live for a year on the same income.

          My final request to you was for a firm commitment that no structural changes would be implemented before July 1, 2011, the original deadline proposed in the Academic Plan for the disestablishment of the above-mentioned Centres and the amalgamation of various departments into a new “School.” You were reluctant to make such a commitment, but were clear that such a timeline would depend on the UTFA grievance. I would therefore like to change my request and ask your office to publish a revised estimated timeline for structural changes, taking into account discussions you have had recently with the various affected units and the faculty grievance, including the proposed dates of presentation to the Arts & Science Council and the Governing Council for both discussion and decision, and when any such decisions would be implemented. Such a timeline would, I think, be an important step towards re-establishment trust within the Faculty.

          Finally, you indicated that you, the Provost, and the Faculty as a whole were interested in hearing constructive alternatives to the current proposal on the table. I therefore respectfully offer the following suggestions:

1. that the Provost grant the Faculty of Arts and Science a temporary release from contributing to the University of Toronto Fund for the next three years. While I realize that the cross-funding model is key to the University’s budget, given the current dire financial situation facing the Faculty, I would suggest that the net “loss” of $11 million would be best spent within the Faculty itself.

(I will only mention in passing the irony of an endowed School of Management that cannot—even with deregulated tuition fees—manage to run itself without subsidy, yet still has the capital funds to build a new building. A building project that I look out on from the cracked window of my carrel in Robarts.)

2. that administrators take a voluntary five-year wage freeze on those portions of their salaries that are stipends. This would not affect the portion of their salaries due to them as faculty, only that portion which is in addition to the salaries they would receive if they did not hold administrative posts.

Not having access to budget of the Faculty, I can only guess what affect these measures would have on the financial situation of the Faculty; they may not even be possible due to agreements and contracts to which I am not privy or of which I am ignorant. I do not know. However, I would once again draw your attention to the stipends that graduate students received, a stipend that is in effect a fixed income, and one that is not indexed to the cost of living, and certainly not to the cost of living in Toronto. I would suggest that voluntary measures might be one way in which the Faculty might make up some of its shortfall without placing in jeopardy the quality of education of which it is justifiably proud. (It is not my intention here to raise the issue of graduate student funding packages; I merely use it as an illustrative example.)
          I offer these suggestions in good faith, in the spirit of consultatioon, and as examples of some possible measures that I imagine would make more immediate and more significant contributions to the Faculty than the proposed School of Languages and Literatures, and the disestablishment of the three Centres mentioned above, which you estimated would save $900,000–$1.5 million.

          I thank you again for the time you have taken to read this letter, and I look forward to your response. I will be so bold as to hope for a personalized response rather than a form letter. If I have been misinformed as to any of the figures I have quoted, I apologize: I’m working with what information I have been able to find.

Best Regards,


Rachel F. Stapleton
Ph.D. Student
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto



CC: Provost Cheryl Misak
President David Naylor
Neil ten Kortenaar
Linda Hutcheon
Savecomplit
Academic Plan
UTFA
UTSU
CUPE

Courtesy of Eugenia Tsao, Anthropology

Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

Northrop Frye and Che Guevara seem to have much more in common than anyone ever guessed.

Robert Ramsay, Past Chair, CUPE 3902

September 24, 2010

Cheryl Misak
Vice-President & Provost
University of Toronto

Dear Professor Misak,

I have been watching the debate over the Faculty of Arts & Science (FAS) Academic Plan unfold since its release in July, and at this point I believe there is very little to add to the substantive input you and other administrators have received from members of the university and international community on the content of the Plan. However, there is still much to say about the process by which the Plan was produced and the state of academic planning at the University of Toronto in general, both of which deserve as much if not more censure than the FAS Plan’s now-infamously myopic recommendations.

In addition to their criticism of the Plan’s recommendations, many colleagues have noted the total abdication of your responsibility to shared, collegial governance. This is most clearly outlined in the grievance filed by the University of Toronto Faculty Association, which notes that the Academic Plan violates the contract between the University and its faculty, the principles articulated in your own planning document released in September 2009, the Policy for Assessment and Review of Academic Programs and Units, the University’s Statement of Institutional Purpose, and more generally, the academic freedom of your constituent scholars.

It is as if no one in your administration has done their homework. University governance in Canada has been a topic of study and reflection since at least the issuance of the Duff-Berdahl report in 1966. This massive study, commissioned jointly by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and the Canadian Association of University Teachers, had enormous impact nationally and was highly influential in the governance reforms that took place at the University of Toronto in the early 1970s. The commission was originally undertaken to examine the charges that “scholars no longer form or even influence their own policy, that a new and rapidly growing class of administrators is assuming control, and that a gulf of misunderstanding and misapprehension is widening between the academic staff and the administrative personnel, with grave damage to the functioning of both.” Over fifty years later, these sentiments are echoed in the current debate.

The University administration has done nearly everything the Duff-Berdahl report advised not to do and virtually nothing that it recommended. To wit, the guiding principle of long-term academic planning is expressed thusly: “Rather than having to accept purely administrative ad hoc decisions, it would be far better for the faculty to evolve a consensus which reflects its own values and long-range goals. The risks and the demands may be great, but the values are sufficient to justify the enterprise.”

These sentiments have been repeatedly forwarded and expanded upon in studies since 1966. The members of the Independent Study Group on University Governance wrote, in 1993, “It is our view that the well-being of the university cannot be fully achieved if it does not remain open and responsive to legitimate public suasion and if it cannot articulate its mission in a convincing fashion to the community it serves.” This is a prescient statement in light of your administration’s inability to articulate a guiding academic rationale for the proposed changes to FAS.

Investigation into the nature of university governance continues to thrive in the academy, and the general trend in this literature is to highlight a growing sense of alienation among faculty and students from the decisions that affect their working and academic lives. OISE’s own Glen Jones has suggested that a stronger integration of faculty, including contract faculty, into university decision-making may serve to counterbalance the effects of emerging market-oriented administration approaches. Conclusions like Jones’ were affirmed in a December 2009 paper by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, which stated, “Faculty participation in institutional governance isn’t a privilege; it’s a necessary part of decision-making in colleges and universities.”

To the observer, it would seem that neither you nor Dean Gertler, nor anyone else in senior administration, has studied the genealogy of your own jobs. If you had, surely you would have taken the necessary steps to avoid the current debacle, such as engaging in meaningful consultation with stakeholders prior to the implementation of radical changes (and it is well-documented that implementation has in fact begun). Despite your recent shift to the terminology “publicly-assisted university” rather than “public university” (a shift that signals far more than a fiscal reality, by the way), I assume that the recent events reveal only an unintentional failure of due diligence on your part, rather than an intentional departure from a tradition of shared, collegial governance that has long distinguished the public university from the private corporation.

I attended a meeting of the Governing Council in April 2010, during which the closure of language programs at the Scarborough campus was protested in multiple languages by a diverse range of governors (foreshadowing, perhaps, the present outcry). At this meeting, you spoke eloquently about the “great professors” at the University of Toronto. How is it that now you sidestep them, or worse, undermine them?

To cite just one example, the external reviewers for the Faculty of Forestry (FF) explain in their report of December 3 2009 that “we were advised by Provost Misak that a reorganization of the FF was being considered” and so “our primary charge became one of discussing with each group we met during our site visit the possible reorganization options being considered.” The reviewers continue, “Provost Misak advised that our report should only briefly comment on the traditional seven questions…and concentrate instead on reorganization.” In their response to this external review, the members of the Faculty correctly note, “Reorganization consideration was therefore less a conclusion that was reached than a primary charge to the review team.”

Your interference in the external review of the Faculty of Forestry belies your claim in a September 13 2010 letter to the Faculty Association that “planning processes must be local.” In this same letter, you go on to state that Simcoe Hall is prepared “to play a catalytic role when local processes stall or…spark significant unhappiness.” However, the public evidence shows that for the departments and centres of Arts & Science and for the Faculty of Forestry the local processes did not have a chance to succeed. In the former case, lack of communication and consultation from the Dean’s office resulted in an “air-tight” process and faulty plan. In the latter case, your manipulation of the process is what has resulted in significant unhappiness, as numerous letters from alumni and faculty, and the Faculty Association, demonstrate.

At a Planning & Budget Committee meeting in March 2010, I spoke against the process of the FAS plan, noting that the Strategic Planning Committee was small and unrepresentative, and that certain guiding objectives seemed to have purely financial justification, and potentially negative consequences for the academic mission of the Faculty. This intervention was wholly consistent with the recommendation of the 1988 Report of the Chairman’s Advisory Committee on Governance that Committees review policy matters “in the early stages of development,” and its recognition that a unicameral Governing Council can only flourish with “a high degree of reliance on consultation” (an idea reinforced by the 2008 Task Force on Governance). And yet, my comments were dismissed by the Committee, and later by Mr. Petch, as uninformed. Since then, my comments have been repeated by thousands of others. It is encouraging, at last, to see that Dean Gertler is taking the input from the university community seriously. I find it regrettable that our concerns were not taken seriously when we first voiced them many months ago.

I respectfully urge you to examine the crisis generated by the FAS Academic Plan as a case study in a long history of deteriorating university governance. It is not too late to salvage the reputation of the University of Toronto’s administration, or to regain the trust of those with whom you share the responsibility of governance. It will take much work to return to the practice of shared, collegial governance, and to honour the corollary obligation to observe due process in academic planning, but it will be worth the effort.


Sincerely,



Robert Ramsay
Past Chair
CUPE 3902
PhD Candidate
Department of Geography



cc: David Naylor, President
Meric Gertler, Dean of Faculty of Arts & Science
George Luste, UTFA President
Leslie Jermyn, CUPE 3902 Chair
Jack Petch, Governing Council Chair