In the same school-wide emails that accuse picketers of delaying traffic, the administration conspicuously reminds everyone in the school that students who choose to cross the picket need to be ‘allowed’ to pass.
Moreover, the administration continues to emphasize in its announcements that the students are under the regular onus of coming to school, writing their tests, and handing in their assignments. From the standpoint of anyone who supports the idea of Carleton as a cohesive community, the administration’s decision to keep the classes running deserves scrutiny.
What the school administration is choosing not to do, is to implement a campus-wide academic amnesty policy for students, including but not limited to those who show solidarity with the strike. Such a measure would have placed a campus-wide suspension of major deadlines during the strike, and would have compelled all courses, regardless of their discipline, to give generous extensions relating to strike-related delays.
Instead of giving the students the benefits of such an amnesty policy through school-wide announcements, messages from the president’s office are telling students to go to class as usual, implying that students will be under pressure to succeed anyway even when many of the supports provided by members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 2424 are gone.
The effect of this is that it sets students up to fail, and creates a toxic environment that pits the needs of the students against that of the staff. This setup changes the tone of the strike from a conflict between the administration and the union, to what appears to be a conflict between the union and the students.
From the perspective of those in solidarity with CUPE 2424, this maneuver to pit students against unionists, by forcing the former to go to school unsupported, needs to be named and scrutinized.
Without a campus-wide amnesty policy in place, what can happen is that each department makes their own decision about how much amnesty to give students. Since each program has a different professional culture, the form and level of amnesty is going to differ wildly across the board.
This is then going to create uneven levels of student anxiety, uneven amounts of student sympathy and awareness, uneven levels of solidarity across different departments, and, ultimately, split student opinions along departmental lines. In turn, this can lead to the artificial appearance that the general student body’s aggregate opinion about strikes is ambivalent at best and negative at worst.
In reality, however, student opinions about the strikes under such circumstances would not be a reflection of the students’ ‘natural’ values. It would instead be a reflection of the administration’s policy decision to squeeze the students even when the staff who work to support them are on strike.
In times of strikes, it is important to have discussions about academic amnesty in forums on and off campus. Even if amnesty never comes, the notion itself will remind us that amnesty for the students is always an option.
It will remind us that unions and students can be on the same side, unless the opponents of the union decide that it would not be so.
