Students and Others Speak Out on NSCAD University Strike

Morgan Melenka, another NSCAD MFA student, agreed. She said MFA students’ attempts to convince the administration of the importance of addressing faculty concerns—concerns Melenka believes are reasonable—have not been responded to adequately.

“The MFAs in particular started a letter-writing campaign in early February to administration, to ask them to avert the strike,” said Melenka. “It doesn’t feel as though we are being listened to in any meaningful way.”

MFA thesis defenses are due to start this week, which raises the stakes for second-year MFA students in particular.

“I’ve been working on these projects for the last year and a half,” says student Katarina Marinic of her MFA exhibition “Composed with Fragments,” which opened Tuesday at NSCAD’s Anna Leonowens Gallery. “Now we are caught in between all of this and it’s putting a really dark cloud over things we should be celebrating.”

The administration has said MFA thesis defenses will be delayed until after the strike has ended. And if related MFA exhibitions have ended in the meantime—each is only a week long—then documentation will be used for the defense, says the administration.

But: “It is extremely difficult for any artist working with any kind of digital media to document their artworks and get the same feeling across through documentation,” says Marinic.

“We are here and we are working really hard and we fully agree with the faculty and we are supporting them,” says Marinic. “We would also just like to feel some respect and support from the administration. Don’t treat us as numbers on a page but as real people spending time and effort in studies.”

What Faculty Reps are Saying

The current strike is reportedly the first at NSCAD since 1986, with key issues for labour being compensation and workload, among other concerns.

Faculty union representatives say that after several years of forgoing adequate wage hikes in order to get NSCAD University in the black, they want to see progress again.

“We think that our proposals are reasonable proposals—we haven’t made them irresponsibly, we have costed everything out as realistically as we can,” said FUNSCAD president Mathew Reichertz on Monday. “There is an unwillingness at the moment for the administration to discuss some of our more substantial proposals—maybe because they have prioritized other things, like fundraising for a new building.”

The union says that it understands the need for physical infrastructure renewal—it just wants human infrastructure to be adequate as well.

“I think it’s understandable that we do need a new building,” says Reichertz, “but we also have to invest in our human infrastructure. We are not in a deficit position. There is money. There is just an unwillingness, it seems, to direct any of it towards us.”

The faculty union’s position has found support at the Canadian Association of University Teachers—a national organization with more than 72,000 members, many of whom are facing issues similar to those at NSCAD.

“Those who teach at NSCAD have the highest workload of any university in Canada,” contended CAUT president David Robinson in Toronto yesterday. Robinson says at most universities in Canada, faculty teach four or five courses over two semesters. But at NSCAD, he says, it’s six.

Robinson also says that he sees the issues NSCAD’s faculty union has raised around the rights of contract instructors being mirrored in other university campuses across the country.

“The issues of casualization and contingent faculty” are at hand, says Robinson. “About a third of the [NSCAD union] membership is precarious labour, and that is something we see across the country as well.” Many of these contract teachers only find out six weeks before a course starts whether they are working or not.

And this has impacts on students at NSCAD and elsewhere.

“When there is constant turnover in instructors, it can be hard for students to get references for employment or graduate studies,” Robinson noted. He says it’s sensible that art universities have the option for artists to teach contracts from time to time, but there’s a problem when the same people are having to be rehired semester after semester after semester.

What Will Come Next?

Despite their differences on terms, both the union and the administration have expressed a common interest in having more dialogue and resolving the strike, which began on March 1, quickly.

“We are hopeful that there’s some movement on their part and that we can reach and agreement as quickly as possible,” said Mathew Reichertz of FUNSCAD. “The faculty don’t want to be out on strike. And the students support us which is fantastic, but we don’t want to put them through a strike either.”

In a Chronicle-Herald article on March 1, the first day of the strike, NSCAD president Dianne Taylor-Gearing also expressed a similar sentiment.

Back at NSCAD, another student, undergraduate Peri McFarlane—also VP Financial of the NSCAD Student Union—says that she will continue joining the faculty picket when possible in hopes the strike comes to an end as soon as possible.

“The sooner the strike ends the better, but until then we are standing in solidarity,” McFarland told Canadian Art on Monday. “We are encouraging students to join the picketing, because the longer the picket line, the shorter the strike.”

MFA student Alex Linfield also continues to support faculty—and understands students may be in their shoes someday, too.

“As MFA students, we came here because there is a focus on pedagogy, which means we are interested in being faculty at other universities someday,” Linfield told Canadian Art on Monday. “We have no interest in bargaining down our future as educators.”