Open Letter to Acadia University Community

August 1, 2017
On Tuesday, July 25, the Acadia University Faculty Association (AUFA) Executive and
Negotiating Team held a meeting to update the membership on the status of contract negotiations
between AUFA and the Board (short for Board of Governors). As well, the membership was
informed that AUFA’s tentative plan is to hold a strike vote so that the negotiating team would
be in a stronger position when it returns to the bargaining table. During that meeting, I stated as
explicitly and emphatically as possible that I do not support either the AUFA negotiating team or
the AUFA executive. For many at this institution, this might come as a surprise given that I have
been a strong supporter of unions in the past, e.g., I was a picket captain during the two faculty
strikes that took place during President Dinter-Gottlieb’s tenure. In this letter, I will explain that I
can no longer support this union because I believe that it is bargaining in bad faith and why I
believe it is imperative that others speak out.
This message will be lengthy (six pages) because I am giving background information to explain
my positions and their underlying logic. To facilitate this process and to make the content less
daunting, I am breaking this letter down into five sections (section 1 below is the one that is most
relevant to all employees). I hope that it will be clear when I am presenting facts and when I am
presenting my interpretation of those facts; please feel free to contact me if there are any places
in this message where the point that I am trying to make is unclear so that I can provide
clarification. I will also gladly retract and apologize for any factual errors that are in this email
message. As I tell the students in my courses, people are entitled to their own opinions; however,
they are not entitled to their own facts and I am holding myself to this standard.
Before I start, I will first address the role of the members who attended the various AUFA
meetings but stayed silent. The silence could have arisen because people agreed with the union’s
position or it could have arisen because people were unwilling to speak up at the meetings even
when they agreed with me. Speaking only for myself, I know that I still get nervous and feel
mildly anxious any time I have to speak at a meeting – and this is happening even though I have
been at Acadia for 14 years. Because it is impossible for me to discriminate these two groups of
people, I will be restricting my comments to what people have said and will not be extrapolating
any meaning from people have not said.
The other issue that I will address is that my criticisms of AUFA should not be read as
endorsements of the Board (administration). It is possible to see strengths and weaknesses in the
positions held by both sides at the same time. The analogy that I will use is that it is possible to
oppose police brutality while at the same time feel sad for police officers who get killed while on
the job (e.g., an officer who gets killed while dealing with what at first appeared to be a routine
traffic violation); these are not dichotomous positions.
1) Problems with AUFA’s Financial Position
The first reason why I am not supporting AUFA has to do with the fact that I cannot support
many of their positions. Rather than go through all of their positions, I will focus on the one that
I find most troubling, which has to do with AUFA’s financial demands from the Board. At one
of the three AUFA meetings to discuss the proposals (which I believe were held in early to mid
March) and at the meeting held on July 25, I stated that AUFA is not the only employee group
that is overworked and under-resourced. I cannot remember if I made the following point as
explicitly as I would have liked at those meetings, but the underlying assumption behind this
statement was that I think it is important for our union – which has the most power out of all of
the employee groups on campus – to consider the hardships that other employees are
experiencing when coming up with our financial proposals. If there was something wrong or
outrageous with my position, I would have gladly taken it back if anyone had pointed out that I
had made a statement that was false or illogical. One strong argument that would have convinced
me would have been evidence that the other employee groups are not experiencing hardships;
another strong argument would have been evidence that the university is actually in a financial
position to meet the needs of all the employee groups on campus. However, and this is a point
that must be emphasized, no one refuted my statement.
Instead, what I said was dismissed at both occasions. Specifically, at the meeting in March, the
only response that came from the floor was that it was the union’s job to tell the administration
what the union needed and that it was the administration’s job to give the union what it needed.
At the meeting held on July 25, the gist of the comments that came from the floor was that the
financial needs of the other employee groups was not AUFA’s problem (there certainly were no
comments from the floor that were sympathetic to my position).
At the meetings held in March and July 2017, one point that I forgot to make was that employee
groups such as SEIU (Service Employees International Union) and AUPAT (Acadia University
Professional, Administrative & Technical Employees) had agreed to pay cuts when President
Ivany began his tenure at Acadia University, whereas AUFA did not. At that time, AUFA’s
membership was divided as to whether members should or should not comply with President
Ivany’s request; the split was pretty much 50% for and 50% against. To break this impasse, I
made a motion stating that AUFA members who wanted to comply with President Ivany’s
request could make voluntary donations to the university and would receive income tax receipts
in return. That motion passed and the administration at the time was notified. After all of the
employee groups had made and communicated their decision, the administration then sent an
email message to all employees that summarized how the various groups responded to President
Ivany’s request.
If AUFA’s financial demands are to be one basis for a potential strike vote, then I believe that
AUFA’s executive and negotiating team should consider not only the financial needs of the
various groups within AUFA to ensure that they are not falling behind financially (e.g., below
the rate of inflation), but to also consider the needs of the other employee groups (e.g., SEIU,
AUPAT) so that they too have an opportunity to build their complement and see their salaries
catch up to 2017 levels. For me, this is an important equity issue because those employee groups
experienced pay cuts and hardships that our group did not have to endure.
Given that the university’s budget is fixed and that AUFA is the most powerful of the employee
groups on campus, I would argue that AUFA has a moral and ethical obligation to look out for
the other groups that do not have the same power or access to resources (e.g., strike funds from
CAUT) to ensure that there is equity on campus. I am appalled and disgusted by the fact that
people at the AUFA meetings were unwilling to discuss my concern or to even acknowledge the
dignity and humanity of the other employee groups at this campus. Finally, I think it would be
hypocritical of me to lament about the effects of inequality (i.e., the growing gap between the
richest and poorest people in society) when I am teaching my courses, while at the same time
demand that the university give me pay raises at the expense of some of the most vulnerable
employees who do not have a strong union to back them up.
2) Process: Overview and Use of a Biased Survey
The second concern that I have has to do with the pre-negotiation process that was used which
led to the proposals that are now being defended. My position is that the process has been flawed
right from the start and that any reasonable person would conclude that the union is bargaining in
bad faith. Instead of going through the entire process, I’ll use this section and the next one to
focus on the use of a biased survey to obtain the views of the membership (for the quantitative
data) and a biased method that was used to interpret the results from the qualitative data of that
survey. In this section and the next one, I am referring to the survey that was administered last
summer (August 2016; the completion date was in September 2016).
Before discussing the surveys that were used to poll the membership’s views, I will first describe
a tactic that was used by the Canadian government in the past; this will provide an analogous
context in which to understand the problems with the surveys that the AUFA leadership
administered to its members.
For those who remember when Stephen Harper was Prime Minister of Canada, Canadians would
sometimes receive pamphlets in the mail that asked them for their views on various issues. The
Harper administration would sometimes use the data from these pamphlets as evidence that
Canadians supported the Conservative Party of Canada’s positions. However, even a cursory
examination of the pamphlets would reveal that they were severely flawed. As an example,
Canadians could receive a pamphlet that asked about their views about Canadian gun laws; in
that pamphlet, the options that would typically be available were that Canadians thought that the
laws were fine as they were or that that the laws were too restrictive. I hope it is apparent that the
pamphlet was a flawed instrument given that Canadians who were in favour of gun control
would not be able to communicate their view given that they were not provided with the option
of stating that the laws were too loose or that they needed to be tightened. With an instrument
that is this flawed, I hope it is obvious that any data derived from the use of it would be dubious
at best.
Turning to the surveys that were administered to the AUFA membership, a sizable number of
questions offered only the following options: no answer, leaving the article from the collective
agreement unchanged, or strengthening the article in AUFA’s favour. In other words, options
such as a weakening of an article or removal of an entire article, positions that would be in the
Board’s favour, were not available. My argument is that if the tools used by the Conservative
Party of Canada and by AUFA to solicit opinions have similar structures, it is only logical that
they will also produce data that are of similar quality, namely, data that are dubious at best.
I had raised the issue of bias when I filled out the survey. I also know of other members who had
raised this concern either in their survey or by talking to members of the Survey Committee. Had
the leadership done anything to acknowledge and address this problem, I would not be raising it
in a public forum today.
3) Process: Interpretation of Qualitative Data
Before discussing the problems with the qualitative data from this survey, I will highlight that
instructors and professors submit either all or none of the comments that they receive from their
course evaluations when they submit their applications for renewal, tenure, and promotion. The
reason for doing so is that this procedure allows the departmental and university review
committees to exercise due diligence by being able to examine the entire set of comments (both
positive and negative), and therefore allows for the review process to be transparent. Otherwise,
it is too easy for candidates to cherry pick the most positive comments, and/or place less
emphasis on the negative comments, in order to make an overly positive impression of their
teaching.
Turning to the qualitative data from the surveys that were administered to the membership,
members were not presented with all of the comments that were provided; instead, they were
presented only with comments that AUFA’s Survey Committee believed to be reflective of the
views of the membership. Given that this approach is subjective and open to a biased
interpretation, I hope it is apparent why I believe that these data should be approached with
skepticism and why I question whether the comments that were reviewed were truly reflective of
the views of the membership. After the argument that I presented in section 1 about the use of a
biased survey, this is my second argument to back up my assertion that the union is bargaining in
bad faith.
Another issue that I will raise has to do with the survey that asked the membership about which
items/principles should be prioritized; at this stage, I am referring to the survey that the
membership filled out most recently (I believe it was in late March or early April). The
membership was asked to complete this survey twice because, after the membership had
completed the survey for the first time, there was a potential concern that arose that individuals
could fill out the survey multiple times. That is why the membership was asked to complete the
same survey again, but this time the survey could be accessed only through their acadiafaculty.ca
account. The question I have is whether this same concern could apply to the first survey that the
membership filled out last summer. If this concern is applicable, then that would be a third piece
of evidence that the union is bargaining in bad faith.
4) Lack of Consideration for Alternative Viewpoints
The last reason why I am not supporting the union has to do with the unwillingness of the pre-
negotiating committees (that played a role in coming up with AUFA’s proposals), and of the
vocal attendees of the AUFA meetings, to even consider alternative points of view. As an
example, at one of the meetings held in March, I suggested that the union consider adopting a
blind review process for the hiring of new faculty members. The idea was that identifying
information would be removed before selection committees would review applications, and that
this would make the hiring procedure more fair by removing the potential for both explicit and
unconscious bias in the hiring procedure. This procedure, in turn, would be helpful because it
would allow for qualified applicants from underrepresented groups to be given the same due
consideration as other qualified applicants.
However, the idea that I raised was never discussed. Instead, the meeting continued as if I had
never spoken. Related to what I had mentioned earlier in this message, I would have been fine
with people refuting this idea if it was flawed; it is the outright dismissal of a different point of
view that has me concerned.
I figure that the idea could not have been all that horrible given that (on April 20, 2017) the
federal government announced to the mainstream media that it is testing a similar type of
procedure. Links “a” and “b” below are examples of coverage from the Toronto Star and CBC,
respectively. Was the idea that I presented perfect? No. As shown in link “c” below, one
researcher has criticized this procedure. But disagreement on what solution is best should be
expected when an institution of higher education is trying to tackle a complex multi-causal
problem. With some discussion, though, it is possible that any concerns about the use of this
procedure could have been addressed and the membership could have made an informed
decision about whether or not to adopt an innovative/novel technique into our hiring procedures.
If this procedure was adopted, it could have distinguished our institution from other universities
and could have had the potential for us to recruit strong candidates, in part because we were
demonstrating our willingness to adopt potentially forward-thinking solutions to complex
problems. Instead, the proposal that was put forward was to simply adapt the procedures already
in place at Queen’s University. In summary, the main issue for me is that situations are arising in
which academics are unwilling to even consider, much less discuss, alternative points of view –
even though this is a major component of critical thinking and being informed citizens.
a) https://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/2017/04/20/ottawa-pilots-name-blind-
recruitment-to-reduce-unconscious-bias-in-hiring.html
b) http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/public-service-blind-recruitment-1.4077456
c) However, see: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/name-blind-hiring-canada-
diversity-1.4082674

5) Closing Comments
Over the past year, I have tried to work within AUFA’s system to help create a collective
agreement that would be more fair for the entire membership. This included filling out the
union’s surveys, having a 90-minute meeting with one of the faculty representatives on the
university’s employment equity committee to discuss some of my ideas (the meeting seemed to
go well, but then there was no follow up), and raising my ideas in a respectful manner at union
meetings. At each stage, my ideas – as well as those of other members – have been ignored. As
any reasonable person can imagine, it is frustrating to be treated with such disrespect, and this
explains why I was so angry and upset when I spoke out at the meeting on July 25, 2017.
While I was away at a teaching of psychology conference in Vancouver, I tried to think if there
was any other way that I could work within this system to have my concerns addressed. After
giving this issue much thought, I concluded that the only option I have is to speak out in places
such as this public forum – even if it means that I’m standing alone in speaking a position that is
highly unpopular. I anticipate that my work life is about to become extremely toxic as a
consequence of sending this message. As well, I am questioning the extent to which academic
freedom and tenure will protect me given that I am speaking out against my colleagues instead of
the administration. Based on what I have read about what is happening on some of the
universities in North America, my gut instinct tells me that that it is likely that some of my
colleagues on this campus may be calling for the termination of my employment. I also would
not be the least bit surprised if I will start to have a record of deficiencies appear in my employee
file even though there has been no cause for concern during my first 14 years at Acadia. I
nevertheless will do what I think is right.
When making any major life decision, I try to rely on evidence and my conscience. The evidence
strongly suggests that there are serious flaws in the way that my union has been and is handling
the current round of contract negotiations. And my conscience tells me that I should no longer
stay silent. In this context, silence is compliance.

Sincerely,

Rick Mehta
Associate Professor
Acadia University
Department of Psychology