Their 'Couv and COCAL VII

Wee wobs weathered his first extended road trip pretty well. It took us about (or "a-boot", as our northerly neighbors would have it) 13 hours to make the drive, with a couple hour long stops to let the child run crazy for a bit. Other than the long line at customs, entering Canada was a breeze. Vancouver itself is a stunningly beautiful city, one that puts other West Coast metropolitan areas to shame. And, being Canadian, of course, they're super-friendly. I'm a little disappointed that I haven't had time to explore the town while here, but work is work, right?

I'm a little bit disappointed in the conference. On the one hand, I'm more convinced than ever that contingent faculty organizing is where the higher education labor movement needs to be focusing its resources if the movement is to grow and maintain some sort of faculty governance within the academy. The trends are clear - the ranks of contingent faculty - especially part-time faculty - will continue to grow, and the days of the mythical academy filled with tenured professors are numbered. The task is to formulate a model to fill the vacuum.

On the other hand, the contingent faculty union movement has a looooooooong way to go if it hopes to take part in this conversation. I again have to marvel at how cutting edge we are in the graduate employee union movement. Moreover, I'm always surprised at how radical the organizing model seems to most of our brothers and sisters in the labor movement. In a session on mobilization strategies, I brought up that the foundation to any successful mobilization had to be conversations with individual members. The amount of resistance that this met was astonishing to me - people actually questioned the value of having individual conversations, and others objected to the amount of time involved with it. The latter objection, that of it taking too much time to talk to someone, I found particularly disturbing. The fact that many people don't seem to want to do the hard work of building a movement, of actually having to sacrifice for our values and beliefs, bodes ill.

I suppose one small consolation to me is the energy that graduate employees have. We'll be the ones entering the ranks of the new professoriate in the short-term, and I have to hope that our experiences will serve as a shot in the arm to the contingent faculty union movement. In that respect, I was disappointed that I didn't see anyone from LEO or GEO at the University of Michigan here. Here's a success story to be shared - a successful contingent faculty organization, and an example of how grad employees can be a boon to contingent organizing. Opportunity missed.

At any rate, the conference is over for me, now. I'm going to reconnect with the fam in a bit, skipping out on the evening banquet, and we'll be leaving early tomorrow to drive back south so that we can visit a couple of friends in Seattle before making the haul back to Eugene.

I, for one, will miss the metric system when I leave.