OCUFA Today and Tomorrow

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  Today, half a century after its creation, OCUFA has become the central voice for faculty in Ontario, and an advocate for high-quality, accessible post-secondary education. Although many of the issues facing the province’s university sector seem to have changed little since the 1960s — including affordability, accessibility, support for both research and teaching, adequate public funding, and more — other challenges have begun to command more of OCUFA’s attention as it enters its second half-century.

   

  These challenges include the needs of the ever-expanding number of contract and part-time faculty, increasing faculty workload and job-related stress, and pension reform.  OCUFA is also focused on the complex issues of institutional differentiation and the push for “program rationalization,” as governments seek yet another way to trim university budgets and ask the system to do more with less.

   

  

  Kate Lawson

• Changing times, evolving priorities

  These new challenges — and as-yet unforeseen challenges that are sure to arise in the coming years — will clearly demand that OCUFA keep adapting to the needs of Ontario’s post-secondary sector and the professors and librarians who work within it.

   

  Although advocacy has always been a key role for the organization, in recent years OCUFA has begun having a greater voice in the public realm, as it seeks to educate and inform all Ontarians about the quality and sustainability of the province’s higher-education system. OCUFA’s “We Teach Ontario” campaign, for example, promotes the important connection between teaching and research in the province’s universities through highlighting the research of featured professors.

   

   

  

  OCUFA President, Executive Director, and staff in front of OCUFA’s office at 17 Isabella Street, Toronto, October 2014. Front row: Mark Rosenfeld (Executive Director), Andrea Calver; second row (left to right): Donna Gray, Karen Wheeler, Kimiko Inouye, Lisa Alexis; third row (left to right): Erica Rayment, Brynne Sinclair-Waters, Gail McCaughey; back row (left to right): Russell Janzen, Graeme Stewart, Kate Lawson (President). Missing: Karat TenBrinke.

• The OCUFA at 50 History Project thanks the following individuals
  and organizations for their assistance in creating this exhibit:

  Lisa Alexis	Deborah Flynn	Kate Lawson
  Carol J. Anderson	Melissa Goldstein	Doug Lorimer
  Paul Axelrod	Donna Gray	Joyce Lorimer
  Helen Breslauer	Craig Heron	Ed Monahan
  Glen Brown	John Holmes	Graham Murray
  Alan Brunger, Trent University	Tess Hooks	Michael Piva
  Glen Copplestone	Michiel Horn	Connie Reid, OCADU
  Rebecca Coulter	Geoffrey Hudson, NOSMFSA	Mark Rosenfeld
  Helene Cummins	Russ Janzen	Graeme Stewart
  Michael Doucet	Glen Jones	Karen Suurtamm, University of Toronto Archives
  Howard Epstein	Mark Langer	Aniko Varpalotai

  

  Mark Langer, President of OCUFA, 2009–11, supports striking faculty during the Northern Ontario School of Medicine Faculty and Staff Association (NOSMFSA) strike, Thunder Bay, 2010.

• One area where I think OCUFA’s really indispensable is government lobbying. Faculty associations just don’t have the resources to speak on a regular basis, formally and informally, to the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, for example. OCUFA does. It has ongoing relationships with the province’s key educational, political, social, and economic bodies and then transmits essential
  information to the local level.

  Current OCUFA President, 2013–15

  Kate Lawson

• OCUFA will continue its important advocacy and service roles, including support for members’ collective bargaining and the grievance process. But it will also be critical to be creative in our public engagement, not only with those in the university community but as well with the broader public, in order to offer alternatives to increasingly narrow conceptions of higher education.

  OCUFA Executive Director, 2011 to present

  Mark Rosenfeld

• Our Status of Women Committee is a place where I personally feel that we can make change in the lives of our female faculty colleagues and librarians in a very real and involved way at the level of policy. And for that, first and foremost, I think OCUFA is absolutely outstanding.

  Chair, Status of Women Committee, 2014

  Helene Cummins

• They’re a supportive body and they give us a supportive framework, things like how to
  navigate the system politically when we have questions, how to deal with program prioritization, things like that. They link us to other faculty associations, and other key players in the university system. So they’re very much a threshold of knowledge, a network to lead us to others who can assist us.

  Chair, Status of Women Committee, 2014

  Helene Cummins

• I think the other role that was always positive was OCUFA’s ability to share and compare information. And the fact that we can make reference to OCUFA at the bargaining table. I think that is really important.

  Former Board member, Finance Committee member, OCUFA

  John Holmes

• We’re advocating to preserve and promote our members’ concerns — financial, economic, professional concerns. But it goes beyond that. We’re also advocating for a conception of higher education which I think the majority of the membership still share: of a high-quality, affordable, accessible higher education system in which there’s still respect for liberal arts, there’s still respect for the sciences, there’s still a respect for professions. And not only respect, but that those areas are supported and seen as fundamental to a higher education system.

  OCUFA Executive Director, 2011 to present

  Mark Rosenfeld