Hurt at Work: Workers’ Memorial Day and the Practice of a Pedagogy of Kindness

From Cate Denial’s A Pedagogy of Kindness:

“We deserve an academy that is kind.

Somewhere along the way, many of us were taught that the academy should be a place of intense competition, where we had rivals, not colleagues; where the most important insights and best ideas were those that rose to the top by any means necessary; where our emotional lives were not just unwelcome but entirely unnecessary distractions from the Work. Our mentors taught a distressingly large number of us that students should be the last consideration on our list of things to care about; that they were coddled and unserious; and that they were out to scam their way to a degree. These suppositions were reinscribed upon us by the delegation of teaching responsibilities to untenured faculty and graduate students, who often found themselves badly supported (if at all) by our institutions; by research and administrative responsibilities that ate up time; and by promotion and review processes that failed to reward the hard work of teaching well. Getting a job and holding on to a job under oppressive conditions shattered so many of us.”

Today is Workers’ Memorial Day around the world, where we honour the lives lost and injuries suffered by people in their workplaces. I have taught young adults in the trades, as well as older adults who have engaged in arduous physical effort in plumbing, or shipbuilding, or masonry for decades, until their backs or arms gave out. They returned to college, sometimes with WCB funding, to re-think their lives and careers.

I don’t want to gloss over the cost of physical injuries experienced on construction sites, in mining and forestry, and in other physically dangerous work. That’s the image many of us have in mind, of the injured worker. In my province, last year there were just under 140 deaths due to workplace accidents and incidents: “WorkSafeBC said in a statement that 79 of those deaths were from occupational diseases, including 36 from asbestos exposure . . . .” Young people, including those in part-time, summer, and first jobs, are especially vulnerable. In some occupations, the harms accumulate over the years.

College and university teachers sometimes struggle to see ourselves as workers, preferring to view our employment as a profession or, better yet, a vocation. Campus hierarchies mean that cafeteria workers, admin assistants, and instructors are rarely in the same room, talking about our working conditions. One of the things I value in my current and exceptionally strong union representation is their determination to build solidarity with other employee groups, as well as with students, across campus.

Faculty aren’t alone in being treated as higher ed temps. The summer slowdown means that lots of campus employees have eight-month contracts, or are laid off annually. Casualization has come for us all.

I once worked at a university where the Faculty Association was in the process of unionizing, and there was fierce resistance by some professors, who felt that we were simultaneously devaluing our own status as participants in shared governance while claiming an inappropriate working-class affiliation as labour. We had privilege, insisted some of my colleagues, and it was absurd to view ourselves as mere cogs in the machine.

They were outvoted; we unionized.

But I’ve heard variations on this theme throughout my entire academic career, from graduate school on, when our chairs and deans sometimes bemoaned the way that union representation of TAs restricted their hiring choices. These administrators preferred an apprenticeship model of higher ed. Attending graduate school was arduous, no doubt, but it was part of climbing the ladder of academic success.

Except that for many, as Marc Bosquet observed, doctoral studies were the end point. Their careers in higher education began and finished in grad school, where they were exploited as contract faculty teaching undergraduate service courses, especially at the first-year level. English Departments, which are typically tasked with the obligation of Freshman Comp or its Canadian equivalent of Academic Writing, take in large numbers of graduate students because they are needed as teaching assistants, tutorial leaders, research assistants, and per-term course instructors. Their class sizes have little to do with the the new grad students’ future employment prospects.

I had doctoral program colleagues who didn’t complete their degrees, overwhelmed by money woes or stress or poor supervision. Harassment and bullying have ended careers in graduate school.

And because our profession can be, as Denial observes above, more competitive than collegial, more cutthroat than caring, people are injured at work across academic settings all the time, so often that it’s barely noted or commented upon, even when people retire in their early 50s, or go on permanent disability, or quit and take worse jobs.

I’m in the latter category, because I left what was intended to be a permanent position because workplace bullying was so endemic in my workplace. The alternative, which HR urged on me, was a long-term “stress leave”; my faculty association would have preferred department remediation, but my experience of other departments that had undergone what a colleague described as “group therapy for people who don’t want to be in the same room” hadn’t been encouraging.

My workplace injuries from harassment showed up as stress-related illnesses, and I’ve recently had a flare-up, as my college has been going through a protracted and painful layoff process. Everyone is doing their best in very difficult circumstances. But there’s a lot of pain involved.

In 2019, the Council of Writing Program Administrators issued a helpful statement that included a range of behaviour that constitute workplace bullying. I suspect that many of my colleagues in academic would recognize their own experiences in this checklist.