The strike at the University of Toronto is over now that teaching assistants have agreed to binding arbitration, but for students, “it’s bittersweet; we’ve essentially lost a month of term,” said the head of the 20,000-member Arts and Science Students’ Union.

“It’s a messy situation; I hope the TAs get a deal that satisfies their demands, but it’s a tense time now for students who have to try to salvage whatever they can,” said ASSU President Abdullah Shihipar.

With just five days left of class, striking teaching and graduate assistants and course instructors voted to return to work Friday in time for final assignments, classes and exams.

“I’m going to email my students Friday morning and tell them that as many catch-up sessions and review sessions as they need, they can have,” said teaching assistant Craig Smith, spokesperson for the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) 3902, which walked off the job March 2. “The students know we care about them.”

Union members voted Thursday 942 to 318 in favour of binding arbitration.

“Achieving a new agreement through a bargaining process would have been preferable but we are proud of the light the strike has shed on the problems inherent in higher education,” said CUPE 3902 Chair Erin Black.

University President Meric Gertler, who asked the union Wednesday for binding arbitration, thanked students for their patience in enduring “uncertainty and anxiety at a crucial time in the year — especially those in the final year of their programs. We are enormously relieved that the strike is over and share a commitment to resolving all remaining complications caused by the strike as soon as possible.”

The sticking point has been the complex funding package that graduate students receive — a mix of research grants, tuition rebates, scholarships and, for CUPE members, wages for marking papers, doing research, teaching and running tutorials. The U of T’s latest offer would provide money to raise the minimum funding package for members to $17,500 a year from $15,000, where it has been since 2008.

But critics rejected the deal last weekend because it failed to enshrine the minimum funding package in the union contract, rather than have it set by academics as is common at Canadian universities. While universities do negotiate hourly rates of pay for grad students who work for them, not all grad students are in the union, and not all union members are grad students, which is why university officials say the overall funding package doesn’t belong in the collective agreement.

“No matter what the terms agreed upon through binding arbitration, some huge fissures in higher education have been exposed during the strike,” warned Professor Emily Gilbert. “We need to work towards fair and workable solutions that include discussions among graduate students, undergraduate students, faculty and staff to address the structural inequities that exist.”

Meanwhile at York University, bargaining was to resume Friday with the union representing its striking teaching assistants, who walked off the job March 3.

The U of T strike has affected undergraduates in different ways, because while the university chose not to cancel classes taught by non-CUPE members, some 5 to 6 per cent of courses run by CUPE course instructors did stop teaching, leaving hundreds of students with no instructor.

“Most of the language classes like French, German, Spanish aren’t happening because most are taught by course instructors who are CUPE members,” said Sandy Hudson, executive director of the University of Toronto Student Union. “One French major complained at a town hall that their instructor suggested they try to teach themselves by watching YouTube videos online.”

Second-year student Christina Rae Gorman said she hasn’t had an Italian class since the end of February “so we never got to learn the future tense. I want to take Italian next year, but I’ve never learned the future. At the end of the day I’ve missed a whole month of classes that I’ve paid for.”

In her Canada and Globalization class, Professor Emily Gilbert told students that if teaching assistants did not return by the beginning of May when marks are due, she would have given them a pass/fail on one assignment that TAs had not marked, which is worth about 25 per cent of the mark.

“We can’t actually mark work that our TAs would normally mark because that would be taking over work they have a contract to do,” said Gilbert.

Student Sean Stewart said in his German class, “we last met on Feb. 27. This was the last class before our midterm, which obviously hasn't happened. We have missed four weeks of instruction, amounting to about 16 hours as of tomorrow.

“The department has been giving us homework to do out of our textbook, but it's designed for a classroom and not for book learning, so it hasn't been going very well,” said Stewart. “And of course we have no opportunity to practise speaking German.

“The strike has severely affected my mastery of the language, more so because this is a first-year course for absolute beginners. At this stage in language acquisition you really need a teacher.”

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These issues of missed material and tweaked marking schemes “raise issues of academic integrity – like hand-out credits,” noted ASSU President Abdullar Shihipar. While a simple pass/fail mark might seem appealing to students now, it might not carry enough clout to help the student get into grad school in future, for example.

While most tutorials and labs were cancelled, some union members opted to keep teaching, leaving some students with the benefit of their teaching assistants and others without.

Union bargaining committee chair Ryan Culpepper said earlier Thursday a deal hammered out at the bargaining table is “always preferable to one imposed by a third party,” but some union members said they felt there was little to gain on the picket line with students leaving soon for the summer.