Reflecting on what’s at play with the Ontario college faculty strike, as Yogi Berra once noted, it’s “déjà vu all over again.”

I was a college president in 1984 when college faculty voted overwhelmingly for a strike because they felt they were treated as lemmings, victims of top-down management styles that eschewed proper faculty involvement in decision-making, especially when it came to instructional delivery and workloads.

This clearly defined the majority of colleges at the time. Faculty was right to strike. Each strike has an idiosyncratic ethos — core factors that vary from obvious to vague. In 1984, the issues were clear.

In 1987, not so. The faculty hit the bricks with only a 51.25 per cent strike vote. It remains unclear to this day, why the union leaders at the time took their brothers and sisters to the picket line with an unprecedented low strike mandate and no apparent issues at stake. Was it runaway megalomania? Was there an unrelated personal agenda? Who knows? But the result was a disaster for faculty who were led down a prickly garden path and dealt a financial blow by an arbitrator.

Flash forward to today’s strike. This time, the union team received a 68 per cent mandate. In addition to salary demands, the need for a university like senate and equitable benefits for part-timers represented by the union, are on the table. Salary for full-timers should be not an issue, the offer seems fine. The senate idea signals that faculty members do not feel they are properly consulted regarding things that affect their craft. It’s 1984 all over again? This item is off the table.

But how part-timers are used and treated is at the crux of the logjam — the consequence of the gross overuse of part-time employees represented by the union who now outnumber full-timers at most colleges. Am I sympathetic regarding the need to provide equitable support to part-timers who complement what full-timers do? Absolutely. But when an institution relies too heavily on part-timers, the results suffer from inconsistency of support for students and the labour strife we are now witnessing.

While it is always important to bring in colleagues to complement what permanent faculty provide, I can understand the cost-effective argument for a certain percentage of part-time contract support, perhaps 25 per cent to 30 per cent; but not good when the books are balanced on the backs of a high number of these poorly compensated part-timers.

In my view, too many of our post-secondary institutions need a major rebalancing in favour of more permanent full-time faculty who are provided support to stay current and carry a long-term commitment to the health of their institutions.

Of course, the real driver for overuse of part timers is the lack of public funding to support more full-timers, which in turn has led to the inequitable payment to the part-timers. Public funds need to support full time rebalancing but resources are also required to drive innovative ways of providing more cost-effective instructional delivery.

Finally, as noted, the current strike echoes the 1984 refrain that faculty members do not feel they are consulted about key issues affecting their teaching. As was the case then, it is likely there are colleges where the leadership acts in a collaborative fashion, invests in the professional develop of its faculty and staff and whose ratio of full timers and part-timers is in good balance. Unfortunately, there are likely colleges where these things are not happening and, as a result, they wag the entire system at the bargaining table.

I feel now, as I did in 1984, that the solution lies with local bargaining that would provide the kind of accountability that would serve students, faculty and the move to more effective and collaborative college leadership. Pressure would be brought to bear where needed. But the provincial union will resist this and too many college presidents will have no place to hide. But having thousands of students who feel like hostages to a system that is driven by bad practice rather than good, should not be an option.

Charles Pascal is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto and a former deputy minister of Education.