BY WENDY ELLIOTT

The Kings County Register

With 300 professors, instructors and librarians on the street since October 15, Acadia University spokesman Scott Roberts says Acadia’s negotiating team is ready any time.

He noted some locks on university buildings had been changed.

“It’s a couple of buildings and it’s a personal safety issue because we have so few staff members in them, so we just change it,” he said.

Acadia’s president Gail Dinter-Gottlieb left October 15 for a long-planned recruiting trip to China. Some 20 per cent of Acadia’s 3,000 students comes from outside Canada; 60 per cent of those are Asian. The 10-day trip, he added, is being paid for by Chinese hosts.

Since the president is not a member of the negotiating team, Roberts said she did not want to impair Acadia’s capacity to recruit and, “it’s already paying off. We are dealing with the long term.”

Striking professors don’t like the optics of Dinter-Gottlieb’s departure. Acadia Faculty Association president Peter Williams expressed collective frustration.

“We spent four full days in meetings last week, including 12 hours Sunday, and achieved nothing.”

Classes were cancelled Sunday night and close to 200 students immediately headed for a downtown tavern. Other facilities - the gym, cafeteria and library - are open.

Outstanding issues include faculty complement, compensation, equity and benefits.

Williams said he was disappointed by the latest developments.

"We came to the table Wednesday (October 10) with an offer that made very significant compromises in a number of areas. The board's team responded with an offer that presented no significant improvements over an offer that was overwhelmingly rejected by AUFA members in June."

The most recent offer by AUFA would have saved over $1 million in each of the first two years of the proposed contract, compared to the offer made by AUFA in June. In a letter appended to the previous Collective Agreement, signed in 2004, Dinter-Gottlieb promised to make the necessary budgeting changes so “as soon as possible, Acadia and its faculty should arrive at the point where our compensation structure is seen by all as being regionally and nationally competitive."

Williams said, "earlier, we decided that the university couldn't afford to pay us nationally competitive salaries in this contract. They have had three-and-a-half years to make the necessary budgeting changes, and now we have offered them significantly more latitude in how they reach the president’s stated goal.

“We're very disappointed that the board is unwilling to work towards fulfilling the president's promise."



Students frustrated, thinking ahead to lost studies



Students are frustrated and concerned at the prospect of a strike going on for any length of time, says Acadia Students Union president Kyle Steele.

“The prospect of any time lost in the classroom is anything but welcoming. These students - and international students, in particular, who pay double the tuition of Canadian students - are losing out on a service that they are paying for; and are worried that if this does go for an extended period of time, a term may be cancelled and their abilities to graduate on time could be affected.”

Steele notes, while that is a distant scenario now, it is in the back of students’ minds. Some continue to purchase tickets out of town, some are keeping up with their reading and others are sitting in frustration trying to figure out what to make of this situation.

The ASU is committed to communicating with students, updating its strike website with programming schedules and other information.