U of L risks students and reputation by replaying past labour mistakes

By Lethbridge Herald on February 5, 2026.

Next week marks four years since the University of Lethbridge began its Seinfeld job action. Seinfeld, as in the long-running television show that was famously about nothing.

The job action was long-running as well: six weeks — among the longest work stoppages in Canadian post-secondary education.

It was also extremely damaging. The U of L’s Canadian student enrolment was set back almost a decade, as current students moved their degrees to more stable institutions and new recruits switched to universities that were not at war with their professors. Only a brief rise in international student revenue and credit hours prevented a complete crash.

That cushion has disappeared. The U of L was late to the international student bandwagon and the bubble that propped us up right after the lockout and strike is now over.

But domestic enrolment has yet to recover. My department is doing better than most, but we are still nowhere near the numbers we had the year before the job action. There has been some growth over the past three years, but not enough to undo the self-inflicted damage from 2022.

The worst thing, however, was the pointlessness of it all. I was president of the faculty union at the time. The impasse arose when the administration’s negotiating team presented what was called their “hell no” list — issues we’d have to strike on if we wanted to see movement.

So we ended up in job action — a lockout and a strike. But for the first three weeks, we couldn’t get them to a meeting. And when they finally agreed to mediation, we had to wait for a management-preferred mediator, ignoring one who was available immediately and extending the dispute by another unnecessary week — into mid-March, when students were deciding whether they wanted to sign up with us again.

And when it ended, it turned out there was no “hell no” list after all. We reached agreement on almost everything, including most of the things we were told they’d never discuss. It was really all just a gigantic game of chicken.

Except the damage was real: enrolment tanked in response to the chaos and the Board had to offer tuition rebates and other incentives to stop even more students from fleeing.

The reputational damage extended well beyond Lethbridge. A former university president told me he was repeatedly asked how things had gone so wrong down here. At other tables administrators were promising they wouldn’t repeat the U of L’s mistakes. Our union was asked to speak across the country on how we maintained solidarity in the face of such aggressive tactics. The U of L became a national example of how not to run a university.

Four years on, you’d hope some lessons have been learned. But Seinfeld was not just a show about nothing. It was also a show in which nothing ever changes. In which characters make the same mistakes, episode after episode. For laughs.

So it is with the U of L. Four years later, the administration is using the same external lawyer as their chief negotiator and once again the U of L stands out among its peers for its inability to bring things to a settlement. Every other university in the province — and almost all its colleges and polytechnics — concluded their negotiations long ago. Only at the U of L do we see so many unresolved articles still on the table and so little momentum towards putting this round behind us.

And once again, the dispute is headed for March — when students will have to decide whether they want to commit again to a university that seems unable to break its bad habits or choose a school that prioritises student interests over short-term gains at the bargaining table. Once again, the U of L is risking serious damage to its reputation and enrolment in exchange for relatively small gains in language.

Like Seinfeld, we are apparently going into reruns. It’s just a lot less funny in labour relations.

Dan O’Donnell is Professor of English at the U of L and a former president and current member of the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association. He has served with national and provincial labour organisations. The opinions in this piece are his own.