SMU, FU, So I Can Do What I Do!

Saint Mary’s University (SMU), in Canada, is one of my previous employers. The institution is presently having budgetary problems that impact employment and so the higher education it is meant to facilitate. What a surprise. Here’s another, the response from the faculty employee labor union: Solidarity, redeemable at any Tim’s or Sobey’s and telling the President to fuck off.

It doesn’t dawn on the parties that these two acts – one of solidarity, the other of schism – embody the fracture of higher education, or that reoccurring episodes of such schizophrenia might be an indicator of deeper problems with the higher education institutional model of universities and colleges.

This all might be amusing, except they deserve it and so many others do not.

I was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where I studied at and was later a faculty employee of SMU. This is also the campus where Peter March, Robert Ansel and myself created the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model (though then it was called, Greenvale). At that time, I was a student who would soon find myself juggling a PhD candidacy, owning and operating a janitorial company and, of course, applying for and fulfilling as many adjunct contracts as the three universities in my hometown would allow, in any given semester, in any given year.

As I said, my alma mater is in financial trouble, but I'll be hanging up in the Alumni Office, when they beg for money to operate a model that should never have been used in the first place. But don’t worry about SMU. This is a well-rehearsed dance routine found across systems that use the institutional model, with some classic moves already being made by the SMU Faculty Union (SMUFU), like the aforementioned solidarity and scolding. Plus, up the Cabot Trail there’s a clever little higher education institution with a nifty solution to financial woes.

“Do tell!" shrieks, SMUFU.

"Sell out!" shrieks, PR&S. And it looks like SMU is 58.8% of the way through its milling of the social pillar - can't wait to get into the international student numbers for SMU. The other day I sent an email to, Dr. Marie Battiste, whom the CBU website describes as “Special Advisor to the Vice President Academic and to Unama’ki College on decolonizing the academy.” PSA can help with everything that must be on her plate: It’s a fully functional, independent higher education system that can service and steward indigenous access to postsecondary education and employment...

Silence.

To be fair, the institutional model conditioned CBU and SMU to behave this way, imposing circumstances in which they find ourselves forced to do shameful things under the new bridge, like go private, but stay public. See, not so original, or professional, or moral a solution after all, and from buildings full of intelligent people. Unfortunately, this CBU dance move has been repeatedly used in the history of the university and college model - not just the last two years or so - with a steady rise in popularity during the past forty in higher education systems around the world.

I can’t believe I even have to say this shit, and to SMUFU no less (this is their material!), and in an institution that strategically boasts about efforts to provide access and support for indigenous students!

Here’s an uncommon calculation for your next union meeting: Take the revenue from “Student Tuition,” as reported in the SMU 2023 Annual Financial Report, then divide by the number of faculty employees providing frontline higher education service. The result is a hint at the annual revenue for a professional academic practice, maybe in one of the old houses on Henry St, like used to house the philosophy department at Dal, before it was moved to its new capital project.

Sporting the McCain brand, it cost $12 million (about $20 million today), while I hear the new ice rink is at least $36.5 million to construct. For a light mental stretch, how many homes could that have bought faculty and their families, in the south end from (say) Jubilee to Inglis and from Oxford to Barrington. Suppose the average home price is $1 million (it’s actually around $750,000). That’s 50 to 60 nice home-based academic practices, like the good ole days on Henry St, and the number is over 901 if we use all the revenue Dalhousie University collected in 2022-23. Community integration wider than the corner of Henry and University is normal in professional service models like those used by attorneys, physicians, accountants, psychiatrists, and dentists to provide their equally valued... Do you see it? Look at it another way. Get out of my way. Let me earn as a professional licentiate. I’ll buy my own damn million-dollar house and I bet the bank would give me a good mortgage, and with a professional academic practice as a tax…and government programs encouraging the spread of PSA-style practices…in native and other communities that draw droves of international students who contribute.... Do you see it now?! Do you recognize your responsibility, your culpability in the harm caused by this cluster-fuck of a model?!

The calculation of gross PSA practice revenue from tuition alone is $274,843 ($82,453,000 (Tuition) ÷ 300 SMUFU members). Initially, I tried to find a total or membership breakdown on the SMUFU website, only none is provided. But conveniently, the organization responded to a comment of mine on X:

The bitter irony of “2 years (at least)” is completely lost on the author, as I suppose it is lost on a Starbuck’s employee. History of the higher education institutional model of universities and colleges and its litany of failures is many centuries old (at least), and where you will find the real struggle in which you express solidarity, and eventually your alma mater with bloodied hands. (Don't even get me started on SMU's collusion with one of my (😉) universities back in Communist China (Beijing Normal University), which was basically an off-shore degree mill for SMU - in a nation where the so-called government has killed around 100 million Chinese (and other) citizens in the past 100 years. But I digress, it seems into the politics of the day on campuses.)

Off campus, could you operate an independent practice in higher education services on revenue of say, $263,910/annum, with no financial troubles severe enough to rationalize collusion with mass-murdering-fuckheads like the Chinese Communist Gang? (And if you think there is a difference between BNU and the CCG, then stop reading and pull your head out of your ass!) The source for this revenue is the total public contribution of $79,173,000 divided by 300 professors and librarians, or 41% of total revenue ($192,843,000) and a 56% reduction in the total expenses ($178,652,000) of the institution you quaintly, naively, irresponsibly, culpably call yours.

Imagine the control over change that can come from such financial and work liberation, and for all stakeholders in higher education, not just the McCains. (And in case it's is not clear, because you just pulled your head out of your ass, this calculation means higher education can be free of tuition and academic work finally compensated well enough to live closer to SMU.) The current model has no hope of achieving what is by right ours.

Here are some more financials for PSA: Canada, United States, Australia.

And below are some figures which are straight from SMUFU. Ouch! Well, take solace in the fact that the union only takes 1.18%, whether you like it or not, whether they act as you vote or not.

Incredible, problems solved. Let's round it up to $2 million, in an institution that spent $178,652,000 to provide higher education service in 2023. Are you people serious? Do you want to be taken seriously?

 

SMUFU Statement of Solidarity 

I do not see higher education in the same way that you do. In fundamental ways we take different pictures. Perhaps we share a composition for higher education service, in the western tradition of teaching, researching and community servicing, but we definitely contrast when it comes to the means used to facilitate provision of the service. Now, pictures with high contrast can be nice, but here are some of the things that PSA terminates: universities, colleges, tenure, shared governance and academic freedom. Like I said, very different pictures of the same subject. And if you think this terminates higher education, then you’ve a long way to go to properly fix this pillar.

So, this is going to be swift and unpleasant, like tearing off a band-aid. This is fitting because that’s exactly what SMUFU offers in this statement and in all of its industrial actions, a band-aid for serious injury and damages to its members and the wider community - though the former are the explicit concern of the SMUFU in collecting mandatory dues. Ten quotes from the SMUFU Statement of Solidarity are given a snap PSA interpretation. For deeper treatments, follow the links:

1) “losing our community” – Then build a new one from without the institutions. Hello? Duh! On Sesame Street they use this segment called, Three of These Things Belong Together. Here’s a version you should solve in a flash: Which of these three things is not needed for higher education: universities, academics, or students? If it took you a second or two, that’s not bad. Such things are by now foundational for me. But if you said none, then I’ll see you on the other side amigo.

2) “not a world without limits” – Right, but the limits imposed on us by the higher education institution (HEI) model of universities and colleges damage us all, because these limits are compromised, in violation of various human rights, are too expensive, too easily weaponized…and finally, most importantly, they are not fucking needed! If you don’t like the limits of your academic or higher education world, then change the model. We did. SMUFU and the rest of the academy prefer to tape up the injuries and push the player back on the field. Tenure, shared governance, academic freedom, all just pieces of tape that are ultimately unnecessary. That might be fine for the Vanier Cup, but not for the social pillar of higher education.

3) “wondering where this will take us” – Where this road always takes the faculty and staff employees of higher education institutions. Enserio, you don’t know!? Possibly, you are not the ones to lead us? From behind the heavy veil of centuries of Chancellors and Presidents and Boards and Bishops and Pubs & Taverns and Federal Budgets and Technological Redundancies and Union Action and… And you still don’t know where you are going. Is that right? I bet you said, “none” to the Sesame Street question.

4) “stand in solidarity with” – At the unemployment office? You have failed, repeatedly. Union-represented employment is not the answer to the serious problems that plague higher education. The professional service model is, or at least it’s an answer with much higher paper scores than the HEI model. Shed the veil!! How many faculty employees are unionized in the United States right now? How about Canada, or Australia, or China, or Ecuador? They are all unionized in England. Once you've got the Communist China cleaned off you, pop over there and see how things are going, in a version of the HEI model and institutions that are founding fathers! Fundamentally, labor unions represent the interests of their collective (dues paying) members, but this translates into compromise for some of the collective, some of the time…and what else do we have, cries SMUFU? This does not happen in the professions, or rather the limits and solidarity that exists in the professions is prescribed and cultivated by peers, not employers, and so absent employer interests and actions that are hostile, aggressive, dishonest, manipulative,… Well, anyway, you folks are better at slinging mud than me. I bet it’s a department over at the union office.

5) “standing up for” – One-quarter into the 21^st century!? Are you people for real? Let me ask you this: In say the 1980s, if you were building a service model from scratch for the social contract of higher education provision – not the department of mud slinging! – would you include transparency and accountability? But, ya, stand up. Your legs must need medical attention after decades in that position. But, please, stand up, walk away and start a proper academic profession. One more in line with the professional service model used in the provision of something like medicine or law. Academics are the only essential labor in HE. ...Now, play fair, don’t go back to change your answer to the Three of These Things query.

6) “respect for all SMU workers” – From whom and in what way (how)? Answer these questions and you will start to see what PSA is saying to you. What Peter, Robert and Shawn are trying to say to you, if you will only listen.

7) “a dignified workplace” – Describe what that looks like and then ask yourself which model, the HEI or PSA, is more likely to provide it? I was married to an associate at a law firm for a number of years, while I was an adjunct faculty employee. Having intimate access to working conditions in both legal and faculty employment, at the same time that PSA was being developed, I can tell you that generally speaking the legal presented a more professional, more dignified, serious workplace. A friend of my ex’s was an attorney who worked in one of the most dignified of places, from an independent family law practice in the first floor of her home, in a very nice neighborhood. We also had friends with partnered practices in mixed fields… Hello? Is there anybody listening? Do you see the equivalent of a university (not universitas) in the legal or medical social pillars? Answer, "hospital," I dare ya.

8) “our president” – Really? The one who you claim fucked SMU up, got your friends terminated, at whom you shouted “no confidence” as a response, the one from whom unions were formed to protect yourself, whose competency and professionalism you are now bashing in public, the one at the annual faculty dinners, with that nice house on, what was it? Tough sentence to read, and a tougher statement to think, If you’re still too enchanted to understand this criticism of the model and you, then see 1 through 7 above, or, ya know what, just keep reading.

9) “do what you do” – What we do is academic work. The conditions in which we do the work are those of a Starbuck’s employee. So, get your heads out of your collective asses and start doing the work in conditions more like those of state-sanctioned, licensed, professionals in solo or partnered practice. Or let me do it at least! Because right now your institution and your president, and your…are denying me the right to earn a living from my complex investment in career and community, denying countless millions of students access to higher education, to realization of their right to tuition and even expense-free higher education…and finally, none of your shit is necessary for the provision of higher education – return to Sesame Street if you don’t understand. It doesn’t get much more tragic than this story, just ask Dr Battiste at CBU. Step off SMU, so I can do what I do! Put that on one of your next strike placards! No, even better: SMU, FU, so I can do what I do! (Original says: "All wealth is the product of labor [sic]")

10) “who is going to take responsibility?” – You. That’s who. Every single academic who ever walked through those oaken front doors as a faculty employee, that’s who is responsible, and certainly since the early 1990s when PSA was created on the SMU campus. But you are also responsible in the early 20^th century, when the American Association of University Professors missed all the signs of a professional model for higher education (and continue to do so), or when for the first time in its proud history McGill University had a faculty strike, just at the tail end of some TA strike. And you all call this cyclical shit a victory! Anyways, I contacted the Association of McGill Professors of Law, with a professional model, like the one their students work in, like the one many of the professors have worked in. Silence. That is their failure. We did our part and more.

All this effective solidarity from SMUFU, and for only a mandatory 1.18% of your monthly salary. Take the yellow vests off. It is long past time to start acting like professional academics, not faculty employees, some of whom voluntarily pay dues to a labor union, which some of the time acts in accordance to their will as expressed through the democratic process. And it is way past time we took real, effective responsibility for both the service and stewardship of higher education. Not the unions. Not the universities and colleges. Not the governments. And whenever you are not sure that this is true, find your way back to Sesame Street.

~  ~  ~

So there you have it, a PSA snap interpretation of the SMUFU Statement of Solidarity. I know you work hard to save institution X or change its Y and Z, but you and I are in different leagues of change – a horse vs a tractor. But gratefully, I’m in the league with academics like Peter and Robert, or rather they thought I belonged. Thirty years ago, we sat on the fifth floor of MN and offered solution to a problem. As such, we three get a pass on righteous indignation, because we did more than bitch and band-aid. We made a serious model for a serious problem that brings effective, sustainable, individual-oriented, and social-oriented change.

But, ya, you go on and wave around that “no confidence” vote. What did it pass by? That’ll scare the shit out your employer. Just look what it accomplished at the University of West Virginia recently.

Change the model, change everything. As always, let’s collaborate or argue or communicate. You decide, I’ll respond.