When York University’s contract professors voted late Monday to go back to work, there was one clause, one nugget of wording, that helped seal the deal.

York promised to turn 24 of its legion of short-term teachers into permanent full-time profs over the next three years — but their jobs would be purely teaching, not the teaching-research split that has long ruled the ivory tower.

To outsiders, it may not seem like much. But for York’s 1,000 contract professors — short-term hires, often renewed at the last minute, whose ranks have ballooned by more than 135 per cent over 10 years — the provision more than triples their chance at a coveted tenured gig. The old contract guaranteed just seven such “conversions” over three years.

This is a new kind of tenure; one that costs a university less. Stripped of the hefty research component, sabbaticals and blue-chip conferences, it can afford to offer more teachers something rare in today’s precarious post-recession economy; job security.

“This was an extraordinary, once-in-25-years deal to get 24 ‘conversions’ to tenured jobs,” said Faiz Ahmed, chair of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) 3903, which represents York’s contract faculty as well as some 2,700 teaching and graduate assistants, who remain on strike over funding, as are their counterparts at the University of Toronto.

“Teaching-track jobs are part of a broader structural reform of universities,” said Ahmed, noting the 24 new jobs will start at about $80,000, a far cry from the $7,600 per course that contract profs at York earn on a piecework basis.

York began hiring permanent teaching-only profs several years ago, and other Ontario universities also have turned to the new category, including McMaster, Queen's, Waterloo and the University of Toronto, which has several hundred.

But contract professors have become the go-to shortcut for universities and colleges facing an explosion of students unmatched by hikes in funding. In Ontario, the number of full-time university students soared by 52 per cent between 2000 and 2010, while the number of full-time tenured professors grew by just 30 per cent, according to a report by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.

“So there’s a gap there, and the challenge is, how do we address the additional teaching needs?” noted Professor Glen Jones, interim dean of the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and a co-author of the report. “It’s not true that universities no longer hire full-time faculty — it’s just that they’re hiring part-time faculty at a much faster pace. It’s a balancing act that’s shifting.”

And while there’s no evidence contract professors are weaker teachers, “the precarious nature of the position does create problems,” admitted Jones. “Sometimes they’re brought in at the last minute and don’t have access to the library or other university resources . . . and if they’re not on campus very much and can’t run into students in coffee shops and other profs don’t ask about their work, they can feel almost invisible.”

Kole Kilibarda started working as a contract professor 18 months ago as he began to wind up his PhD in political science at York. Last year the 36-year-old new father stitched together a living by teaching an upper-year labour studies course in spring at McMaster for $6,500, taking a summer research job at York for $10,000 and a $5,000 summer research contract for an outside agency and teaching a different labour course at McMaster in the fall for $6,500.

“I was able to string together enough contracts last year to get just above the poverty level, but if you’re trying to write a dissertation — and in my case there was a lot of field work and travel — it can be very intense, and you balance that with other employment to pay the rent.”

Many argue a university teacher is stronger when he or she is doing research at the same time, but that’s not necessarily true, counters Professor Ian Clark of the U of T’s school of public policy.

“Even though it’s a matter of religious faith among faculty associations that being a good researcher is crucial for being a good teacher, that’s wrong at the undergraduate level. There are very good researchers who are good teachers and some who are not and vice versa,” said Clark, who did admit some upper-year students keen on research will benefit from being taught by strong researchers, “and for sure this is true at the graduate level.”

When the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) surveyed students in 2011, most said they would prefer their university to hire six more contract teachers rather than two big-name researchers for the same price — not because research isn’t important, it said in a report to the government, but because students don’t always see the links to research made in class.

Jasmine Irwin, OUSA’s communications director, compared the turnover of sessional staff to “a more conveyor-belt model of undergrad instruction where those kind of Dead Poets Society moments (of student-prof connection) are considered secondary to pumping students in and out.”

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Still, would a shift to more teaching-only professors weaken Canada’s research clout?

Not at all, insisted Clark, because “only a small fraction of the research done at universities is valuable for society and about 20 per cent of faculty produce about 80 per cent of valuable research,” said Clark. Increase the teaching load of the 80 per cent who aren’t the heavy research hitters and you get more teaching bang for the buck.

“But I am concerned about the rise in contract faculty because they don’t have the same relationship with the university. What you want in a university teacher is someone totally committed to the betterment of student learning . . . a professor who is primarily a teaching professional who feels a strong association to the institution,” said Clark.

Shawn Murphy, a fourth-year sociology major at Trent University’s 900-student Oshawa satellite campus, said there are no tenured faculty in the sociology department there; they’re all at the main campus in Peterborough.

“So if I wanted a letter of reference for grad school from a prof in one of my earlier years, they wouldn’t be here any more (because of turnover of contract faculty),” said Murphy, 21. Luckily there are two faculty members hired on three-year contracts and one will be his thesis adviser next year.

“The growth in contract faculty has a really negative impact on students,” said Murphy. “It’s a major issue.”