Category: Equity

Objection Sustained

There might well be no aspect of collegial governance that matters more to faculty members than our ability to participate as experts in the appointing, reappointing, tenuring, and promoting (henceforth, ARPT processes) of our colleagues.  The Faculty Association has tendered four proposals that are directly concerned with ARPT processes.

Can You Say “Precariat”?

Full-time teaching for Sessional Lecturers in Education at UBC is 15 credits/term (yes, really), and they make less per credit than anyone else at UBC. If they teach fewer than 7.5 credits in a term, they are still considered less than half-time and do not qualify for most UBC benefits. We need to fix these inequities for our Sessional Lecturer colleagues at UBC, and not just in Education. Most Sessional Lecturers hold PhDs or other terminal degrees and teach a significant number of UBC’s courses; many Sessional Lecturers also do curricular work, service, and research in their disciplines on their own time, unpaid. All Sessional Lecturers deserve to be treated fairly and paid as the highly-qualified professionals they are.

Breaking Bad Habits

They are clearly biased against racialized and other historically marginalized groups; they are statistically unreliable; and they do not and cannot answer their intended purpose. Yes, we are talking (again) about student surveys, the cheap candy of teaching metrics.
As we said in 2019, it is hard to imagine an instrument more ill-suited to its supposed value than student opinion surveys. Leaving aside the statistical limitations involved in what are often small non-randomized samples, these surveys cannot provide accurate information about the skill of the instructor or the effectiveness of their teaching. They tell us instead, as one would normally expect from a survey, about the students themselves.

Equity and the Evaluation of Scholarship

In 2012, the Bargaining Committee asked the UBCFA Status of Women’s Committee for recommendations on ways the Collective Agreement could improve the University’s treatment of members of “designated groups” (i.e. groups with personal attributes that the law generally forbids as grounds for discrimination.) They made recommendations in two areas. 

Guest Blog: Equity for All

The University of British Columbia Faculty Association, echoing the Canadian Association of University Teachers, recognizes the importance of securing equity for all members of our bargaining group. The Faculty Association aspires to take a leadership role in realizing equity by negotiating a full equity provision in the Collective Agreement.