Concern as Canadian courses rely on temporary teaching staff

Employing academics on short-term contracts as “disposable cheap labour” is unsustainable for Canadian universities, experts have warned.

The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) estimates that more than half of undergraduate courses in the province are taught by contract faculty.

Rob Kristofferson, president of OCUFA and a professor of history and social and environmental justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, said it was a phenomenon across the country – with rates even higher in Quebec.

“The concept of firing itself is alien to many contract faculty because they have to reapply for their jobs every four months,” he told Times Higher Education.

“They get a single contract to teach a single course, maybe for C$8,000 or C$9,000, and then there’s no guarantee in many places that they’re going to get that course again. Getting predictable, stable employment is not an experience of many.”

OCUFA have warned that contract staff are hired on short-term, often precarious contracts, with little job security, access to employer benefits or institutional support.

Kristofferson said part of the problem is the long-term underfunding per student that Ontario universities receive – about C$10,400 (£5,686) compared with C$17,400 across Canada.

“It’s that gap that puts our universities in a position where they have to find ways of finding efficiencies that lead to things like increasing the pool of contract faculty and letting the pool of tenured and permanent faculty decay.”

In addition to the funding issue, Larry Savage, professor in the department of labour studies at Brock University, said senior administrators have come to treat teaching as a variable cost.

“Administrators are increasingly reluctant to make long-term investments in permanent positions for fear of changing enrolment patterns or budgetary shocks. As a result, sessional instructors are treated like a disposable form of cheap labour.”

In the face of financial challenges, experts worry that many universities are replacing permanent tenure-track positions with temporary instructors.

“Given the precarious nature of their work, they don’t have the same capacity to support students outside the classroom, shape curriculum and programme development, or participate fully in the collegial life and long-term planning of their departments,” said Savage.

“You can’t properly run a university on sessional labour. It’s unsustainable.”

Glen Jones, professor of higher education at the University of Toronto, said the high unionisation of the sector and the expansion of student numbers in recent decades have also been factors.

Jones said the practice can make it harder for students to build connections with faculty, and they may be less likely to address complicated and time-consuming issues of academic misconduct.

“Contract faculty are sometimes hired under challenging circumstances, such as being appointed just as the term begins to replace a faculty member who is ill. A programme that employs a large number of part-time faculty can be challenging given problems related to cohesion and maintaining uniform standards.”

While there is limited national data on the issue, Rebekah Willson, associate professor in the School of Information Studies at McGill University, said it is a considerable problem across Canadian higher education.

She said contract staff are typically very passionate about their work but are concerned about what they are able to accomplish.

“You just basically have to rock up and teach them, they don’t have a lot of opportunity for [preparation work] and there’s a lot of concern about being stretched too thin.”

Willson said many academics get “trapped” in a pattern of lurching from one teaching role to the next to make ends meet and taking on as many courses as they can.

“It’s the cycle of running from one thing to another and not being able to do the job to the level that they would like to,” she said.

“You’re on this treadmill that you are spending all of your time and energy on teaching, you are not able to do research and typically these people are on teaching-only contracts, which means that if they’re doing research it’s off the side of their desk.”

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com