TUFA Newsletter
Quick Mentions:
- BlueSky Now Live: TUFA is now posting updates on BlueSky. Follow us: @trentfaculty.bsky.social
- The newsletter will be pausing until bargaining ramps back up in August.
President’s Message
Dear TUFA Members,
Bargaining is officially underway, and you will find details about activities to date in the Bargaining section of the newsletter below. You—the membership—have put together a strong, clear bargaining mandate and the bargaining team has been hard at work. So, let’s keep the pressure on! We are the force for change.
And with change in mind, I have two workload-related notes to share. First, the TUFA executive and the Employer agreed to a working group to address supports for the Centre for Academic Testing and SAS. We want to address general operations for testing arrangements, space issues, and faculty workload issues involving make-up test requests. When faculty have high student numbers and multiple tests per course per term, arranging make-up tests is a colossal exercise. There must be a better way. TUFA’s initiation of the working group also applies additional pressure on the Employer regarding workload.
My second note returns to the issue of corporate consultants at universities. Deloitte—a multinational accounting firm that offers higher education consultancy among a multitude of other professional services—is currently providing its professional services to Trent at an estimated taxpayer cost of 500K through the provincial government’s 15 million dollar “Efficiency and Accountability Fund.” In TUFA’s May newsletter, I highlighted noxious links between faculty workload, educational quality for students, and the Ministry’s “Efficiency and Accountability Fund.”
Consultancy firms like Deloitte typically advise universities to increase class sizes and teaching loads, changes which overtly indicate increased faculty workloads and reduced student engagement. But such firms also recommend changes that increase workload in subtler ways. Moreover, some of these recommendations shift the nature of our work away from research and teaching to “sales” and the pursuit of “consumer satisfaction.”
Consider the following example. Ruffalo Noel Levitz, a higher education consultancy firm, is hosting a conference this month titled “Altering the Landscape.” One of the presentation abstracts, “All-In for Student Success: Implementation, Faculty Engagement, & Impact,” illustrates well a tactic that quietly increases and alters the nature of faculty labour.
In the abstract, the presenters—a provost and a dean—invite attendees to adopt RNL’s College Student Inventory (CSI), a “data-informed” intervention aimed at retention. Their abstract promises to “[d]iscover best practices for faculty engagement, establishing connections to first-year students, and approaches to converting skeptical faculty into CSI thought leaders.”
Data-gathering to improve retention is common in universities, and Trent has tasked non-academic staff in the past with such initiatives. Information about how students are managing with their studies, residence life, off-campus housing, and health services, can help universities provide better support. Supporting students is something we can all get behind, and faculty would be the first to agree.
The idea of “converting skeptical faculty into CSI thought leaders,” however, deserves exploration. Higher education consultants typically advise universities to cut non-academic support staff, increase class size, cancel academic programs, and casualize academic labour, activities which structurally impair faculty and librarians’ ability to engage students and support their success. Activities like “CSI thought leadership” remove us from engaging students within our areas of expertise and push us into some kind of retention “truth-influencing.” In fairness, I work here only from an abstract and experience with retention inventories, initiatives, and higher education consultants. Perhaps “CSI thought leadership” requires an inconsequential time investment or somehow relates to our expertise. But even if so, time spent on “CSI thought leadership” shrinks authentic scholarly connection with students in our areas of expertise.
The loss of authentic scholarly connection with students is what higher education consultancy amounts to in the end. Cautionary tales are many. At the University of Technology Sydney in Australia, KPMG identified “a significant number of courses being offered … that are not earning a surplus for the university.” One UTS academic commented to The Saturday Paper that UTS is “already cheating the students and teaching them as cheaply as possible. ‘Seminars’ have no less than 40 students and we already have far too many online classes … The idea that UTS plans to make teaching even cheaper is absolutely appalling.”
In another article on higher ed consultants in Australia, an ANU academic observes that in running universities as for-profit businesses, “it doesn’t take long before shifting the norms and logics inside these places moves them into a wild world [where] Sydney University made $500 million in profit but ran teaching and research at a loss.” [My emphasis.]
With Deloitte currently on the Trent campus, let’s be alive to the overt and subtle ways that our workload can change. Faculty associations have the most liberty to expose and resist these kinds of initiatives. We need to use it.
In my next message, I will explore another area of consultancy advice: student and faculty service hubs. In the meantime, if you would like some gory details on higher education consultants (including Deloitte), see Deb Verhoeven and Ben Eltham’s (2023) Nousferatu: Are corporate consultants extracting the lifeblood from universities?
Moira
From the Table
As promised by our Chief Negotiator, the Union will be providing periodic updates to the membership as bargaining progresses with the Employer. After receiving its mandate from the membership on May 28th, the Bargaining Team spent several weeks translating the members’ direction into contract language to be presented at the table. Bargaining with the University began on June 24th with the initial exchange of proposals. It is encouraging that some of Trent’s proposals overlapped with our own, suggesting areas of early alignment.
After receiving the Employer’s initial proposals, the Bargaining Team first determined that they proposed no significant changes requiring the Union to seek a “response mandate” from the membership. Their proposals deal almost exclusively with housekeeping and minor operational matters. The one exception relates to the parity formula. As expected, the Employer raised several issues related to the operation of the formula. In particular, they flagged concerns with its unpredictability, its weighting mechanism, and by extension with our comparators. As we have already shared with the membership, these concerns were anticipated and thus were factored into our proposals. TUFA’s opening proposals were much more substantive as we seek ways to address the membership mandate. We expect that the Employer will interpret many of our asks as having monetary dimensions and as such, – we did not expect the employer to respond to these in the first week of bargaining. As such, we do not have a good read yet on the steepness of the hill before us. We can say that the Employer took seriously our framing of concerns around Research issues and we had a productive 2+ hour conversation with their Team and the Provost on the hurdles confronting Trent researchers..
As part of the bargaining process, Trent brought in Tariq Al-idrissi, Vice-President, Finance and Administration; Lawrence Lam, Associate Vice-President, Students; Cheryl Turk, Associate Vice-President, Finance; and Dr. Mark Skinner, Provost & Vice-President, Academic (Interim), to answer questions posed by the bargaining team. These presentations were especially useful in giving us a better sense of the University’s broader plans for the coming years and we will report out additional information gathered in those sessions in subsequent newsletters. For today, we thought the update and overview of the University’s financial operations would be most valuable to relay to the membership (see below).
Bargaining is scheduled to resume the week of August 22nd. You can expect several informational newsletters from before that, but we won’t have anything substantive to relay “From the Table” until then.
Trent Ends Fiscal Year in the Black: What That Means for TUFA
As part of the first week of negotiations, the bargaining teams hosted several senior administrators to receive updates and answer questions. The Associate Vice President of Finance, Cheryl Turk, was one of these and this is what we took away:
Despite a drop in student enrolment, particularly among international and post-graduate certificate students, Trent University is expected to end the 2024–2025 fiscal year with a positive financial position of $2.8 million before year-end university appropriations. While this number may be subject to final year-end adjustments as part of the audit process, the report presented at the June 20 Board of Governors meeting shows the institution in a stronger-than-expected financial position.
The surplus comes despite an estimated $14.7 million shortfall in tuition revenue due largely to enrolment declines. However, Trent’s finances remained buoyant thanks to a combination of having $10 million set aside as a contingency fund in the last budget and several unexpected revenue sources:
- $3.0 million in higher-than-expected interest income from short-term investments,
- $1.5 million in one-time Post-secondary Education Sustainability Funding (PSESF),
- $2.1 million in nursing and other grants,
- Unspent departmental budgets caused by temporary staffing vacancies.
Given that the University cannot rely on such investments next year, Turk, warned that Trent University is navigating a complex and increasingly precarious financial landscape. She predicts a deficit of $1.7M in 2025–26, $12.2M in 2026–27, and $20.2M by 2027–28, assuming no further changes are made. These pressures are the result of declining enrolment, frozen domestic tuition, and new caps on international student recruitment, especially in postgraduate certificate programs, where the hit has been most severe. It is worth contrasting the $1.7M projected deficit for 2025/26 with the University’s projection of a $23.6M deficit for that same period back in August. Also worth noting: the University’s budget exercises always builds in some provisions for salary gains related to collective bargaining
To cushion the short-term blow resulting from the sudden constriction of international enrolment, Trent has built up a contingency fund in excess of $36 million, which would be fully depleted by 2028 absent revenue increases or costs decreases over the next three years. As will be explained in our next newsletter, the University’s sites are clearly set on the former as we roll out new dorms, a new college, new classroom spaces, and increased student service capacity.
Trent
PC: Kodie Trahan-Guay
What Does it Take to Raise a Pride Flag?
by Rachael Nicholls and Karleen Pendleton Jiménez
Try imagining a world worth living in, and then ask yourself if that isn’t worth fighting for. You’ve come too far to give up on hope, Jess. [On joining the union leadership as an organizer] (Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, 2014 [20th anniversary edition], p. 328)
For the first time the Pride flag has been officially raised at Trent University. Since the announcement, some colleagues have admitted that they did not realize it wasn’t already up. Others have asked how we were able to successfully advocate for the change this year. The answer includes a whole community of voices and actions over many years, including the work of TUFA members.
Trent University faculty have a long history of advocacy. In 1977, when a student-led petition and subsequent referendum threatened to restrict the funds of the student-led Trent Homophile Association, over 60 faculty members released a statement published in Arthur Newspaper:
We the undersigned regret the threat to the fellowship of the university community posed by recent efforts to use financial control as a means of censoring organizational life among students, and we hope that this divisive project will be halted by the good sense and kindness of the great majority (Nov, 17, 1977 issue).
Since that time, TUFA, CUPE and OPSEU members have all worked to include gender and sexuality in presentations, publications, events, job postings, HR policies, collective agreements, library collections, transgender funding, financial contributions to LGBTQI2S community causes/projects, and more. TUFA members have organized and facilitated Camp Fyrefly Ontario, “a national leadership retreat for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-identified, two-spirited, intersexed, queer, questioning, and allied youth” on the Trent Campus since 2017. The Department of Gender and Social Justice has offered courses specifically on queer and trans knowledge since 2012. Indeed, TUFA itself was one of the first unions in Canada to negotiate a gender affirmation benefit which began as a $5,000 annual fund and was significantly improved and integrated with our SunLife Benefits plan in a subsequent bargaining round.
In 2018, TUFA members generated a list of the queer scholarship of its members, (Perhaps it’s time we update this list with a call out to faculty and students across the university? Who would like to take on this project?) You might also be interested in joining Trent’s Media Experts on LGBTQI2S issues (there are only four of us listed presently, but we know many more of you are out there).
Over the years, TUFA members along with staff and students have written letters, and asked at Senate and Faculty Board for the Pride flag to be flown at Trent. The response invariably was disappointingly succinct: the University has a long-standing practice of only raising the Canadian flag.
The Pride flag is going up this year because of the efforts of LGBTQI2S (and ally) faculty, staff and students over the last five decades. We can’t actually say exactly what tipped the scale this year.
We know that in March of this year, Trent Alumni hosted a phenomenal evening of Trent LGBTQI2S queer/trans/two-spirit histories of Trent. While the event specifically celebrated Trent alumni, it also filled the Season Spoon with a standing-room only crowd of queer/trans/two-spirit joy.
We know that the School of Education’s Anti-Oppression Committee wrote a letter in May 2025 requesting that the Pride flag be raised.
We know that a community member and the local media asked Trent University why the Pride flag was not raised.
We know that concern over backlash against LGBTQI2S rights across North America has reminded many of us to notice the absence of the flag and ask for it to fly.
Whatever the answer, the Pride flag represents diversity of gender and sexuality, our movements for social justice, our celebrations, our hope. It seems fitting that the Pride flag is raised at Trent this year as a marker of the fact that this is the 50th anniversary of the first openly queer group on campus.
Happy Pride!
Remember When
We might be in the heat of summer but let’s throw back to our Chilly Chilly Social! We’re planning another social for September/October and will be in touch in August with further information.
Member Updates
Share Your News & Events
While not officially endorsed by TUFA, this section is here to help share your events, updates, and initiatives with fellow members. Have something coming up? Hosting a survey? Want to spread the word? Send the details to [email protected] to be included in an upcoming newsletter. Big or small, if it matters to you, it matters to us!