The Search for Faculty Power

The Search for Faculty Power The Search for Faculty Power The University of Toronto Faculty Association 1942-1992 William H.H.Nelson The University of Toronto Faculty Association Canadian Scholars' Press TORONTO,CANADA Nelson, William H., 1923-. The Search or Faculty Power: The University of Toronto Faculty Association, 1942-1992 First published in 1993 by The University of Toronto Faculty Association 720 Spadina Ave., Suite 419 Toronto, M5S lAl Canada and Canadian Scholars' Press Inc. 180 Bloor Street West, Suite 402 Toronto, M5S 2V6 Canada Copyright© 1993 The University of Toronto Faculty Association. No copy, reproduction or transmission of this material may be made without written permission. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: The Search for Faculty Power: The University of Toronto Faculty Association, 1942-1992 ISBN 1-55130-023-0 1. University of Toronto Faculty Association - History . I. Title. LE3.T52N44 1993 378.1'2'09713541 C93-0940000-8 Contents Preface 1 ChapterOne Early Days 7 ChapterTwo University Government-Faculty Power 23 ChapterThree University Government-Faculty Failure 41 ChapterFour Collective Bargaining-The First Attempt 59 ChapterFive A New Start 75 ChapterSix The Memorandum of Agreement 93 ChapterSeven Binding Arbitration 113 ChapterEight Revision And Retreat 135 ChapterNine Different Times 151 Appendix Faculty Association Chairmen and Presidents, 1947-1992 167 Index 169 2006 Preface t seems useful, in reprinting my book on the history of the Faculty IAssociation, to add a brief summary of some of the main events and trends in the association over the fifteen years since I wrote the book . It requires no insight to see that most of the defining events of fac ulty relations with the university have been driven, directly or indirectly, by concerns about security-security of tenure, of salary and benefits, of professional status and academic freedom. The early 1990s saw what seemed at the time a grave threat to all these aspects of faculty security. Along with an abatement of inflation, there was in Ontario especially an increasingly grim contraction of public spending on higher educa tion relative to other public spending. The attempt to enforce a "social contract" by Bob Rae's NOP government was a direct attack on collec tive bargaining, and included threats to jobs, salaries, and pensions in the universities. At the University of Toronto the administration cut jobs sharply among some non-academic staff. Despite various threatening gestures, there were no actual cuts among tenured faculty, though there were in the teaching stream. One particularly savage attempt at job-cutting occurred in the Faculty of Medicine in November 1991: disregarding established procedures for terminating jobs and, instead, following the advice of a private consul tant, a personnel officer in the Faculty of Medicine persuaded the Dean The Searchfor Faculty Power of Medicine and the central administration in Simcoe Hall to carry out a sudden, unannounced firing of 79 employees in the faculty. People with many years of service were given hours or minutes to clear out of their offices, university police standing by to enforce expulsion. The whole body of university employees, academic and non-academic, was outraged. And, as had happened before in times of crisis, in the absence of any other institution, such as a faculty senate, the Faculty Associa tion rook the lead in resisting the firings. A well-attended and somewhat unruly general meeting passed motions demanding the reinstatement of the fired employees as well as an apology from University of Toronto President Robert Prichard. In the event, there were no formal apologies, the dismissed employees were reinstated, and this style of job termination was not repeated. But the loss of non-teaching jobs, especially in the library, continued for years. And the university administration attempted to limit faculty benefits. In 1994-95 there was no across-the-board salary increase and no PTR. There were various threats to the progress-through-the-ranks com ponent of salaries, which for twenty years had been the basis of faculty salary structures, and, as well, increasing rigour in awarding tenure, and increasing reliance on non-tenured staff for teaching. Though the worst fears were not realized, it was this climate of contraction, reduction, and menace that sent a chill through the university in the 1990s. Fortunately, the mechanism for hearing grievances laid out in the Memorandum of Agreement did provide some protection for faculty members, and, not surprisingly, the number of formal faculty grievances burgeoned in the 1990s. Some 500 grievances were heard in the five years after 1996, before falling sharply in recent years from 100 a year to 20 or 30. Many of the grievances of the '90s concerned PTR awards, and the recent fall in numbers reflects both more uniform administrative proce dures and a slightly milder benefits climate. Of course, the great grievance issue in these years was centred on a grievor who was not a regular university faculty member at all. This was Nancy Olivieri, a doctor at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, who was engaged in research concerning thalassemia and related blood disorders. Her research was being partly funded by a drug company, one of whose products Dr. Olivieri was testing on her patients. When the Vlll 2006 Preface results of her research led her to conclude the drug in question was inef fective and possibly harmful, she published her conclusions and found herself under attack from the drug company and the hospital adminis tration. Olivieri was fired as head of her research program and sued by Apotex, the drug company. She, along with several of her co-workers, appealed to UTFA for support. The position of clinical staff in the hospitals who also hold university titles has never been entirely clear. UTFA does not negotiate their salary and benefits or represent their interests generally. They are rarely mem bers of UTFA, though some have been over the years. But they do hold university titles-Olivieri was a full professor-and they have a common interest with regular university faculty in the freedom to do unhindered research and publish its results. The Faculty Association agreed to repre sent Olivieri, not anticipating that her appeal would go on for five years, from 1997 to 2002, and threaten to bankrupt the association. The Olivieri case was complex and studded with extraneous issues. Faculty support for UTFA's representation of Olivieri was not unani mous, and weakened somewhat as the years drew on. It was argued that she and her co-grievors should seek the support of other clinicians in the hospitals rather than UTFA's (there was, and is, no effective negotiating body representing medical clinicians). Doubts were raised about Olivieri's research, and she was subjected to various forms of harassment, rang ing from denial of hospital facilities to attacks on her and her colleagues in anonymous letters. The relationship between the university and the teaching hospitals was not straightforward. There were entangling com plications, such as the university's expectation of a major donation from Apotex. A mediated settlement of the case reached early in 1999 fell apart after further hospital harassment of Olivieri and her supporters. With remorselessly rising legal expenses and dwindling funds, UTFA sought support from CAUT and received it unstintingly, including a $200,000 grant to apply to lawyers' bills. As time went on, the Faculty Association came under pressure from some of its members to drop its support of Olivieri, or, perhaps, accept a cosmetic settlement that would amount to the same thing. But even as UTFA was feeling the strain of this case, so were the hospital and uni versity administrations. The Olivieri appeal was drawing national and, ix The Search for Faculty Power indeed, international attention. It was increasingly viewed as a funda mental test of academic freedom in a world where corporate donations were replacing public funds in financing research. Toronto hospitals and the university disliked the bad publicity and feared the wrath of donors. CAUT's solid support made it clear that UTFA had resources beyond its own. Finally, in the fall of 2002, with the tough mediation of Martin Teplitsky, Olivieri and UTFA won a major victory. The terms of the set tlement included an agreement on their confidentiality, but it was clear that the university and the Hospital for Sick Children had capitulated. A part of the settlement that could not be kept confidential was a $500,000 payment from the university to UTFA for legal expenses. The Olivieri case was the most important test of academic freedom in Canada since the Crowe case in the 1950s. In that affair the Toronto Faculty Association had been timid, passive, and unhelpful. But UTFA passed the Olivieri test. It is to the credit of the three UTFA presidents who were involved in the Olivieri appeal-Bill Graham, Rhonda Love, and George Luste-that they, supported by the UTFA Executive and Council, kept their nerve and their principles. In December 2002, a few weeks after the Olivieri settlement, Uni versity Provost Shirley Neumann, quite recently arrived at Toronto and perhaps not wholly familiar with its traditions, dropped a bombshell on UTFA by abruptly invoking Article 21 of the Memorandum of Agree ment to give notice of the agreement's termination. The Provost explained that she only wanted, once and for all, to remove clinical faculty from any claim to UTFA's support, and had no way to do this except by terminat ing the agreement so as to make slight revisions in it. In a special meeting, the UTFA Council voted unanimously to consider certification. With advice and assistance from CAUT and some certified unions at other universities, UTFA started to organize a certification drive.

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