OCADU’s decision to terminate four librarians reflects a troubling trend in the post-secondary sector
Op-ed: Min Sook Lee (OCADU Faculty Association President), Harriet Sonne de Torrens (UTFA Librarians Committee Chair) & Terezia Zorić (UTFA President)
On May 4th, the Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCADU) administration unceremoniously announced its decision to eliminate six library positions (effective June 1st, 2021). As a result, four senior librarians — with a combined seven decades of experience — were given a month’s notice of their job termination.
The librarians found out that their services were no longer required following a virtual meeting where OCADU’s new University Librarian informed staff that the university was planning to re-structure the library.
From time to time, the re-structuring of academic libraries may be necessary to support the evolving pedagogical, curricular, and other needs of students and faculty members. Central to any academic restructuring is a collegial and transparent process where those involved with relevant expertise have a real voice. The principle of collegial governance ensures that members of university communities who contribute to its well-being and accomplishments are part of a shared decision-making process.
OCADU’s administration and Board of Governors disregarded these fundamental principles. Students, staff, faculty, librarians, and the broader community all stated that OCADU’s Administration did not hold substantive and meaningful consultations before issuing layoff notices. Deeply concerning is OCADU’s statement and attempts to justify and conceal a failed restructuring process by utilizing de-colonization as an explanation.
The loss of the expertise and historical knowledge of the four most senior librarians will have a profound impact on the OCADU community that relied on their services.
Academic libraries and the librarians who manage them are at the heart of post-secondary institutions. Academic librarians support students and faculty in research and knowledge translation. Gutting libraries is a bad move for any educational institution.
It should not be lost on anyone that librarian services rely on a mostly feminized workforce. The pandemic has devastated the monumental gains that women have made after years of hard-fought battles for equity in the workplace. Academic librarians have been among the leaders in the fight for equity in the post-secondary sector for decades. It is unsurprising that these more vulnerable members of the academic workforce are some of the first to face the consequences of bad governance decisions.
What is happening to OCADU’s senior librarians reflects a disturbing trend that has emerged with greater force in the university sector during the pandemic. Administrators are operating more like corporate CEOs in the private sector and are making arbitrary decisions without respecting principles of collegial governance. Decisions that jettison the interests of students, faculty, and staff are being made in favour of the bottom line.
This should be familiar to anyone who is following the crisis at Laurentian University. Students, staff, and faculty there are paying the price following years of financial and governance mismanagement by Laurentian’s administration. Then there is also the situation at the University of Alberta, where its administration revealed plans for a massive re-structuring process after experiencing a $120 million shortfall in funding. Students, especially those who are most vulnerable and face the highest equity barriers, are the ones who are suffering the most because of university mismanagement.
The widening collegiality gap is the result, in part, of the ongoing failure of provincial and federal governments to adequately invest in post-secondary education. The starving of higher education has gone hand-in-hand with the increased corporatization of universities and the re-positioning of universities as public burdens rather than public investments. Unstable public funding emboldens university administrations to act with near impunity in the name of ‘tough financial decisions’. Publicly-funded post-secondary institutions must not be managed as corporate businesses but rather governed as irreplaceable social goods.
Recent events demonstrate again how the corporatization of academic institutions suppresses academic freedom, innovation, creativity, and collegial governance. Healthy democracies rely on public sites of knowledge-building that are free from political interference, protect academic freedom within a human rights framework, and are free from corporate profiteering. This requires government commitment to stable and adequate funding of our colleges and universities.
Provincial and federal levels of government need to work together to build a national plan on post-secondary education. Without this, we will see more libraries being defunded in the name of ‘decolonization’.
