Fall General Meeting documents
FAUW presidential election results
Current FAUW president, David Porreca, has been re-elected by a strong majority to serve another two-year term from July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2027.
This was a record-breaking election, with 72.5% of all eligible voting members casting a ballot!
Didn't receive a ballot? Sign up to become a voting member now.
Questions & answers
Questions were welcomed in person and online. A summary of the questions posed, and FAUW responses, are below.
The employer seems to persistently bypass FAUW on employment related matters. Long term, what can we do to change this?
FAUW must stress that not every administrative branch behaves this way; others some units consult well, those that don’t are the source of our increased work - the Employment Agreements are a good example. FAUW does its best to regenerate the collegial governance between FAUW and admin, and we do have some areas of success - evaluation of teaching is a work-in-progress, and we have examples of some units being more collegial in their interactions with FAUW. We set the good example of non-hostile interactions to motivate the UW administration to work together. We have pushed back on Policy 1; we want these changes to be positive.
Gender-based salary anomaly reviews were promised to take place every 5 years, with the last report in 2020. Will there be a gender-based salary anomaly review in 2025?
Yes, the Salary Anomaly Working Group continues to look at gender- and race-based salary anomalies, with a work toward a report to begin in 2025.
Will faculty who signed employment letters over the summer be permitted to sign new letters? Can you please speak to the issue that teaching-stream faculty will now have different employment agreements than those in the tenure stream?
The new employment agreements (EAs) are being signed for all new appointments, including internal job changes and new hires. Following discussions at the Faculty relations Committee, changes have been made to the EA templates going forward. A Letter of Understanding is in the process of being finalized and shared with members, to clarify the content and intent of the employment agreements that had already been signed.
What is FAUW doing to challenge the modifications to Policy 33? Bill 166 poses extremely troubling challenges to academic freedom and to equity. Can you comment on how FAUW might consult faculty and other experts on anti-racism and mental health in the process of modifying Policy 33 ahead of the January deadline?
The directives for changing Policy 33 come from Provincial legislation, so there are limits on what we can challenge at this point. FAUW is working with FRC on changes to Policy 33 and with CAUT and OCUFA at the government level to address concerns at both levels. Once the changes are put into practice, there may be events that bring about more challenges to the legislation and policy. The provincial deadline for implementing changes at the institutional level is January 31, 2025.
Does institutional neutrality constrain the ability of committees or working groups who do work that is inherently political, such as equity and social justice work? When it interacts with academic freedom, what does institutional neutrality mean? When we talk about neutrality, we need to consider human rights violations.
FAUW defends our member’s academic freedom; however, as an organization we don’t benefit from this, it is the individuals who have academic freedom, not organizations. We are actively consulting and deliberating on what institutional neutrality means for FAUW. For the FAUW sub committees, we will need to define and come up with one that will please everyone and we are still working on it.
How likely are we to be talking about "financial exigency" and/or "program redundancy" in the near future?
The administration spoke to the University’s budget at their Town Hall. Budgets are political documents, a more accurate picture can be gained from reading the audited financial statements. OCUFA provides finance training that explains how to read these financial documents and having more FAUW members attend this training would be beneficial. FAUW is discussing details of the financial exigency process at FRC. More information about the process for financial exigency can be found in Section 16 of FAUW’s Memorandum of Agreement with the University.
Please feel free to contact fauw@uwaterloo.ca with any other questions or comments.