"an intellectually & politically independent rag which does not whitewash YUFA nor the administration, nor PEN nor AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL but which is generously
contributed to by YUFA members.

Sent: 5-May-97 12:49
To: YUFA-L@YORKU.CA

A Contribution to the Broader Context of Our Strike

Janice Newson, Sociology, Faculty of Arts

I have not been able to regularly participate in the e-mail discussions of the strike because of my involvement in the media/com co-ordinating group. Someone told me that over the past week or so, some discussion has been circulating about the broader context of our strike and I want to make a contribution to that discussion now.

Although the manifestations of the re-structuring and corporatisation of higher education have become more visible in the past five years or so, it was at least fifteen years ago that the shift began to take place away from collegialism toward managerialism, and away from developing knowledge as a social and broadly accessible resource toward its commodification, commercialisation and privatisation. This shift was clearly signalled by the formation of the Corporate-Higher Education Forum in 1983, four years after a similar organisation (The Business-Higher Education Forum) was founded in the United States. In 1984, the Forum published its first report, Partnership for Growth, putting forward a boldly stated, aggressive blue-print for almost everything related to corporatisation that we have seen taking place in universities over the past decade. Also throughout the 1980s, the now defunct Science Council of Canada issued a series of reports each of which promoted the development of particular kinds of campus structures and funding approaches that would escalate and intensify collaborations between universities and corporations. Many of these structures and programmes came into existence on university campuses by the early 1990s if not sooner, although many faculty members were not aware of them. They included technology transfer centres, innovation centres, research parks, the centres of excellence designed to partner up academic and industrial scientists in pre-designated priority areas, and various forms of matched funding research programmes. At the same time, external lobby groups like the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI) and the Canadian Manufacturing Association (CMA) were actively putting forward to government similar agendas for higher education in which they aggressively argued for re-structuring, down-sizing and implementing cost-efficient managerial systems of control in institutions of higher education.

I and Howard Buchbinder first wrote about the emergence of a "corporate agenda" for higher education in 1985. We had been encouraged by Rusty Shteir of Atkinson College to write up an analysis of what, through our involvement in YUFA, OCUFA and the CAUT in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we had begun to perceive as a change of direction in higher education policy and the relationship of this change to what members of the faculty were experiencing at York. It was evident in the early 1980s, for example, that York University was "being watched" because it had become a highly unionised campus, more militant and to some degree, more aggressive if not more effective than some other campus communities about confronting the cut-back scenario and the increasing centrality of the university administration and its priorities in decision-making. In 1984, we organised toward a strike to start on the first day of classes in September, in order to prevent a stripping of our contract provisions for grieving and arbitrating tenure and promotion decisions, and appointments to the graduate faculty; and the imposition of a government "suggestion" for the maximum level of compensation increases to be awarded that year. The strike on the first day of classes in 1984 did not take place even though, as in our present situation, we faced an obstinate non-negotiating stance from the administration for the first five months of negotiations.To secure a last minute satisfactory settlement offer, it had been sufficient for the administration to hear (through their own channels!) that a large proportion of the faculty were making picket signs over the weekend. But there were many indications during that summer leading up to the almost-strike and subsequently that the state of York's negotiations had been used by other university administrations as a lever for holding the line on settlements in their universities.

When Howard and I first wrote and spoke about an emerging corporate agenda, many of our colleagues thought that we were being overly conspiratorial, too anti-business, or creating a tempest in a tea-pot. Yet from 1985 onward, after the last YUFA strike until now, the infrastructure and social relations of university-corporate linking were being put into place both at York and to varying degrees in other universities. The most graphic expression of the extent of this infrastructure and these relations and the hold that they had gained over our own campus was the failed attempt in 1992 to locate the International Space University Inc. at York. I can't take the time here to tell you what this initiative involved and who and what it involved or even how it exemplified the corporatisation process, but it was a dramatic attempt to appropriate public higher education resources to serve purely economic objectives and to reap benefits for particular corporate entities, some of which were represented on our BOG. Susan Mann began her Presidency at York on the coat-tails of the International Space University initiative ... an initiative which, as you know, never took off (excuse the pun).

Since 1992, the visible effects of the longer term processes of managerialism and corporatism have become more evident and are embedded in a variety of new kinds of campus structures, including corporate entities that exist within and as part of the university infrastructure. In other words, corporatism doesn't just arise from the external influence of private sector corporations that fund particular programmes, faculties and research projects; but it also arises from entrepreneurial, commercially oriented units - companies- that are, o have become part of, the university from the inside. For example, through the entrepreneurial activities of CULTECH, a within-campus corporate entity engaged in developing networked, on-line educational "products", business logos on educational materials that are authorised through the academic status of York University are a reality. The commercial focus of York Lanes has been extended into advertising opportunities in washrooms and table tops, as the campus population is primarily conceived as a market for whatever goods someone wants to peddle. Although the shop-keepers in the mall are friendly and helpful and should not be the focus of attack, nevertheless the mall has introduced a distracting element to the campus which, especially in the current context, does not support and constantly undermines our efforts to sustain an intellectual, teaching and learning centred, campus culture.

It has been stated many times now that the York Strike has been animated by concerns about these various effects of managerialism and corporatism, even though the specific issues that are at debate at the bargaining table may not appear to be related to these concerns. In fact, I think they are very related and in a very direct way. Moreover, managerialism and corporatism in education are the more particular manifestations of the general re-structuring of both public sector and private sector workplaces, and of the ideological attack on intellectual, cultural and socially-oriented activities and services. But even if the relationship of these concerns to our bargaining issues is indirect, our strike has been an important pivotal moment for making the public more aware of the dangers of managerialism and corporatism to publicly funded education in general, for escalating and focusing our energy on the necessity of struggling against them and for putting forward a different vision for our society and world than the one now being promoted through the widespread influence of largely multi-national and trans-national corporate elites.

It was out of our involvement in YUFA in the early 1980s that Howard Buchbinder and I began to write on these issues, in order to inspire a political response to them among our colleagues both at York and elsewhere. In 1988, we wrote in the conclusion of The University Means Business: Universities, Corporations and Academic Work :

... many academics have not noticed the institutional ground shifting beneath them, as their careers have moved from good times into bad. They have been pre- occupied instead with increasing teaching loads, ill-equipped students, rejected grant proposals, and more and more committee work with less and less power to determine the outcomes. They have searched for a place of retreat- space to "do their own work" because the institution seems to be demanding something that isn't "their own". If successful at finding this space, they have narrowed their vision and concentrated their efforts on work they "have chosen" to do. They have been content to leave the rancour and confusion of the institution for full-time managers to sort out with a few militant unionists.

To whatever extent this characterised the situation at York in the decade after YUFA's last strike (1985), it is clearly no longer the case! But when the 1997 strike is finally over, it will be important not only to continue to identify the changes in the university that have fuelled our determination to take back control of the educational mission of the university. It will be even more important, if we are to reverse the trends, to understand how these changes were able to take place over that previous decade with so little effective resistance, particularly in a university where a vigilant faculty had previously engaged in aggressive and successful actions to defend the integrity of the institution. I will be happy to contribute toward answering this important question, along with others who must also be thinking about it, in any kinds of discussion groups or fora that may be organised for this purpose.

In the mean time, if it would be helpful in any way, I would be glad to make available xeroxed copies of a lecture that I gave to the distinguished speakers series of the Humanities Unit at the University of Windsor in the fall of 1995 ,in which I tried to provide an overview of the political and cultural transformation of the academy through managerialism and corporatism over the past fifteen years or so. It is called "Technical Fixes and Other Priorities of the Corporate-Linked University". I have been waiting for it to appear in the published version of the 1995-6 speaker series but it is not yet out. Please let me know if you are interested (JANEWSON@YORKU.CA)

And finally, in the midst of this strike, I have been trying to meet the writing deadlines for a co-edited book Universities and globalisation: critical perspectives, to be published by Sage later this year. I am currently writing the concluding chapter, that originally was to put forward alternative paths for universities to follow in the face of globalising forces. I am now writing it from the perspective of "in the middle of a strike that is focused on all of the issues that have been discussed in this book." I was told that someone had distributed an e-mail message urging that our struggle at York should be placed in such a context and I just want to add that this chapter will be one such effort.