As OCUFA celebrates 60 years of raising key issues affecting faculty, academic librarians, and academic professionals, President Nigmendra Narain explores the state of university funding and the future of public postsecondary education in Ontario.
As OCUFA celebrates 60 years of raising key issues affecting faculty, academic librarians, and academic professionals, our voice and work remain crucial to ensuring the future of world-class public universities dedicated to teaching and research excellence in Ontario. When the organization celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2014, the role of remote or online education was nascent, a global pandemic had not upended our world, financial bankruptcy and institutional absorption for universities were unheard of, and heavy reliance on international student tuition had not impacted the trajectory and paths universities were treading—and the fallouts they are now confronting. Today, OCUFA members are called upon to do so much more with so much less, inside and outside of the classroom. OCUFA, thus, continues to—and must—play a significant role in seeking solutions to universities’ challenges, providing timely and broad province-level analysis, and developing responses to these changes to guide and assist our member organizations as they work to enhance faculty working conditions and student learning conditions across the province.
OCUFA has grown as an organization both in size and scope in the past decade.
Growing OCUFA
OCUFA has grown as an organization both in size and scope in the past decade. When OCUFA celebrated its 50th anniversary, the organization represented 17,000 faculty and academic librarians in 28 member organizations. Now, OCUFA represents 1,000 more people in 30 member organizations. An important space of growth for the organization has been in its expanded capacity to support member organizations through committees. Notably, OCUFA has established a permanent Contract Faculty Committee and Equity and Social Justice Committee to recognize changing employment demographics in our sector and offer more focused training for member organizations to improve faculty complement, ensure job fairness for contract faculty, and push for stronger equity initiatives on campuses. These issues have been at the forefront of much of OCUFA’s advocacy work on campuses and at the provincial level over the past ten years, and while we have succeeded in bringing issues of precarity and inequity in higher education to a larger stage, much work remains to ensure an equitable future for all faculty.
The Struggles are real
OCUFA’s organizational strength and political capacity have grown considerably in a decade. As the organization has grown, so too have the problems facing Ontario’s universities. Significantly, funding cuts have sadly continued in our sector, continuing a tradition of chronic underfunding. In 2014, the government provided around 30% of funding to universities. That already-low amount has only decreased—provincial revenue sat at about 22% of total university revenues in the province in 2022-2023, according to OCUFA research. That’s the lowest in Canada and is about 12% less than the Canadian average: a significant—and disappointing—difference.
At the same time, tuition fees have increased for domestic and international students alike. Domestic tuition fees were frozen in 2019, but the government did not increase funding alongside this short-term affordability measure for students. This reduction in provincial funding has thus led to universities looking elsewhere to raise revenue, and many have turned to unregulated, sky-high international student tuition fees to do this. This is an unsustainable approach to funding our university system, and OCUFA continues to raise the alarm about the need to change course and properly fund our postsecondary education system.
OCUFA continues to raise the alarm about the need to change course and properly fund our postsecondary education system.
In recent years, the provincial government has also introduced complex Strategic Mandate Agreements (SMAs) for universities including a controversial performance-based funding model that would tie 60% of university funding to a set of inappropriate metrics of “success,” up from 20% in earlier years. These initiatives increased bureaucracy without providing details, but did not provide resources with accountability. Since the 2018 election, the Ford government has conducted a more severe reduction of public sector funding, which has hit the university sector hard. OCUFA expanded efforts to address this provincial challenge: joining a coalition in defeating the unconstitutional Bill 124 and its attacks on collective bargaining; enhancing detailed provincial budget analyses and sectoral research; providing greater training for member organizations to understand universities’ financial information; and expanding mobilization, communication and bargaining supports as waves of difficult negotiations and strikes rippled through the system.
OCUFA faced significant tests of its leadership role in education advocacy.
Against this backdrop, OCUFA faced significant tests of its leadership role in education advocacy during the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis at Laurentian University, which ripped through our sector during 2020 and 2021 respectively. As the pandemic raged, OCUFA advocated to address the rapid transition to online education, the exploding workload of faculty and academic librarians, and the health and wellness of the campus community during return-to-campus periods. Simultaneously, negative shockwaves hit the Canadian university sector when Laurentian University’s administration used federal corporate bankruptcy protection to deal with its egregious financial mismanagement, bypassing existing protocol and consultation with the Laurentian University Faculty Association.
Again, OCUFA and our allies rose to the occasion: Laurentian’s administration was called out in public, the Minister of Colleges and Universities Ross Romano was shuffled out of his cabinet position following pressure from OCUFA, the Office of the Auditor General intervened and gave a scathing report on the administration’s mismanagement, and OCUFA mobilized to get the federal government to commit to exempting public universities from using corporate restructuring processes to address financial issues. Indeed, OCUFA and allies made positive shockwaves across Canada! These are important markers over the last decade showing how OCUFA is making a significant impact on provincial (and national) politics, and working across many areas to benefit the university sector.
Rejecting a broken system
Sitting on past laurels and retrospective nostalgia is not the OCUFA way. We fight forward; we fight hard; we fight with allies. The challenges we face in the next ten years continue from past broken systems: an ongoing and unstable funding crisis; overburdened faculty and academic librarian workloads; precarity in academic jobs; cuts to non-academic support staff who are partners in the university community; a lack of support and services for students to have a successful university experience; insufficient research funding and support for world-class innovation and excellence; the diminishing of our libraries and academic librarians’ data and information literacy efforts; and narrowing the university sector’s academic, social and economic mission and impact in Ontario and local communities.
We fight forward; we fight hard; we fight with allies.
New challenges are also emerging: exploding class sizes, growth of vulnerable contract faculty jobs, declining faculty complements and research funding, and exploitation of international students. OCUFA will continue the fight on behalf of and alongside our member organizations because the fire of excellence in research and teaching in Ontario’s world-class public universities burns hot and bright in faculty, academic librarians, and academic staff.
As with the last 60 years, OCUFA will continue to break new ground and chart innovative paths to make lasting positive changes to Ontario’s university sector. We should take encouragement from the Taylor Swift lyrics: “You know you’re good when you can even do it / With a broken heart.” Despite the heartbreaks of chronic underfunding, damaging legislation, and other challenges, OCUFA resolutely and eternally remains hopeful, daring, bold, organized, and active in the face of current tough battles and those in our future.
