The Dalhousie Faculty Association (DFA) was locked out by the university three weeks ago (August 20th). The DFA’s calls for fair wages and supportive measures for newer and precariously employed faculty resist right-wing trends experienced throughout the world that seek to limit intellectual freedom. By fighting for equitable salaries, the DFA is fighting for the integrity of education and helping ensure that academics will be fairly compensated for their labour.
We live in a time when universities need to strengthen their vision to provide an education that can be a location of possibility, a practice of freedom to transgress that which oppresses, silences, and constrains. As we have witnessed south of our borders, governments are stomping on critical thought and morally bankrupting university institutions.
Neoliberalism, a dominant political philosophy in Canada since the 1970s, advocates for a small-government approach which reduces the welfare state and denies social accountability for those impacted by reduced social welfare spending. It is critiqued for increasing social power differences based on gender, race, and class while simultaneously targeting critical thought and historical and colonial recognition of resultant social problems.
One goal of neoliberalism is to cut funding for services, including education.
Dalhousie University’s mission statement leads with the importance of lifting intellectual vitality, but this mission is fettered to provincial government funding that has decreased drastically. In the 1980s, government funding to universities accounted for 70 per cent of their revenues, demonstrating a strong commitment to public universities. Today, governments have severely reduced their funding to 33 per cent in Nova Scotia, resulting in a total diminishment of the capacity to be a public university. This reduction in public spending pushes universities to raise tuition, putting higher education further out of reach for those who can least afford it. This furthers the divide between the wealthy and the many.
The limited funding now provided by the government of Nova Scotia comes with strings attached under the guise of financial oversight. Bill 12 provides the Minister of Advanced Education unprecedented power to select up to 50 per cent of university Board members who will support government priorities. This Bill, unanimously condemned by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, also provides the government with scope to direct research agendas, ensuring that they align with government priorities. It places the freedom to transgress that which oppresses, silences, and constrains, as so eloquently articulated by Hooks (1994), at risk.
These neoliberal policies affect every facet of our social, cultural and economic life.
Today in Canada, the gap between the share of disposable income between households in the top 40% and the bottom 40% of the income distribution reached the largest gap ever recorded by Statistics Canada. This is evident in Nova Scotia, where the child poverty rate jumped from 20.5 per cent in 2021 to 23.8 per cent in 2022.
A commitment to social justice celebrates the emancipatory power of education and research as a pedagogy of liberation. Our students need the tools to recognize and resist social injustices, which are too frequently the result of policies shaped by neoliberal ideologies that have little regard for environmental devastation and for the vulnerable in our society. The DFA’s strike mandate can be seen as strong resistance to right-wing neoliberal tendencies that strangle universities. This lockout, unwanted by faculty or students and carried out against fair and reasonable bargaining practices, is just the latest example of the neoliberal push in the Canadian academy toward a more corporate and less equitable post-secondary system. The result is the erosion of critical thought and the active engagement of citizens working towards a just world.
Nancy Ross, PhD, is CCPA-NS Research Associate and an Associate Professor – locked out, School of Social Work, Dalhousie University
