The hash-tag #abpse has fallen silent. We no longer have a bow-tied face at which to direct our anger. We no longer have a Twitter fall-guy. I have fallen victim to this plot as well. If there isn’t a politician (allegedly our champion) actively deriding you and your research and your teaching and your 140-character attempts to defend Alberta’s post-secondary education, then we won the fight. Right?
Wrong. Mr. Lukaszuk has also fallen silent on Twitter; I do not see the same vitriol or even the same number of tweets from Mr. Lukaszuk’s account. Mr. Lukaszuk was a decoy.
Replace him with an older minister, one who has held this position before, one who appears not to be as technologically savvy, and those who care about post-secondary education in Alberta will stop fighting. Oddly, this replacement occurs right in the middle of a four-year term for our current majority government.
It is precisely this quiet Redford wanted. We in #abpse may want to demonize our former minister, but we have to realize that the one in control, here, the one who over-sees everything is the silent, travelling, pipe-line-selling Redford herself. We may be happy that we have a Minister who wants to “get out of the way.” Please remember that this is politics: they only want to stay in power.
Alberta’s post-secondary institutions were brutalized in 2013. A chair of a department recently tweeted about the deplorable funding conditions in that department: my department now boasts a total of 8 faculty members and two instructors; when we have funds, we have one sessional (adjunct). To be fair, not all of the job losses were due to the cuts; many of them are a direct result of faculty members taking the “early retirement” package, which opens up more spaces to exploit recent graduates.
I can’t stress this point enough: we are an English department without a Modernist. We have nobody to teach Woolf or Joyce or Hemingway or Pound or Eliot or Fitzgerald or H.D. Sure, we have people who could “cover” those areas, but it is a disservice to the students that we cannot even cover the whole of English Literature.
When I was hired, the 18th century scholar resigned. Until a year ago, we did not have a scholar of 18th century literature.
Don’t get me wrong, my colleagues are excellent; we try to make up for weaknesses; we try to cover as much as we can. Like all departments, we try to cover what we are able to cover when colleagues go on sabbatical.
But students suffer. I can’t tell you the number of times this term I have heard students say that they are happy to be able to get into a third- or fourth- year course in order to complete their degrees. Last term, apparently, there were few offerings at that level.
“Not on the backs of students” was the rallying cry of the cuts to #abpse. “Post-secondary institutions exist for the students,” our government cried, as though the professors somehow disagreed with that statement.
My only point in this entire post: Lukaszuk was a decoy. We are still $97M short, and we have no promise of future funds. We may want to blame the Sith Lord Lukaszuk, but he is just a pawn. We all know that the Emperor beneath the hood is Redford herself.
We need to make the #abpse hashtag active again; it’s illegal for us to strike, after all.
