Dear Isabelle and Members of MSVU Senior Leadership and Board of Governors,
As a Mount Part-Time Academic and member of the Halifax community, I am writing in response to the Campus-Wide Bulletin circulated earlier today. I found this message both a disappointing breach of good faith bargaining and a disingenuous representation of the offers currently on the table.
I ask that you please take a moment to hear me out. As many of you know, the Mount’s part-time faculty are among the lowest paid in the country. We design and teach over half of the university’s courses, support and mentor your students, and contribute meaningfully to the intellectual and cultural life of this institution. Yet we do so with little to no job security and for a per-course stipend that ranks near the bottom nationally.
The Board’s decision to present its offer in percentages obscures a stark and persistent pay disparity between Mount contract faculty and our peers across the country. Our current per-course stipend is 29.59% below the 2024 national median Step One stipend of $8,058. The raise you have proposed for 2025 would still leave us 11.14% below that national average. Meanwhile, the Local’s request for a flat-rate stipend of $8,435—which you have characterized as unreasonable—remains 11% below the national average flat-rate stipend ($9,371 across 18 Canadian institutions). These figures show that our bargaining team is asking for a modest and long-overdue correction after years of undervalued teaching labour. This correction is all the more urgent as Halifax’s cost of living continues to rise, now ranking among the highest in the country.
As a proud member of this community, I believe deeply in the Mount’s publicly stated values and its social justice mission. Yet it is difficult to reconcile that mission with an employer that continues to extract as much labour as possible for as little pay as possible from its most precarious academic employees. Like most of my colleagues, I hold a PhD, have completed postdoctoral research, published in my field, and have a strong record of research, teaching and mentorship. Unlike my full-time colleagues, however, I lack access to a regular office, job security, health benefits, and pension contributions. My income is not sufficient to meet the cost of living without ongoing financial strain and debt.
I love teaching Mount students—they are among the hardest-working, most engaged, and most conscientious students I’ve encountered in my career. Like so many of my part-time colleagues, I’m deeply devoted to undergraduate teaching and learning. But I also know that we cannot give our students the time and attention they deserve when we’re stretched so thin—many of us, myself included, are commuting between multiple teaching jobs just to piece together a living. We do this work without the security of an institutional home, reapplying for our own positions term after term. We do it because we care deeply about post-secondary teaching and about our students’ learning. But I, like many of my colleagues, am increasingly exhausted and disheartened by the sustained exploitation and institutional disrespect that come with being treated as second-class academics.
You describe the Board’s offer as “reasonable,” yet it includes no pay increase for 2024 and continues to signal that the Mount undervalues the most vulnerable members of its academic community. I stand firmly and proudly with our bargaining committee in their refusal to recommend any agreement that fails to demonstrate genuine respect for the essential contributions of part-time academics; all of whom are highly trained professional educators who are central to the Mount’s teaching mission and to the success of its students.
We are indispensable to the functioning of this institution, and we expect a fair deal that reflects that fact.
Sincerely,
Larissa Atkison, PhD
Part-Time Academic
Mount Saint Vincent University