Thursday, October 9, 2008

This current strike action is not just about Brandon University professors and their needs (though, make no mistake, these are significant considerations). What you are witnessing is part of the vital process that keeps the Canadian University system among the very best in the world: that keeps it healthy, vigorous, dynamic, and autonomous.

If you read the many letters received in support of this strike action, you will see clearly that this unfortunate dispute is not just local; it is in fact part of a national-indeed, an international-struggle to retain the ideals that make universities universities, as opposed to colleges, or mere diploma mills, or mere businesses.

BUFA's struggle is part of a much broader struggle against things like the increasing corporatization of knowledge, and against a burgeoning administrative bureaucracy that draws precious resources away from the creative and intellectual passions that lie at the very heart of great academic institutions. It is part of a struggle to maintain the fundamental integrity and autonomy of higher education.

Financial issues attract public attention, make for 'good press', and are relatively easy to explain in mundane terms. But these are not the problem itself; rather, they are symptoms of more basic problems with which universities across Canada are being increasingly forced to wrestle.

BUFA's gains or losses in this strike action will be gains or losses for the entire Canadian university system, with ripple effects that extend from one end of this country to the other. That's at least one of the reasons why the employer's desire to substitute arbitration for negotiation is unacceptable.