Latest CUPE 3902 Statement
Statement from ASSU Executive:
Dear students,
Tonight you may have received an e-mail from Dean Cameron in the Faculty of Arts and Science informing you of your options going forward as the strike enters its fourth week. These options include using a letter grade system or CR/NCR system in place of numeric grades in classes where the instructor has been on strike. In addition to this, the Faculty has said that it will allow you to drop the course or use CR/NCR after you have received your grades. This is quite concerning.
While this may seem like a great thing, we urge you to take a step back and look at the grander picture. The university is throwing its academic integrity and your education out the door. You didn’t come here to just receive the credit and you paid thousands of dollars to receive an education – things you aren’t receiving right now. While these measures may provide a solution that allows students to graduate while not extending the term, they are precarious. We have all worked hard and now the integrity of all of our course work this semester is in jeopardy because of these measures. For a university that normally is quite concerned with maintaining a high standard of difficulty; these types of measures are shocking.
This allows us to save face for our GPA, due to a labour disruption that we did not cause, but it does not make up for the lost class time. These types of measures are in a way insulting. What the university is saying to us undergraduate students is that, here’s your credit to pacify you. That the credit and our GPA is the only thing we are concerned about, that we aren’t here to learn from our instructors. Fundamentally, university is willing to risk its own academic integrity as opposed to addressing the grievances that CUPE 3902 members have put forward.
E-mail cheryl.regehr@utoronto.ca and tell the Provost’s office to negotiate in good faith.
Many students have also come forward with concerns with regards to the department intervening in interrupted courses and implementing syallabi changes. From our correspondence with the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Faculty believes that this is allowed however has yet to point to a specific policy in the Academic Handbook that allows for this. ASSU believes that a syllabus is a contract between an instructor and a student – not the department and the student. As such, only the instructor can push for a vote to change things.
If a vote is being pushed in your class by the department, you can kindly request that they show you the policy that allows them to do this. The Academic Continuity Policy has not been enacted by the Provosts’ office so therefore – there is no policy. You can challenge departments on this and ASSU will be there to support you.
We’d also like to remind you of your syllabi rights:
– that is you have the right to vote on a change to the syllabus and that this change needs to be announced one class beforehand.
– in the options presented, you must be able to reject any changes or keep the original syllabus. You cannot be penalized for this. This is your right.
– you have the right to a secret ballot.
We have heard reports of coercion and of students not feeling comfortable, to our students, we say stay strong! These are your rights and we will help defend them.
If you have any further concerns or need to report anything – please visit us at SS1068, e-mail us at students.assu@utoronto.ca, tweet us, message us on this Facebook. We may take a while to respond – but we promise, we will respond.
Yours in solidarity,
The ASSU Executive