A Picket Line Manifesto

I just found this one, it is a few weeks old (found on the Algonquin Local 415 web site) but its topic remains very relevant, despite the fact that it was written before the strike was over.

Why I strike: a picket line manifesto

By Joe Banks, Citizen Special, 22 March 2006


I am a proud graduate of the Ontario community college system. In May 1978, I was presented with my diploma in journalism on the stage at the Durham College convocation.

It was one of my most exhilarating moments. Along with a few of my classmates, I earned honours with an average of more than 80 per cent.

When I fell over the finish line in Grade 12, gasping, I couldn’t have imagined a more unlikely end to my post-secondary education. I was a mediocre student in high school, nearly failing actually, cursed with a brain that could not grasp math, but which somehow had an affinity for the arts and writing.

When I enrolled in a community college journalism program, something clicked.

Instructors taught me not just what I needed to know to get my first job, but also street sense. I didn’t know it then, but what they were teaching me was so much more important than lessons rendered by rote. They taught me how to wonder.

According to the curriculum of the day, they didn’t set out to do it, and I didn’t set out to learn it. It just happened. It happened because they were unencumbered by the distractions of the minutiae of academia.

Experience your education; live the learning, I learned.

This was what the Ontario community college system gave me then and what I think it gave to hundreds of thousands of graduates who went before and came after. A sturdy, useable education that never pretended to be anything more than what it was: a practical, pragmatic way to find out how to do things that make society function. Faculty members were hired from the very sectors that needed new blood. People who had proved they could do, were hired to teach.

But rather than building on that model, rather than continuing on a trajectory that had been set in motion by former education minister and premier Bill Davis in the mid-’60s, the system was allowed to be starved. Rather than seeing the hiring of full-time faculty as an investment in excellence, they were looked upon during the Harris years of the ’90s as expensive and politically disagreeable liabilities. Still, aware of the political fallout of being seen to be doing nothing as the double-cohort approached, it threw hundreds of millions of dollars at bricks and mortar and, with the tacit acceptance of college presidents, ignored the situation that would bring us to where we are today — 22-per-cent fewer full-time faculty during a time when enrolments rose 53 per cent. That has equalled larger classes and a steadily growing reliance on part-time faculty paid only for their classroom time (marking and prep remain unpaid) and, surprise, surprise, a steadily declining quality of college education which, through always-present performance and student assessments, would put any failures squarely on the shoulders of an increasingly harried and declining number of full-time faculty.

And so I picket. And as I watched my colleagues pressing their signs against the wind last week, people who are far more comfortable and competent with markers or laser pointers than picket signs in hand, I remembered something I learned and try to teach my students.

Some things are worth fighting for. I had learned a long time ago, maybe from dad, maybe from mom, maybe from my teachers, that principles can stand as long as they are based on selflessness. Then they will endure any test thrown at them.

But don’t take my word for it. We trip over ourselves arguing to a weary public that it’s the students who really matter. So let’s hear from the head of the Ontario College Student Alliance, Matt Jackson, who said on March 16 the provincial government of Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty must put more cash into college education to help bring an end to the strike.

“While the McGuinty government has made a historic investment in post-secondary school education (in last year’s provincial budget, he pledged $6.2-billion over the next five years for Ontario’s universities and colleges), the college system is still suffering from years of neglect and cuts of previous governments,” Mr. Jackson said. “Ontario college students still remain the lowest funded in Canada on a per-student basis. This is absolutely unacceptable.”

The Durham diploma hangs on the wall in my office at the Woodroffe Campus of Alqonquin College here in Ottawa in room N-209A. It will stay there as long as the college sees fit to employ me.

Joe Banks is a former rural community newspaper publisher and editor in the area. He teaches journalism at Algonquin College when he isn’t the picket captain for the Woodroffe evening shift — and a mighty fine one at that.