Various Carleton student and teaching unions have released a call for Carleton to open the Board of Governors (BoG) to students and union executives.
In a news release published online, the letter said the groups were seeking to change the way the board was distributed and push to be “more democratic, not less.”
“We seek reform of the democratic procedures of the university . . . so that the Carleton community may finally get the Board that it deserves,” the letter reads.
The release was co-signed by varying corporate and student unions on campus, including the Graduate Students’ Association (GSA), the Canadian Union of Public Employees representing administrative and technical staff (CUPE 2424) and TAs and contract instructors (CUPE 4600), Carleton University Academic Staff Association (CUASA) and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEO).
GSA president Michael Bueckert said he thinks the board is closing itself off from outside participation. He also claims the board has begun to operate the campus as a corporation.
“The community members on the board . . . end up making the decisions on behalf of the rest of us. This is not how a democratic institution functions,” Bueckert said.
This response is a reaction to the continued efforts of the BoG to remove the representation of the unions on campus, which came to a head this summer with a proposed change in the by-laws that would remove the elected executives from both Carleton student associations and unions from the board.
However, Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) did not sign on to the letter. CUSA president Fahd Alhattab said he has mentioned opening the BoG meetings to president Roseann Runte privately.
“The old-school thinking of student associations was ‘fuck the administration,’ . . . we’re gonna do our own way and get it done,” Alhattab said. “Our goal is pragmatic leadership and how to work with the administration to get what we need for students.”
Bueckert said the BoG needs to be reformed to better serve its mandate.
“There is very little input from the people that work and go to school here,” Bueckert said. “We can see with the recent board bylaw changes that they want to pass excluding student and labour representatives from the board and closing the meetings to the public.”
“These are steps in the opposite direction. They will make the board even less accountable for students to staff and less accessible to the public,” Bueckert said.
Steven Levitt, a member of the board’s legal counsel, said union executives have responsibilities that are “irreconcilable” with the mandate of the board.
Peter Gose, a representative of CUASA, said he disagrees and believes the problem is at the board level, not with student union executives.
“The problem is an unrepresentative and unresponsive Board, not unruly students,” Gose said.
The Ontario branch of the Canadian Federation of Students has also opposed the proposed changes to the Board.
“As the highest decision making body of the campus community, the Board must be a place where students have input, representation, and voting rights,” the letter reads.
Runte said it is not a matter of whether students are on the board, but of how they are elected to represent students on the board.
“Faculty and staff would be able to serve—they just wouldn’t be able to be union executives. The discussion carried on to should that also apply to student executives,” Runte said. “There was never a question of not having students, faculty, and staff on the board. It was a question of should they be students that were elected from all the student body, or should they just be elected from the executive of the student association.”
CUPE 2424 president Pam Griffon-Hody said she sees this as an opportunity to mobilize those who are passionate about the Carleton community, regardless of other responsibilities.
“How can [their position as student union executives] be in conflict with their interest of running a great university?” Griffon-Hody said.
