Under York’s plan, Glendon would cease to exist as a separate faculty. One of the stated rationales for this proposal (as opposed to other alternatives) is to avoid what York views as inefficient “duplication” of courses between the Keele campus and Glendon. Under this proposal, Glendon would survive only as a college with a mandate to provide and promote French-language education, rather than as a faculty offering both French and English-language courses in the liberal arts.
If this proposal comes to pass, not all current Glendon courses would survive the transition to Keele. It is unclear if any English-language liberal arts courses at Glendon would be preserved. This means that courses for which contract faculty have seniority and experience may simply disappear. Even if courses themselves do not disappear in the potential move to Keele, we can also expect that, with larger class sizes at Keele, course sections that would in the past have been offered to contract faculty at Glendon would no longer be available. Furthermore, Glendon contract faculty would now be competing in the same pool as contract faculty applying to teach in Liberal Arts and Professional Studies (LAPS) and other faculties at Keele.
Due to the consolidation of many course sections into large online courses, CUPE 3903 has noted sharp drops in volume of work available for contract faculty. In short, we believe that this proposal would involve extensive job losses among contract faculty – particularly those teaching English-language courses – with no plan on York’s part to mitigate these job losses or offer severance to faculty who have been teaching on contract for years or decades.