Senate’s role needs to be reinforced

 

President Chakma has assured us the administration never proposed anything that threatened academic freedom. We need not rehash all the details – but an administration proposal to require that, as a condition of continuing employment, faculty act “respectfully” to everyone inside and outside the university looked like a potential threat to many of us.

 

How a university protects academic freedom is at the heart of its academic policy. To this end, The University of Western Ontario Act establishes a Senate, one of whose duties is to “establish and recommend to the Board policies and procedures to be followed in the selection, appointment, promotion and termination of appointment of the members of the Faculty, and the conditions under which tenure and sabbatical leave are granted.”

 

The same Act states that the Board of Governors “on the recommendation of the President, appoint the Deans and Chairmen of the academic units and other members of the academic staff of the University, and determine their functions, duties and powers and other conditions of employment including tenure of office, entitlement of sabbatical leave, promotion and termination, but the policies and procedures followed shall be established and recommended by the Senate (my emphasis).”

 

Some will no doubt claim that the certification under the Ontario Labour Relations Act of The University of Western Ontario Faculty Association (UWOFA) as the faculty bargaining agent overrides such provisions. Maybe it does.  But a recent decision of the British Columbia Court of Appeal gives reasons for doubt. In the decision, the court held that matters under the jurisdiction of the Senate of the University of British Columbia (UBC) were not subject to collective bargaining. The decision could still be appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, or there could be legal technicalities that makes Western’s situation different from that at UBC.

 

But the key points here are that Western, like UBC, has a Senate with statutory authority over matters related to academic appointments and that the Senate’s role needs to be taken seriously.

 

Regardless of the legal technicalities, the administration should respect the authority of the Senate by committing now to bring to it any future proposals to change the academic responsibilities of faculty members. It is in the Senate where such proposals can be debated comprehensively and publicly. If the Senate were not to endorse such changes, the administration would then have no business taking them to the bargaining table on behalf of the Board of Governors.

 

We need not wait for future court decisions.The administration and UWOFA should agree now that matters under the jurisdiction of the Senate will not be the subject of future collective bargaining without the Senate’s prior approval.

Andrew Sancton
Professor of political science