Welcome Back from YourKFA

Dear KFA Faculty Colleagues,

I hope you all had a restful and fun-filled summer.

Welcome back to a new academic year—complete with a new potential policy on academic title, continuing pressures due to decreased international student enrolment, the Employer’s launch of Simple Syllabus, and significant political upheaval in BC politics!

Academic Title

As many of you will have seen, KPU has launched what they are referring to as a “policy initiative at KPU” which is titled AC16 Academic Title Awards. The introductory message from Associate Vice President Academic, Dr. David Burns, seems to be an initial statement geared toward generating discussion and consultation coupled with an announcement of future drop-in sessions with both the AVP and President Alan Davis.

It is early days yet in the consultation process, and the KFA is in the midst of formulating a perspective on the matter as KFA Executive Committee members return from vacation. At this point, we are able to say that on the basis of language in Article 1.03 of the KFA-KFA Collective Agreement: Conflict with Policies, “[I]n the event of a conflict between the content of [the Collective Agreement] and any policies made by the Employer, the terms of this agreement will prevail.”

It has also been brought to our attention that faculty may be hesitant in expressing their perspectives in a public manner on the policy blog. If this is the case, please send you opinion or perspective to mark.diotte@kpu.ca. Once we gather these perspectives over the coming days, we will communicate them anonymously to the Employer.

Student Enrolment

The KFA is aware of faculty concerns around international student enrolment pressures. We are meeting with President Alan Davis and other senior KPU administrators on a regular basis to keep informed of the situation and reach agreements to mitigate enrolment pressures where possible. As you may recall, the KFA and the Employer reached an agreement in June to prevent the issuing of layoff notices for regular faculty members by providing time release opportunities to those areas experiencing low international student enrolment and a reduction in course sections.

In my meeting with President Alan Davis on August 21st, he committed to providing the KFA with a full-picture update on the situation once we have enrolment data as of the Fall stable enrolment date. It is my hope that we can move beyond data concerning whether or not enrolment is down year-over-year to a data set that presents a complete understanding of enrolment sustainability related to the current faculty numbers and current course offerings at KPU. We are also hopeful that the Employer might proceed with offering other mitigation strategies such as retirement incentives over the coming months.

Simple Syllabus

Many faculty will have seen an announcement from their Dean’s Office or from Teaching & Learning about the launch of Phase 1 of Simple Syllabus. According to the announcement, the program “has been purchased at KPU to support the creation, dissemination, and archiving of the consistent, accurate and accessible course syllabi across the institution.”

So far, the KFA has been approached by faculty with queries about academic freedom rights in the conduct of their teaching, the difficulty and constraints of the program, issues around faculty intellectual property rights, and whether the use of the program is a directive of the Employer or a suggestion.

While our engagement with the Employer on this topic continues, our initial understanding at this point is that Simple Syllabus is a choice for faculty and that faculty remain able to use their own course syllabi as they have done in the past. The KFA is continuing to investigate academic freedom and intellectual property concerns with the support of our Federation of Post-Secondary Educators.

BC Politics

On the matter of the ever-extraordinary BC political front where the BC Liberal/United party seems to have collapsed, both the KFA and our Federation of Post-Secondary Educators (FPSE) are closely monitoring the situation and through FPSE are liaising with our public-sector partners and the BC Federation of Labour to stay apprised of emerging events.

In solidarity,

Mark Diotte

On behalf of your KFA Table Officers