by Michelle Webber

We are well into the second year of our Collective Agreement and that means we already need to turn our minds to our next round of negotiations. Our strength at the bargaining table comes from an engaged and active membership. There are many ways for members to get involved in the bargaining process: be a member of the Negotiating Team, be a member of the Contract Action Team, complete the bargaining survey, attend a thematic focus group, attend BUFA meetings, speak with your colleagues about bargaining priorities, support your Negotiating Team, etc.

One of the first elements of preparing for the upcoming round will be to strike our Negotiating Team. We will soon be sending out a call for members interested in serving on the Team. Being a member of the Team requires a considerable investment of time over the 2025/2026 academic year. That said, being a member of the Team is a unique opportunity to become immersed in important issues facing faculty and professional librarians, to engage in complex and collaborative problem solving, and make a significant contribution to our members and the wider University community. Team members will be provided training and will have access to excellent supports from CAUT, OCUFA, the Executive, as well as our benefits and legal consultants.

As members are aware, subsequent to the ratification of our last Agreement, Bill 124 was repealed. The next round of bargaining will be a critical one for us to seek a remedy or catch-up as a result of the provincial government’s unconstitutional wage restraint legislation.

The Executive will aim to bring a recommended Negotiating Team for membership approval to the February 24^th, 2025 General Membership Meeting. Please consider getting involved! Feel free to reach out to me with any questions if you are interested (or may be interested) in serving on the Negotiating Team.

Each year, BUFA awards $1,000 scholarships to five undergraduate and two graduate students. These BUFA awards recognize excellence in academic achievements, as well as significant and on-going dedication tocommunity service.

Congratulations to this year’s Undergraduate Award recipients:

Josiah Devries, Physical Education

Lauren Gallant, English

Valentina Guerra Pinilla, Political Science

Naomi Lawrence, Business

Tia Pucci, Health Sciences

We wish all applicants the best for their future endeavours!

by Liz Clarke

There has been lots of talk about pedagogical supports as of late. Since the last round of bargaining, there was a jointly-appointed ad-hoc Pedagogical Supports Committee whose members were tasked with examining supports across the University and making recommendations to the Parties about any improvements needed. There were several issues BUFA was trying to address in agreeing to strike this Committee, none of which will have clear-cut solutions. As per the Collective Agreement, members are entitled to equitable workloads.

There are different solutions to variable workloads across our classes. And, these solutions are tied to disciplinary standards and also to decanal decisions and unit norms. The existing Normal Workload Standards (NWS) process allows units to designate the “value” of one course versus another given the workload associated with each. For example, teaching a large course (eg., 500+ students) may need more teaching credit than a course with 40 or 100 students. Using the NWS to adjust teaching values can get at the additional emails, meetings, extension requests, doctor’s notes, etc. associated with large classes. Increasing supports, such as teaching assistants hours, marker-grader hours, lab demonstrator hours, and/or allocating course coordinators might also work to achieve a greater degree of equitable workload distribution among members. Department committees or Chairs/Directors tasked with teaching allocations should also be mindful of distributing large and small courses equally between department members.

Because the NWS must be approved by the Dean, it is not a given that you can write supports into these documents and immediately assume that they will be approved. Chairs/Directors should expect to have to advocate for the needs of their units while making a case for the need to recognize the ever-increasing workloads that we are facing. The benefit of embedding supports into the NWS document is it forces Deans then to follow the process articulated in the Collective Agreement for approving or not.

These pedagogical supports are especially relevant as the Administration is gathering feedback on the possibility of expanding the number of times that a student can use the medical self-declaration form during a semester. We expect them to bring a formal proposal on this to Senate shortly. While the expanded use may arguably be beneficial for student wellness, and also something that will decrease the burden on health services, we should be alert to what this might mean for the administrative workload of high-enrolled courses in multiple disciplines across the University. If the expanded use is approved by Senate, consider discussing your NWS document as a unit and negotiating with your Deans for increased pedagogical supports where appropriate.

by Tim Ribaric

OCUFA has been busy working to advocate for and advance the priorities of its member faculty associations across the province. In the last issue of Voice I wrote about OCUFA’s work responding to the provincial Blue-Ribbon Panel on post-secondary education. Since that time OCUFA has spent considerable effort mounting a response to the passing of provincial Bill 166. This Bill creates a slew of obligations that post-secondary institutions need to adhere to and some provisions of the Bill allow for governmental interference that could bypass established collegial governance mechanisms. OCUFA’s statement on the Bill provides a useful summary of what is at stake. For example, in OCUFA’s view, members’ academic freedom rights may be infringed despite the stated goal of the Bill being one that is “supporting student services”. The preamble of the Bill states: “Postsecondary institutions should be an inclusive place for all”. Such a statement could easily be used to justify administrative interference in the conduct of class activities against a professor’s wishes under the guise of making the classroom more inclusive. What further compounds this possibility is that the Bill only vaguely articulates how universities can go about aligning services to satisfy the Bill’s requirements. In short, the Bill could allow for the bypass of the established norms of autonomy and self-governance.

In June of this year a special meeting of the OCUFA Board was called to consider a motion specific to Bill 166. The approved motion captured a few different components: resisting Ministerial directives that circumvent collegial governance, actively encouraging member associations to also oppose Ministerial directives, seek out a legal opinion on the impact of resisting these directives, and finally mobilizing a strategy to defend academic freedom.

At the most recent OCUFA Board Meeting held in Toronto on October 26 & 27, a motion was passed to create a committee to investigate academic freedom in Ontario universities in light of Bill 166 as directed by the June motion. In other words, the Committee is tasked with investigating whether the concerns outlined in the summary document are actually happening.

Bill 166 received royal assent in May of this year and it continues to be a primary focus of OCUFA’s advocacy efforts.

by Tim Ribaric

It is probably an inevitability that AI will seep into the operations of universities. The tentative plan of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) to build an AI chatbot built on librarian labour is certainly an example of this. In May 2024, OCUL’s special Task Force on Machine Learning / AI released a final report that included many recommendations but, most importantly, it outlined plans to create an AI-powered chatbot trained on the transcripts of a provincial chat reference platform. This chat reference project is a collaborative effort staffed in part by Professional Librarians across the province, not just by BUFA members. The consequence of this recommendation is that librarians’ intellectual property is being harvested to enrich and create an AI product that will be the property of a for-profit company. A large portion of librarian work is helping people identify what information they need and how to go about finding that information, the output of this process is what forms the transcripts of the chat program that will be used to build the AI bot.

This AI bot represents a startling turn of events and cause for concern. Most collective agreements, including BUFA’s, have good language to protect members’ intellectual property, but reconciling this specific situation with collective agreement language might be tricky. See my co-authored editorial calling attention to this very detail. We argued that faculty associations should negotiate specific protections against AI into their collective agreements, similar to what the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America accomplished.

This AI chatbot project has hit the radar of both CAUT and OCUFA and as such will be watched closely at the provincial and national level. No definitive updates to this project have been shared by OCUL so it is difficult to say exactly what stage it is at in terms of its development. It is safe to say you will hear more about this in the upcoming months as the project proceeds.