Draft:Vancouver Model

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This page is about faculty equality in British Columbia. For money laundering in British Columbia, see Cullen Commission.

The Vancouver Model refers to a one-tier faculty workplace with equality, fairness, and job security for all faculty. The Vancouver Model addresses inequities faced by Adjunct Faculty and the Precariat in academia. It was developed by the Vancouver Community College Faculty Association (VCCFA), with Frank Cosco as one of the principal organizers, later expanding to other colleges in British Columbia, Canada. The essence of the model is its pathway for the promotion of part-time faculty (sessionals), known as regularization. Other components of the model include an early evaluation process followed by a strong job security. Many faculty promote the Vancouver Model as an ideal goal of how faculty could be organized. For example, the Program for Change is a strategic plan for how the Vancouver Model could be implemented in a two-tier faculty workplace. The Vancouver Model serves as a model for other regions, including the United States, and especially in California.

Comparison of the one-tier Vancouver Model with two-tier systems

Equal Pay/Equal Work

Under the Vancouver Model, all instructors, whether full-time or part-time, permanent or temporary, are paid according to a single multi-step salary schedule. Part-time instructor pay is 100 percent pro-rated; for example, those teaching at 30 percent or 60 percent of full-time receive exactly 30 percent or 60 percent of what a full-time instructor would receive. In this way the Vancouver Model offers “equal pay for equal work.”

Workload is likewise 100 percent pro-rated for part-time instructors. Each of Vancouver Community College’s teaching areas develops a workload profile of instructional and non-instructional duties that all instructors are expected to perform, with part-time instructor assignments being pro-rated. In this way the Vancouver Model offers “equal pay and equal work”.

Job Security

Unlike the two-tier system prevalent in U.S. institutions, where tenured faculty have job security while the non-tenured do not, the one-tier Vancouver Model offers a pathway for job security to all faculty based on seniority and regularization. In the U.S., most part-time faculty are terminated at the end of each semester and possibly rehired at the beginning of the new semester. This contrasts with the Vancouver Model, where after a probationary period of approximately two years and both summative and formative evaluations, all regularized faculty have a relatively guaranteed workload from one semester to the next.

Seniority

Seniority is the primary, though not the sole, factor in the determination of workload. All instructors, both full-time and part-time, begin to accrue seniority when first hired. Non-regularized instructors accrue seniority on a pro-rated basis; for example, those who teach at 60 percent full-time accrue 60 percent of the annual seniority. Regularized instructors accrue 100 percent of the annual seniority whether they teach full-time or part-time. This provision means that the seniority ranking of part-time instructors will not be overtaken by instructors who happen to teach more classes, meaning that regularized part-time instructors will not be penalized if they wish to remain part-time, nor will regularized full-time instructors be penalized if they decide to teach fewer classes for a period of time. It also means that some regularized part-time instructors may be senior to some full-time instructors.

Regularization

Regularization is a process that changes the employment status of a faculty member in order to increase their job security, and to promote a more stable and harmonious workforce. Part-time instructors who work at 50 percent or more of full-time workload during the probationary period (roughly two years) without any negative performance reviews automatically receive regularized status. Part-time instructors who are regularized can assume that their workload will remain at least that percentage of full-time; they have “top-up rights” which means that, with the right of first refusal based on seniority, they can accept new work to ratchet their workload up to 100 percent of full-time before that new work is offered to another instructor with less seniority or a new instructor is hired.

In addition, non-regularized part-time instructors who have taught for six months also have the right of first refusal.

Regularized instructors, both full-time and part-time, have job security and can assume that their jobs will continue until retirement. Equal treatment of faculty leads to a more harmonious workplace. By contrast, non-tenured instructors in the United States are rarely assured of work beyond the current term, and the exploitation of part-time faculty increases resentment and guilt in the workplace.

Regularization of the individual, not the position

Regularization is similar to tenure in terms of job security and due process protections, but regularization is conferred upon the individual who completes a probationary period, whereas tenure, as generally instituted in the United States, is conferred after one is hired into a tenure-track position. Since tenure-track positions are rare, tenure-track hiring is also rare. At Vancouver Community College, faculty normally undergo only one hiring process for their entire career. Roughly 75 to 80 percent of the instruction at Vancouver Community College is delivered by regularized instructors. In the United States, rarely do tenured instructors deliver over 50 percent of the instruction.

Regularization Process

In the process of regularization, instructors advance from term status to regular status. Most instructors start under term appointments. If these term appointments continue at half-time or more for about 19 months (380 days) out of any continuous 24 months, they automatically become regular instructors on the first of the month following. Not more than 202 days (about 10 months) in a fiscal year can count towards regularization. After six months of term appointments, further appointments must be offered by seniority so one can have an expectation of re-appointment. Term instructors are expected to have successful summative evaluations. There can be no more than two evaluations in any two-year period.

Faculty Solidarity

The two-tier faculty workplace with tenured/tenure-track making up the upper tier and non-tenure systems is sometimes compared to a caste system, whereas in the Vancouver model “much greater fluidity exists between regular and term than between tenured and non-tenured". The one-tier workplace results in greater faculty solidarity, as manifested by the several strikes and strike votes called for by the Vancouver Community College Faculty Association. In the two-tier higher education workplace in the United States, by contrast, strikes by faculty unions are rare.

Vancouver Model Expansion

Awareness of the Vancouver Model has been growing, especially in the U.S. contingent faculty advocacy movement. Early introductions included faculty who traveled to the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Convention of 2000 in Vancouver. In 2002, a “Part-Time Legislative Summit” focusing on the Vancouver Model took place at Seattle Central Community College and later that year, “Part-Time Instructors Deserve Equal Pay for Equal Work” was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In August 2010, the “Program for Change: Real Transformation Over Two Decades” was unveiled at the conference of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) in Quebec; it is a strategic plan intended to show how the two-tier faculty workplace can be converted into a one-tier along the lines of the Vancouver Model. Additionally, the Vancouver Model was presented at international conferences such as those of COCAL 2012 in Mexico City, the New Faculty Majority in Washington, D.C. (2012), the “Countering Contingency” in Pittsburgh in 2013, and several in conferences sponsored by the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges in 2020, 2022, and 2023. It has also inspired the 2022 Resolution passed by the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) Resolution, “Develop a Strategic Plan to End the Two-Tier System in Community College” and the resulting CFT Task Force. The Campaign for Faculty Equality formed in 2023 to promote the Vancouver Model in California.

Program for Change

The Program for Change was an initial effort by Frank Cosco and Jack Longmate to generalize a contract negotiated at Vancouver Community College into a model that could be exported globally.

The focus of this Program is doing whatever can be done to improve the worklife of the non-tenured and doing it whenever and as soon as it's possible to do it. The current state of inequity did not come about quickly, it will not go away quickly, but that does not mean real change cannot be achieved.
The Program could be used by any activist or activist group seeking more equitable workplace conditions. It provides arcs of measurable progress on over thirty aspects of faculty work. It was based on the most equitable existing conditions the authors are familiar with, those in British Columbian Colleges and Universities under the aegis of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators and especially the Collective Agreement between VCC and the VCC Faculty Association. Most of its advocacy is targeted to the needs of the adjunct majority of faculty in the USA.

The Program for Change proposed an incremental change through bargaining, and was disseminated by the New Faculty Majority.

Advocacy and Reaction

Over the last half-century, U.S. colleges and universities have been employing non-tenured instructors because of their lower pay, fewer benefits, and contracts that generally do not extend beyond the current term, which enables employer flexibility to hire non-tenure-track faculty at will. During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, roughly 75 percent of post-secondary faculty by headcount were tenured with 25 percent non-tenured; at present, that ratio is reversed. The predominant reaction to the erosion of tenure by faculty unions in the United States has been efforts to promote more tenure. The Vancouver Model contrasts with that “more tenure” strategy by striving to establish equal working conditions for all faculty, thereby removing the employer advantage of hiring non-tenured instructors at discounted salaries with limited or no benefits. The Vancouver Model has rarely been acknowledged by faculty unions in the United States, possibly because some fear that it is a threat to tenure or consider it foreign to the prevailing U.S. higher education two-tier norm. Within a month of the release of the “Program for Change” at the 2010 COCAL conference in Quebec, which unveiled regularization as job security for non-tenure-track instructors, AAUP president Cary Nelson published “Solidarity vs. Contingency”; as if to neutralize momentum for regularization among non-tenured instructors, Nelson claimed that “tenure can be awarded to both part-time and full-time faculty members” and urged “tenure for all who teach.” Many proponents of the Vancouver Model consider such claims unrealistic and quixotic, countering that, “until a certifiable instance of tenure is extended to nontenured faculty members, such statements amount to wishful thinking or, by deflecting attention away from what could be concrete and achievable gains, possibly a step backward". After the Vancouver Model was profiled at the New Faculty Majority Summit conference in Washington, D.C., in January 2012, Peggy Berkowitz, editor of the Canadian journal University Affairs, noted that many American contingents at the conference “seemed to feel that hell would freeze over before they got the benefits that VCC sessional faculty enjoy.” Proponents of the Vancouver Model point out that those workplace provisions are extant, not hypothetical, and were the product of collective bargaining by a faculty union dedicated to egalitarian values that all instructors are of equal value and deserve equal working conditions as opposed to elitist values underlining the two-tier faculty workplace.

DEI

The contingent faculty movement has recently taken an intersectional approach to including the Vancouver Model as an ideal example of Equity in the current Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) movement in education.

Union Democracy

The struggle for a one-tier faculty is part of a larger movement for union democracy. An example is the 2023 UAW strike demand of "no tiers". The Vancouver Model provides a solution to the tenure-track domination of wall-to-wall unions. Frank Cosco describes the moral foundation of the Vancouver Model as representing the "weakest and most vulnerable [...] The very point of a union and our duty as a faculty union is to fight for those who are the least able to speak, the most vulnerable. It's about creating one community of faculty, so when one group is disregarded, the union leadership has to fight for their inclusion.”