Category: USFA e-Letter

With pleasure, we announce the 2017 recipients of the Peter T. Millard Award and the Peter C. Dooley Legacy Award.

The 2017 Peter Millard Award goes to Dr. Lee Murray from the College of Nursing.

Through her involvement as the Faculty Association Representative (FAR) in the College of Nursing, Lee Murray has assisted and supported USFA members in her college. She regularly responds to requests from her colleagues for assistance and guidance with matters related to and ranging beyond the Collective Agreement. Lee is a well-known and widely respected mentor in her College who makes use of USFA resources and personnel to ensure her advice to colleagues is as current and cogent as possible. It is in her capacity as FAR that Lee took up the challenge of informing, encouraging and mobilizing her colleagues to push back against the inclusion of prescriptions and “scenarios” for research performance and an apparent undervaluing of clinical practice in her College’s Guidelines for the Assignment of Duties. Lee led a notable effort in her college to bring home the message that the USFA is vigilant and willing to assist its members whenever collegial procedures are threatened or violated.

The 2017 Peter C. Dooley Legacy Award goes to the University of Manitoba Faculty Association.

Through both its cumulative contribution to the promotion of collegial governance and its recent actions to fight back against university administration’s attempts to redefine or subvert collegial governance and the quality of decision-making that form of governance alone enables, the University of Manitoba Faculty Association has been a champion of collegial governance in Canada.

Since its establishment in 1975, UMFA has exercised responsible stewardship of academic values and the public interest. It has maintained a long and distinguished tradition of defending collegial processes and values. Three times UMFA members have taken job action, most recently last fall in response to an intransigent, authoritarian administration and unsympathetic provincial government. When the Pallister government interfered in collective bargaining, UMFA’s portion of a joint response with U of M administration illustrated once again that UMFA is both an expert and articulate defender of collective bargaining and also an able and tenacious advocate for collegial governance, and the academic mission and integrity of their institution. Staying true to its slogan “Our working conditions are your learning conditions,” UMFA built connections from negotiations through teaching and research to collegial governance, and documented the ways in which unilateral actions by administration imperiled both the quality of education and research at the university, and the U of M’s commitment to academic integrity and “excellence” in all its activities. UMFA exposed damage done, and threatened, as a result of arbitrary and substantial workload increases, and the imposition of rigid performance metrics ill-suited to many of the core disciplines and activities on which the academic reputation of U of M continues to rest.

The awards will be presented at a celebration dinner on Wednesday, April 26 at the University Club. Please join us in honoring this year’s recipients. Cocktails will be at 6:00 p.m. with dinner at 7:00 p.m.

As there is limited seating for the dinner, to accommodate all those interested in attending, we would appreciate it if you would RSVP, including whether or not you will be bringing a guest, by replying to Tammy Stieb at tammy.stieb@usask.ca on or before April 20, 2017.

Representatives of the Saskatchewan Association of University Teachers will be in attendance at the Legislature today to hear firsthand how much financial support from the Provincial Government will be provided to Saskatchewan Universities for 2017-18.

Saskatchewan is home to world renowned scholars and high quality degree programs because our universities are more than simply institutions of higher learning. They serve the public good, add to the economy and are cherished by the people of the province. Our Universities must be appropriately funded to maintain and grow what we have.

Public post-secondary institutions thrive only as a result of stable, adequate public funding. Any departure from this model harms the universities and harms us all. “We have now had multiple years of the provincial government cutting back and clawing back the operating funds of Saskatchewan’s universities and post-secondary institutions,” says Dennis Fitzpatrick, President of SAUT. “Ongoing underfunding is jeopardizing the quality, affordability and accessibility of advanced education in Saskatchewan. What our institutions look like in the future depends on base operating funds from the provincial government.”

From the beginning, the people of Saskatchewan recognized the value of education and the return that is realized on investment in autonomous institutions of post-secondary education. “The Saskatchewan Government should be increasing base operating funds to our universities and to post-secondary institutions in our province not just maintaining it and certainly not cutting it,” says Fitzpatrick.

SAUT is the voice for more than 2,500 academic and general staff at Saskatchewan Universities.

The USFA Scholarship Program is open to students who are immediate family members of USFA members. Immediate family includes spouse/partner, sons, daughters or children whom USFA members have served as legal guardians.

The application form for the 2016-2017 USFA Scholarship Fund Program is now available exclusively online at: paws.usask.ca/go/awards. Students can apply online through their PAWS account as follows:

1) Log into the Scholarships and Bursaries channel in PAWS (paws.usask.ca/go/awards)

2) Click on the green “Apply for awards” button

3) Click on the “Select Application Form” scroll-down menu

4) Select the “2016-2017 USFA Tuition Scholarship Fund Application”; click “Apply”

Once the student has completed the application, an automated email will be sent to the Faculty member’s University of Saskatchewan email address. On receipt of that email, the Faculty member will need to log into PAWS as instructed by the email to confirm the Faculty member/ student relationship. Both the student and the faculty member will get a confirmation email that the application has been made. If you do not get the confirmation email please contact student awards immediately.

Each year $250,000 is contributed to the USFA Scholarship Fund. The $250,000 is divided by the number of credit units eligible applicants have successfully completed for credit courses taken in the 2016-2017 academic year (May 1, 2016-April 30, 2017). Recipients will be emailed in late July 2017 with the results of their application.

Scholarship money will be applied directly to the recipient’s student account. Any balance of account, after outstanding tuition and fees are paid, will be refunded by cheque and will be mailed to the student’s address listed on PAWS.

For further information contact Awards and Financial Aid at awards@usask.ca or the Faculty Association Office at usfa@usaskfaculty.ca or 966-5611.

Like all publicly funded institutions in this province, our university faces a directive from the Government of Saskatchewan to constrain the total cost of employee compensation so that it is no greater than what it was in 2016–17. The government suggests that the Board of Governors achieve this goal by entering into negotiations immediately and considering such measures as freezing in-range increments, general wage increases, and performance/bonus pay for U of S employees.

This overreach is unwarranted and virtually unprecedented at our university. The USFA’s position—in no uncertain terms—is that the U of S is an autonomous institution. The Government of Saskatchewan is not a party to our Collective Agreement, and should not be interfering with the right of the university as an independent employer to set its own negotiations mandate. We oppose the imposition of any terms and conditions that detract from our current Collective Agreement.

The government also indicates that progress towards achieving the directive will be monitored. However, employers have legal obligations under collective agreements to their employees. Any attempt rescind or unilaterally change legally negotiated contracts would be unlawful.

We should not be paying for the government’s poor choices on the way to ringing up its $1.2B debt.

Faculty members getting ready for tenure and promotion are under pressure to publish their research and scholarly work. According to the University Standards, candidates for tenure and promotion are required to demonstrate, through publications in reputable, peer reviewed outlets that the results of their research have made a contribution to the field of specialization, sufficient for this contribution to be recognized as substantial by authorities in the field.

With the recent proliferation of on-line journals, determining what is a reputable publishing venue can be difficult. Avoiding predatory publishers in the search for quality publication venues is critical to the success of faculty members.

Fortunately, two of our faculty members in the University Library, Maha Kumaran, Health Sciences Librarian and DeDe Dawson, Science Liaison Librarian, have created a guide to assist faculty and researchers in avoiding predatory publishers.

The Predatory Publishers guide can be found at: http://libguides.usask.ca/predatorypublishers

On March 8 at noon there will be a rally at the Provincial Legislature. We need you to attend. The USFA is willing to help transport members and members of our university community to Regina for the rally.

This rally is an opportunity for people from across the province to come together before the budget is delivered to let our government know that maintaining investment in health, education and social services is necessary and important to our students, to us, to our communities and to our future.

Funding cuts will hurt anyone relying on provincial funding to deliver services – municipalities, school boards, health care and universities, and anyone receiving these services. What will front line health care be like with 4,900 fewer workers? What will our province be like with layoffs in education and reduced services to vulnerable people? What will our universities be like with continued underfunding?

There is an expectation that public sector workers, which includes us, should sacrifice to balance the budget even though public employees have not been a major contributor to rising government expenditures. (Government to blame for the deficit crisis, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Feb. 13, 2017)

We need you to attend the rally, we need you to bring your family and friends, and we need you to encourage your colleagues and your students to attend. Our government needs to see the people who will be impacted by the way it is choosing to cut, and that includes those of us in the U of S community.

To help us with transportation plans, please let us know before Friday (Feb 17) how many seats you will need.