"Lack of critical thinking in strike"

In college I avoided English classes like the plague. After my first year writing course, I only took one English course and it took place during Interim with the topic covering protest in American literature, comparing and contrasting literary authors and American singer-song writers (i.e. I listened to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and analyzed how their lyrics spoke to themes found in Steinbeck and Ellison). When approaching a critical analysis of any piece or idea you can generally take one of two tracts, a surface level and a deep level. Although not always true, the track you take is often dependent on your experience with the piece or idea. In a recent article in The Star on the strikes occurring at York University and University of Toronto, the author comments on a lack of critical thinking, but appears to come at the issue so far removed from it, that in their analysis citing a lack of critical thinking, they miss all of the deeper issues that with critical analysis would be revealed.

I've never heard of the author of this article before, Martin Regg Cohn, but he is a political commentator for the Toronto Star. Wading through the article, its hard to find his point. Under the title is a subtitle: "Labour strife has exposed fault lines in university faculties — byzantine hierarchies where part-time teachers toil in classroom sweatshops." while a caption for the included photograph says: "While a hardy band of low-paid contract lecturers bear the brunt of teaching, a coddled elite of tenured professors are among the best-paid on the planet — while teaching fewer courses than ever, and sloughing off research duties." and the article concludes: "But as other sectors adjust to upheaval — from manufacturing to media to hospitals — we should demand greater accountability and clarity from universities. It’s not just students who deserve a better deal, but part-time teachers, too. Listen to the canaries in the ivory tower." What I pull from these comments is that Mr. Cohen believes that Universities have created two classes of workers with tenure-track faculty riding high hogs with no teaching responsibilities and zero cares about research output while contract faculty perform all of the teaching. He cites a "hallowed" rule that tenure-track faculty divvy their responsibilities 40-40-20 among research, teaching and service, that some professors hadn't published or received funding in 3 years and were well compensated. Taken together I understand this piece as a diatribe against tenure-track professors, however, as the title suggests, Mr. Cohn lacks critical insight into the issues underlying the environment from which these strikes are arising.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I've written about these issues before (here and here) with the gist suggesting that we need to re-think how we evaluate and reward research output and reconsider or come to an agreement on the roles of universities/colleges, in particular research universities in society. Without the private sector respecting a PhD for the general skills it provides (similar to the general skills that a liberal arts education provides), there will continue to be a glut of PhDs who are hoping to work towards a tenure-track position, with few other options. As long as there is pressure to enroll as many PhD students as possible in order to produce as much as possible, we'll be unable to escape the cycle of enrolling more students and turning out too many PhDs. Mr. Cohn and others deride faculty for their apparent unwillingness to teach, but faculty at R1 institutions receive little to no reward for teaching (in the narrow sense of teaching in classroom). Even outside of Universities, few people talk about the best teaching institutions unless they're high school guidance councilors. Most of the time that colleges are mentioned for their prestige or impact, the reference is to their research output not how many classes their professor taught that semester or how high their ratemyprofessor.com ratings are.

We can look at these strikes on the surface and make very little contribution with our comments, tenure track professors don't teach enough, tenure track professor only work 9 months a year and are paid too much, TAs, contract faculty are only working part-time, why are they expecting full-time wages. Or we can look past these surface issues and try to understand why colleges and universities value research output from their tenure faculty, why they rely on cheap options to teach every expanding classes and why little will change without massive overhaul across the private sector, government funding and the research culture.