BUFA Voice – April 2025

by Liz Clarke, Acting President

While the purview of Senate and BUFA are not always the same, their interests often overlap because the academic mission of the university, and its policies, have a strong correlation with our working conditions. As the Senate election results have been announced, and the BUFA nomination period has closed and the elections underway, member involvement is thriving. Whether you ran for either of these bodies this year, or are considering it in the future, this is an ideal way to play an active role in the future of your institution, particularly at an uncertain time.

We have an active and engaged union and membership. Some of the Executive members also sit on Senate. BUFA members meet prior to Senate to discuss items on Senate agendas prior to the meetings in order to have less formal conversations about items that affect our work and our university before the formalized setting of Senate. It is also the envy of other Faculty Associations that we have union observers on our Senate subcommittees. And we have an actively engaged membership who pay attention to Senate, who remain involved, and who share information with the Association or volunteer on Association committees. This is absolutely necessary moving forward.

As we know, in order to lower the proposed budget deficit, the deans “standardized” pedagogical supports across their faculties, largely without unit input, and without BUFA input. While this standardization could have meant keeping the supports consistent with previous years, in many cases the standardization was, in fact, a cut for many units across a faculty. We know, that to maintain the same level of quality in our courses, our workload will go up if pedagogical supports continue to be the first cuts each year of this ongoing budgetary crisis. We, in the Executive, are working diligently to find solutions that account for the budget but maintain our working conditions. It requires a constant dialogue between members of Senate subcommittees and the BUFA Executive to be aware of and to understand what changes can be challenged by BUFA vs by Senate. Let us remain informed so that we can maintain high quality teaching and research using all the tools and structures at our disposal.

Additional changes that may be coming include revisiting the degree architecture of our programs, possible departmental merges, and a change to the core/context credit system. Again, I urge you to look at the Senate agendas over the last several months to see the “Generative Discussions” that have taken place. What is key for BUFA, for Senators, and for members in academic units and in the library, is to remain aware, to remain actively engaged, to remain united, and to ensure that if change happens, we do it thoughtfully and not simply to contend with a current budgetary crisis. BUFA members together can and must maintain a foundation that will allow a future for our members.

Please also note that a call for volunteers to sit as BUFA Observers on Senate sub-committees or as BUFA Representatives on Jointly Appointed Committees is currently circulating. Please reach out to [email protected] if interested.

by Tim Ribaric, Communications Director

CAUT and Unlock Education
If you haven’t seen it yet, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has kicked off an advocacy campaign for the post-secondary sector. CAUT is an organization that supports faculty associations across Canada with labour issues, collective bargaining, and benefits. The program is called Unlock Education and is meant to align with the upcoming Canadian federal election. The project website has a large collection of information and ideas for mobilization. The mobilization for this campaign is largely meant to occur on social media, as well as including talking points to use with local candidates in the Federal Election.

Social media, maybe not as popular as it was
Perhaps you haven’t seen the Unlock Education campaign yet because your own social media usage has declined. The sale of Twitter/X in 2022 to Elon Musk was a watershed moment. That event

really caused a lot of people to take a look at what they were using the platform for and maybe reconsider those uses. Compound this with the decision from Facebook in 2023 to ban the posting of any news to the Canadian version of the service. On top of all of this, there are many different organizations and groups that are evaluating if they should continue to use social media in the first place. You might of seen news that the Supreme Court of Canada is moving away from Twitter/X and that there was a petition created to prompt this consideration as one recent example of this exodus.

The good news is that BUFA has always relied on email communication to keep members up to date on important issues and that will never change. Social media has always been a secondary venue and much like everyone we will keep a critical eye on how we use it. If it eventually outlives its purpose so be it.