Researcher Carol Anderson looks back at a tumultuous decade in the history of Ontario’s universities—and OCUFA’s role in its ups and downs.
Writing our history
In late 2013, I was approached by the prominent labour historian—and a friend and colleague—Craig Heron, about taking on a new project. Craig and I had worked together on several historical exhibits at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Ontario, and so he knew that I would find this new project to be right up my alley: producing a history of OCUFA to celebrate its 50th anniversary. By November, I had met with OCUFA’s executive director, Mark Rosenfeld, and agreed to take on the work.
What followed over the next 11 months was an intensive and immersive journey. I became part of an organization that plays a vital role in supporting university faculty, academic librarians, and academic professionals, and advocating for the public postsecondary education sector in Ontario. And I forged new friendships and lasting connections.
Fast forward 10 years. In the wake of a global pandemic and significant upheaval in the university sector—including deep funding cuts, the decline of collegial governance, the rise in precarious contract faculty work, and so much more—I was asked once again to help the organization celebrate another milestone: its 60th anniversary.
In late 2023, I met with OCUFA’s new executive director, Jenny Ahn, to talk about bringing this history up to the present day. Although the issues facing OCUFA had changed in those years, much remained the same—including adequate public funding, affordability of education, the needs of contract faculty, academic freedom, the corporatization of universities, and more.
Ten years ago, I wrote an article for this magazine detailing OCUFA’s 50 years of advocacy for its member organizations and on behalf of the university sector. This article recaps that history and brings it up to date.
The First 50 Years
The Birth of OCUFA
In late 1962, delegates from Ontario’s then-15 universities met to discuss creating a committee of faculty associations. The Ontario Council of University Faculty Associations, as it was then known, held its first meeting on September 14, 1963, and adopted a constitution on June 16, 1964.
During OCUFA’s first few years, the organization responded to the issues created by the dramatic expansion of the higher-education sector, including effective governance at universities, the changing relationship between universities and the government, and adequate remuneration for faculty. OCUFA’s formation also dovetailed with new financial arrangements between the federal and provincial governments that would give provinces greater influence over their postsecondary institutions.
University education after the war
After World War II, and aided by federal initiatives, veterans poured into Ontario’s universities, straining the province’s small higher education system. By the mid-1950s, the need to expand the system was clear. Between the early 1950s and 1963, the university student population in Canada more than doubled. Thousands of new faculty members were also recruited.
Within this context, OCUFA’s mandate was clear: to influence policies and negotiate with the government on behalf of faculty members. Its first major research initiative was the preparation of a 1963 brief to the Premier of Ontario, University Education in Ontario.
Within this context, OCUFA’s mandate was clear: to influence policies and negotiate with the government on behalf of faculty members.
OCUFA soon began to put a more permanent team of staff and elected leadership in place to handle the growing demands created by its position within the sector. And in 1969, it moved into its first permanent offices at 40 Sussex Avenue in Toronto.
Late 1960s to the 1970s: Expanding the system
The late 1960s and the 1970s are often remembered as the “golden years” of postsecondary education in Ontario, as the time of the largest expansion of the province’s university system to date.
OCUFA responded to this organizational growth through an internal restructuring process that began in 1979. Many new committees were also struck during this time, including Teaching Awards (1973), Salaries (1967), Pensions (1967), and Status of Women (1972).
The 1980s: Inflation and Contraction
The postsecondary system expansion came to an abrupt halt by the early 1980s with the onset of runaway inflation that did not significantly decline until the early 1990s. The ensuing economic challenges ushered in a very different era for university faculty by the beginning of the 1980s.
The ensuing economic challenges ushered in a very different era for university faculty by the beginning of the 1980s.
Government efforts to deal with these challenges included 1982’s Inflation Restraint Act (Bill 179), which limited annual public sector wage increases to 5%, eliminated the right to strike, and extended current collective agreements by one year, and Bill 213 in 1983, which allowed for direct government intervention in any university that incurred an operating deficit.
OCUFA responded to the new realities in new ways: large-scale advertising, lobbying campaigns, and several research reports that explored the crisis facing the university sector. OCUFA’s “Ontario’s Universities, Ontario’s Future” campaign was its largest advocacy effort to date. Its advertisements noted that more than 50,000 qualified students could be turned away from Ontario’s universities in the next 10 years if the proposed rationalization plan took effect.
The 1990s: “Rae Days” and the Harris “Revolution”
In 1990, Ontarians elected the province’s first New Democratic Party (NDP) government, ushering in what many hoped would be a more progressive era. By 1992, however, Premier Bob Rae had begun a program of austerity, culminating in the Social Contract in 1993: public sector unions were forced to implement $2 billion in wage cuts through 12 days of forced unpaid leave (“Rae Days”). Public sector collective agreements were re-negotiated. And OCUFA member organizations were forced to negotiate 5% wage cuts.
In 1995, Ontarians elected Mike Harris’s Progressive Conservatives, whose so-called “Common Sense Revolution” promised a more corporate approach to the public sector and public programs. In 1995, university funding was cut by 16%, programs were slashed, performance indicators were created and applied, and tuition fees rose sharply.
In response, OCUFA began to focus on key priorities. Election-readiness workshops, conferences, and major new research efforts were undertaken once again. And new working relationships with student organizations helped strengthen and extend OCUFA’s message.
“Reaching Higher”: University education in the first years of the 21st century
The new millennium brought different kinds of challenges to the postsecondary education sector and to OCUFA’s member organizations, including demographic changes which increased university enrolment; the resulting expansion of the university system; the impact of technology on teaching; a significant increase in part-time and non-tenured faculty; and the pending retirement of thousands of faculty members.
Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals were elected in 2003. The government promised to create spaces for 50,000 more students, freeze tuition fees, and expand access to student financial aid. In 2005, the government outlined its “Reaching Higher” plan for investment in postsecondary education, including injecting $6.2 billion over four years. Yet it was still not enough to overcome the severe cutbacks of the late 1990s.
OCUFA responded to these changes by increasing support for the collective bargaining efforts of its member organizations. It also held communications and lobbying workshops and began commissioning public opinion polls, asking Ontarians what they wanted from the university sector. OCUFA’s 2007 “Quality Matters” campaign aimed to ensure that faculty had the resources they needed.
In the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis, the federal and provincial government struggled to deal with the resulting financial devastation, deficits, and rising unemployment. In 2010, the provincial Liberal government introduced a two-year wage freeze for about 350,000 non-unionized public sector workers.
By 2011, though the government again pledged to inject new funding into the higher-education sector, it was not enough to “right the ship” in an increasingly underfunded sector. In 2014, although the Liberals pledged to increase the number of government-funded student places in colleges and universities by 60,000 over four years, per-student funding actually fell by 7% over the next three years and tuition fees began to steadily climb.
It was not enough to “right the ship” in an increasingly underfunded sector.
In 2012, OCUFA launched an anti-austerity education and mobilization campaign, highlighting the significant funding challenges facing the higher-education sector and the government’s unwillingness to address the funding crisis.
Changing Times, Evolving Priorities: 2014 to 2024
The funding crisis accelerates
The funding crisis had become clear by 2015. In response, the government introduced the Funding Formula Review, which re-evaluated the formula by which Ontario’s universities were funded. It included measures to determine “outcomes” to implement a new funding model for universities.
OCUFA’s Funding Formula Review Handbook, created after extensive engagement with the government on the issue, helped guide its member organizations through the review’s principles and laid out its own: “Funding should be: adequate, committed to core activities, student-centred, supportive of good jobs, stable and predictable, equitable, transparent, and respectful of universal autonomy and academic freedom.”
In 2018, the Progressive Conservatives won a majority government and quickly reversed course on several of the Liberals’ initiatives. For example, the Protecting a Sustainable Public Sector for Future Generations Act, 2019 (Bill 124) imposed a 1% cap per year on wage increases for public-sector employees for three years.
The government also announced a plan to institute performance-based funding in the higher-education sector, which tied 60% of funding to outcomes or “performance” measures. It argued that this new “business model”-based approach would incentivize institutions to be more productive, efficient, and “in tune” with the labour market’s needs.
In response to the upheaval, OCUFA became more focused on educating Ontarians about the importance of the province’s universities. Its “We Teach Ontario” campaign, for example, promoted the connection between teaching and research in universities through highlighting the research of featured professors. In 2015, OCUFA held its first annual Advocacy Day at Queen’s Park.
Unprecedented upheaval
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. The impact of the pandemic had lasting effects on society and on the university sector, upending teaching methods and challenging faculty and students’ physical and mental health.
In response to the pandemic, the Ontario government declared a state of emergency. In the universities, there was a sudden shift to emergency remote teaching and learning. By September 2020, 68% of universities were delivering their courses primarily online.
Ongoing financial constraints and performance-based strictures continued to create lasting challenges. By 2022, provincial funding made up just 24% of university revenues. From 2018 to 2022, university operating revenues from the provincial government and domestic student fees declined by about $3,200 (in 2020 dollars) per full-time student. Per-student funding levels in Ontario were the lowest in Canada.
Universities looked for ways to increase funding and cut costs. One key cost-cutting measure was the increased use of contract faculty across the sector, a trend that began in the 2010s but which accelerated in the 2020s. By 2018, 58% of faculty positions were contract, teaching-only, untenured, or mostly part-time, with few job protections or benefits.
A key revenue-generating measure was to dramatically increase the number of international-student admissions: by 2022, almost 19% of full-time students were international students; their tuition fees, at about $40,000 a year (in 2020 dollars) paid 48% of all fees collected by universities.
Many universities strained under the weight of the funding crisis, and one broke.
Many universities strained under the weight of the funding crisis, and one broke: in February 2021, Laurentian University declared insolvency, the first public university in Canada to do so.
The Laurentian insolvency was a key focus for OCUFA. With its allies, including the Laurentian University Faculty Association, the organization launched a campaign to amend the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act and the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act to exclude public universities from inappropriate, corporate-style restructuring processes. In 2024, it helped secure the passage of federal legislation to do exactly that.
Another area in which OCUFA’s years of work finally come to fruition was that of adequate pensions. In 2021, the University Pension Plan became the official pension plan provider for almost 40,000 working and retired university faculty and staff in four Ontario universities and 12 sector organizations.
The last decade also brought into focus new issues and areas of work for OCUFA. The crisis at Laurentian highlighted the issue of eroding collegial governance, a shared governance model in which university boards and senates work together to ensure the health and success of the institution. Faculty and their associations also became centrally engaged in working to advance decolonization and Indigenization, as well as equity, diversity, and inclusion within universities. OCUFA has continued to push universities and the government to preserve and create good academic jobs, particularly as contract faculty faced more precarity and uncertainty on campuses.
By 2024, OCUFA’s broader political advocacy strategy had become more focused on educating the public about the issues facing public universities and making OCUFA a “go-to” resource for its member organizations and others outside the academy and government.
60 years after its creation, OCUFA has become a strong voice for faculty in Ontario.
Today, 60 years after its creation, OCUFA has become a strong voice for faculty, academic librarians, and academic professionals in Ontario. Although some of the issues facing the province’s university sector seem to have changed little since the 1960s, and many new issues have arisen in recent decades, what has remained the same (which became incredibly clear to me when updating its history), is OCUFA’s vital role as a leading advocate for high-quality, accessible university education in Ontario.
