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A Cultural and Political Economic Struggle:
Notes towards an understanding of the York Strike
A Two-Part Analysis
Ioan Davies, Professor of Sociology and Social & Political Thought, York University

I. Culture-Conflict in the 1990s. The strike at York University is not a class struggle in the simplistic way of reading that, nor simply a power struggle between different levels of the university. Rather, it has all the elements of a struggle for the meaning of culture and the direction of a political economy in a world where culture, power and class have become reduced to trite, meaningless slogans. However we resolve things, the strike brings together many components of our society today, and it is important to reflect on them before we retreat into our privileged locations.

The centre of the strike is - a Trade Union? Well, not quite a Trade Union. The York University Faculty Association is not a guild nor a professional association in the classic senses, and hardly a union in the industrial one. This a post-Fordian union, concerned with ideas, money, status, security, technology, research, co-operation with each other and people outside its ranks, moving in and out of management positions, whose economy is the political sign of itself (to deliberately distort Baudrillard). It thus includes people who will jump ship when the occasion demands (an important member of the Administration's negotiating team was YUFA chair not so long ago, and the Academic Vice President was a picket captain in an earlier strike). Having said all that, the culture of YUFA is trade unionist, and it borrows its structure and organization from the trade union movement. Similarly, the University Administration draws on corporate ideology, management structures and financial proclivities to order its affairs, even though the bulk of the actors in administrative positions have been academics at some time or other (though almost none of them were regarded highly in their research fields, something that both the administrators and most of the YUFA executives have in common). Thus, on both the administration and faculty sides, the office-holders have tended to be career politicians: most professors would not be seen dead in either role.

The strike, however, has thrown these diverse career-paths into a new perspective. The very large number of faculty members who have no political career interests in the university have been mobilized on either side, though largely on the side of the union. The pivotal group has been those on whom the research and teaching reputation of the university might seem to have come to rest. These are not necessarily the best paid (those with salaries over $100,000 are largely present or former administrators), but those who have received consistent research grants, published regularly or received major teaching awards. In general the Union paid scant attention to these (apart, possibly, to the teachers) and thus the Union perception was that they were largely tools of the administration, operating out of a feudal fiefdom (the Administration was referred to by one Sociologist as "our local Hapsburgs"). On YUFA-L, the listserv used by perhaps 150 faculty members, almost never referred to these professors in terms of their academic credentials or achievements, but generally in terms of whose side they were on. (It is clear, in terms of who receives internal grants, that the same thing is happening on the other side). The concept of academic excellence is, in some ways, being reduced to political allegiance. However, the existence of YUFA-L and the picket-lines has necessarily brought together many people who would otherwise never have occasion to meet, creating the opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration that has been increasingly rare over the years since York became a mega-versity. Thus the strike is probably acting as the catalyst for a more creative approach to knowledge among the striking staff while creating an ossifying corporatism among the administration and the ‘privatized' non-strikers. The multi-disciplinary elan of the picket-lines is offset by the increasingly rigid curriculum patterns of the University administration, and the attempts at adding corporate sponsorship to each aspect of university life, including the courses themselves.

The strike therefore hits at the heart of what research and teaching are for, and therefore ultimately about the purpose of the university. Outside the university, there are several attitudes towards its purpose, ranging from a deep-rooted anti-intellectualism to an awed respect for qualifications. The corporate agenda of the provincial and federal governments manages to combine both into a conception of a knowledge factory. The Media, in order to preserve its own claim on knowledge, is able to purvey some of the ‘findings' of academics and ‘products' such as novels or inventions while giving the impression that professors are somehow not with it. The idea, therefore, that the strike involves equity, retirement, class-room conditions as well as salaries would therefore suggest how out of touch professors are with the real world. Although some professors may (mistakenly) see the strike as being ultimately directed at the provincial government , in fact the strike is about the future of the university and the relationship between faculty, administrators and sponsorship (corporate, governmental and student). The old communal (or collegial) university of the 1970s has long given way to a city of over 50,000 people, and therefore the structures that were established to deal with a small university (with their in-built structures of patrimony) have become unwieldy in coping with the new situation: Senate, Councils of the various faculties, the Boards of Governors, Departmental meetings are all antiquated bodies which ultimately give all the power to the administration, except, perhaps under conditions of a strike.

The future of the university therefore requires that we examine the changing conditions (see Janice Newson's accompanying article) but also that we examine in more detail what new collectivities the strike has produced. It is not enough simply to record that the university has grown bigger and become more corporate. The strike, by opening up the inner workings of the institution, and exposing most of us to each other, has given us a chance to rethink our relationships and provide a scene of new academic politics in action. Watch this site for a continuation of these observations.