Faculty strike the last resort after 600 days with no contract

By Lethbridge Herald on March 11, 2022.

Editor:

Professors at the University of Lethbridge are known to be great teachers; however, it is perhaps less known that they are also top-notch researchers. Since the role of research in the university and the effect of the strike on research is less visible than the impact on teaching, we decided to write this letter.

For a typical faculty member, research constitutes 40 per cent of our duties, and it makes significant contributions to our community and society in a wide variety of disciplines. 

For example, U of L professors are developing new treatments for epilepsy, doing research on genetics to find causes and treatments for Alzheimer\’s disease, finding ways to better diagnose brain injury, and are studying early brain development to help our kids to achieve their full potential. U of L professors work to help children in speech development both at home and in educational settings, and we work with our Lethbridge community to reduce the societal and health effects of addictions, overcome trauma and improve mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Our professors also engage in all kinds of fieldwork, from anthropological studies of other societies to long-term biological field studies, both in Canada and globally. Such studies offer our students wonderful training opportunities: they are given the chance to travel and encounter different environments and cultures, enriching their own life experiences at the same time as their work contributes new knowledge about the natural world, and deepens our understanding of humans’ place in nature. 

Astrophysicists at the U of L develop instrumentation for space exploration missions working closely with the Canadian Space Agency, European Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and NASA. Two of those instruments are in orbit; a flight spare of one of these instruments is on permanent display in the Science Museum in London (UK), adjacent to Isaac Newton’s telescope and the Apollo 10 command module. Physics professors use quantum physics to understand the contents and evolution of our universe and to design quantum computers, the computers of the future. The list goes on. In fact, many scientific discoveries which have greatly benefited our society, such as transistors, the computer and the internet, GPS technology, and most medical treatments, would not be possible without research performed by academics like us. Our research greatly enriches our teaching — conducting research requires that we have a deep knowledge of all the latest developments and cutting-edge findings in our respective fields, and we pass this knowledge along to our students at all levels of study.

We also offer our students opportunities to get involved with our research, and thereby contribute to making scholarly and scientific advances themselves. What this means is that we do our research during the teaching terms as well as full-time during the summer. 

We involve and supervise undergraduate and graduate students in our labs. We give well-attended Public Professor lectures in the community and regularly open our labs to high school students to communicate our research as well as to inspire the next generation of researchers. 

We bring in millions of dollars each year as research grants from provincial, federal, and international funding agencies, and use the bulk of these funds to support undergraduates and graduate students to join us in our research. Students, in turn, spend that money in Lethbridge on food, shelter, clothing and entertainment, which is an important boost to our local economy.

 For many of us, working 50, 60 or 70 hours a week is not uncommon. Why do we do it? Because we love what we do, we care for our students and we want to make our University and our community a better place. 

The faculty at the U of L have taken the extraordinary step to strike as a last resort after 600 days without a contract. 

It is not a ‘vacation’, as a few people have commented online. As a sign seen at the picket line said, we would rather be teaching and doing our research! We want to go back to our jobs as soon as we have a fair deal that respects all our faculty and collegial governance. Denial of access to our labs by the university administration, despite requests by researchers, will result in irreversible short- and long-term damage to our research as well as to the reputation of the University. 

For instance, there are epilepsy experiments that are being run currently that have reached a crucial phase, as the animals have just received the brain implants that are key to the whole project. 

It has taken two years of preparation to reach this stage of the project, but all this research and the $500k in public funding received to carry it out, are now in jeopardy due to faculty being locked out of the University by the Board of Governors and our administration. Many instruments, computations and simulations run day and night, producing data that need to be collected and analyzed before they lose their value. 

Collaborations with national and international colleagues and participation in research networks and consortiums need to be maintained. 

These activities are what has placed the UofL on the international research and innovation map. To give an analogy, medical treatments often cannot be suspended for a month without having long-term negative consequences for a patient. This is similar for many of our research projects. 

Unless immediate mitigating steps are taken, this will ultimately result in world-class researchers thinking twice before coming to this University. Therefore, we write this letter to better explain the value of our research in improving our Lethbridge community, and how it allows us to train our students in new technologies that will be  important for our future, such as artificial intelligence or biomarkers for the diagnosis of neurological disorders. 

Our research is and will remain a fundamental part of the University and community, and any harm to the former will inevitably harm the latter as well.  

Finally, we would like to emphasize that, for us, the strike is not primarily about money, It is about the respect that our students and faculty deserve. It is about our working conditions, which include the research that we conduct, and about our students’ learning conditions. As the U of L is dependent on the Lethbridge community, we encourage you to contact the Board of Governors at the U of L ( https://www.ulethbridge.ca/governance/board-members ) and the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association ( https://www.ulfa.ca/ ) to express your opinion or support. 

Louise Barrett, Professor in the Department of Psychology

Saurya Das, Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy  

Fangfang Li, Professor in the Department of Psychology  

Artur Luczak, Professor in the Department of Neuroscience 

David Naylor, Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy

Marc Roussel, Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

University of Lethbridge