Dear colleagues,
I am writing in my capacity as President of the Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers (ANSUT) to offer my support as you are faced with difficult negotiations and the possibility of job action in the near future. Please know that our support is based on the fact that you are fighting for exactly what we have fought for and continue to fight for against our increasingly corporatized universities and colleges. Namely, the right to collegial governance; the need and absolute centrality of academic freedom in our jobs as teachers, researchers, and defenders of our institutions against poor managerial decisions; the need to speak forcefully in support of our students as their tuition is being directed away from teaching to administrative salaries and unnecessary infrastructure; and, finally, the need to provide some job security and a living wage to academic staff who do have permanent jobs. The plight of these ‘precarious’ workers and the surprising increase in their numbers was, in fact, the focus of a recent ANSUT funded report by Dr. Karen Foster at Dalhousie University, Precarious U: Contract Faculty at Nova Scotia Universities, which is available at http://ansut.caut.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/ANSUT-Precarious-U-Final-Report.pdf.