BU reputation at risk due to ongoing prof strike

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/11/2011 (5422 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Notwithstanding any negative publicity given to BU by Maclean’s and its rating system, BU still represents quality.

Brandon University is considered a good university among employers, it has a good reputation among graduate and professional schools (who accept BU students into their programs), and is generally viewed as a university that produces good students.

This tri-lateral reputation is what the BU uses in marketing to high school graduates and mature students who are considering attending university.

This reputation may be in jeopardy.

What Brandon University and its faculty association have done, essentially, is convince students that not only must they consider what employers think about BU, what graduate and professional schools think about BU, and what the quality of education they’ll receive at BU will be, they must now further enquire about the expected lifespan of any existing faculty’s collective agreement.

If recent history is any indication, BU faculty have either shown that they have a propensity to strike or that the administration has an inclination to lead them to strike.

Regardless, it is the students who suffer.

What I can say with absolute certainty, and this comes from personal experience when I attended BU and an engineer strike was looming in my third year, threatening my final exams, is that students really don’t care about the collective agreement faculty or other employees have with the university.

Students expect to pay their tuition and fees, get their education, graduate, and either find work or move onto another school to further their education.

But since 1999, the provincial NDP introduced some extremely illogical and financially damaging legislation that not only forced BU to lower tuition by 10 per cent, it eliminated most tuition increases for more than half a decade and then subsequently permitted only limited tuition increases.

These legislation pieces drove millions of dollars out of BU coffers which then limited BU’s course offerings, general services and its overall capacity to meet the ever-increasing compensation demands of its teaching staff.

Anybody with Grade 10 math skills knows that if you prevent a school from charging what is needed to offer the courses on a course list, you either have to offer less courses, offer less general services, or pay your staff less (or eliminate future increases until there is cash-flow stability).

Labour Minister Jennifer Howard, doesn’t get this. BU Faculty Association president (and economics professor) Joe Dolecki doesn’t get this. BU president Deborah Poff hasn’t been convincing at selling it.

The end result is that BU severely risks becoming a second-tier school attended only by students who were rejected by other schools, while sought-after students attend other schools with a more stable faculty and provincial legislation permitting quality-based course pricing and a greater likelihood of offering a degree within a limited period of time and a low likelihood of presenting the students with labour unrest.

D’ARCY BARKER

Brandon