Teaching assistants and contract professors at the University of Toronto are poised to strike Feb. 27, which would affect two-thirds of all face-to-face teaching at Canada’s largest university.

The 7,000 teaching assistants, sessional instructors, lab technicians, writing coaches and others in the Canadian Union of Public Employees 3902 are seeking a raise, but say the university has refused any increase, citing the province’s wage freeze for public sector workers.

“Our teaching assistants have been making $15,000 a year since 2008 without an increase, and we think they should be moving towards $23,000, which is the low-income cutoff in Toronto,” said Ryan Culpepper, a PhD student, teaching assistant and chief union negotiator.

“I’m concerned the parties are still too far apart and there aren’t enough meetings (with the U of T) scheduled to be hopeful of reaching a settlement,” Culpepper said Wednesday night.

The U of T is “actively involved in negotiations and is committed to reaching agreements . . . that are responsive to the issues CUPE has raised and responsible in light of the university’s challenging fiscal realities,” said spokesperson Althea Blackburn-Evans Wednesday night.

If there is a strike, professors outside the union warn that a new U of T policy giving administrators control over how they tweak their courses to keep classes running — from marking to course load — would violate their academic freedom.

“It’s like an Emergency Measures Act that applies in the event of a pandemic, natural disaster or labour disruption, that would allow the provost to make fundamental changes to our courses just to make sure the trains run on time,” said geography professor Scott Prudham, president of the University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA), which represents full-time and tenured professors, who don’t have the right to strike.

Prudham said he will meet Thursday with university officials to discuss professors’ concerns about the Policy on Academic Continuity, which some believe U of T launched to prevent the kind of campus shutdown that happened at York University in 2009, when a three-month walkout by teaching assistants and contract staff halted classes for 45,000 students.

“I hope there’s not a strike at U of T, but if there is, you can’t have the provost telling you what you can and cannot teach, and how to mark, and whether to replace a final essay (which could require teaching assistants to mark) with a multiple-choice evaluation (marked by a computer),” said Prudham.

Fourth-year biology student Abdullah Shihipar, president of the Arts and Science Students’ Union, which represents 23,000 students, said “students don’t want a strike at all — the whole nightmare of York comes to mind.

“But we can see the working conditions of our TAs are bad, and when we’re paying $7,000 a year in tuition, you expect some of it to go to the people who teach you.”