It’s easy to sustain arrogance

You may have noticed the 17 August email announcing that the Vice Chancellor has turned his attention to delegating the issue of the University’s sustainability to the PVC Science. Until this time, the idea of sustainability seemed to be a magical position on a spreadsheet with only 2 dimensions: expenses and income. Presumably we are now in that magical spot despite a few lingering cost cutting exercises in the colleges of Arts and Science.

From the list of colleagues chosen to consider the University’s sustainability, the concept has grown some dimensions. The AUS Branch applauds our members who have agreed to serve and has no reservations about their talent and expertise.

I am disappointed, however, that the senior management team (SMT) of the University did not take this obvious—and easy—opportunity to show some goodwill to Union members. In our regular meetings with the VC, Matthew Fitzsimons and I raised the issue of sustainability. Matthew has been especially interested in the concept of sustainable institutions.

Our point to the VC was simple: the biggest and most important resource of this University is the people who consented to work for it. A sustainable institution had workers that felt valued, facilitated their productivity, and met its mission to the community and the nation, that mission being broader than the annual TEC-mandated margin of financial return. It is the workforce of the University that keeps it functioning in bad times, financial or otherwise, allows it to recover more quickly as those times come to an end, and then raises the institution to new levels when times are good.

The VC first mildly undermined the idea of sustainability by alluding to how ambiguous the term had become, but then went on to say that he and the SMT were also discussing this issue. Predictably, the VC turned to financial sustainability as the means and ends to all other kinds of sustainability, but also acknowledged our environmental footprint and the need to be environmentally sustainable (if we could afford it). He then quickly connected a conversation on the contraction of parking spaces with sustainability and said that it was not just a cost-saving exercise, but a way for management to help all of us be more eco-friendly.

Yes we should all drive less etc. etc. But how we choose to meet our environmental goals should be left up to us. It rings hollow when an institution claims some karma credit for shifting a new burden onto the complex lives of its workers, all the while reaping a financial benefit and offering no substantive support for those who have to make changes in their lifestyles to accommodate this policy. All well and good, Mr. VC and your SMT, when you have reserved spaces.

There are other ways to achieve environmental goals, such as by turning vegetarian, that might be both more effective and suitable for some individuals than bicycling, bussing or walking to work. Indeed, commuting vehicles may be on multi-purpose journeys on each and every one of those days. Who is the SMT to say that that is poor use of vehicles compared to commuting by bus only to turn over their powerplants as soon as they arrive home so that they can run to the store, pick up the kids from sport and so on? Perhaps the time that staff would save by not having to orbit the remaining lots looking for a space, or putting the chain back on the front sprog, could be used by them to complete any number of new administrative tasks that are taken up to compensate for declining numbers of people across all sectors of the University. A focus on ‘sustainability by keyword’ runs the danger of creating a cascade of ill fitting fixes that ultimately run amuck and cause less sustainability as measured in other dimensions.

management has again signaled that they just don’t get it

Rather, the AUS argued that the VC should seek an institution that performs well under any circumstance and has the flexibility to not meet goals in one or more dimensions when that is needed. In other words, a sustainable institution is resilient: it functions well despite changing external and internal conditions. Dogged allegiance to a spreadsheet shows the potential fallacy of instead organising around sustained profit. In doing so, the University has not just turned-over some staff, but arguably has lost academic areas that will be hard to re-establish (e.g. in languages and cultural studies). Focusing on resilience, rather than on making particular inputs or outputs of the University “sustainable”, is a flexible way for the institution to continue to serve society, the ultimate sustainability goal. More importantly, a strategy based on resilience forces the SMT to properly identify the most important resources of the University for meeting the goals of its broad mission.
In other words, if the SMT took sustainability seriously, then they would already have realised that only people make an institution sustainable. It is the staff that make the University resilient. A sustainable University will have a happy staff supported by a management with their duty of care to the mission, as achieved through staff, foremost in their minds.

I recognise that there are numerous ways to work toward resilience. Those colleagues named on the committee announced by the VC have my greatest respect in this regard and I know that they take their Union with them to those meetings. But I won’t mince words: AUS expected that this committee would include at least one member who was chosen to represent the staff, not just their own academic qualifications. This campus is highly organised. Only a minority are not in a Union. As the largest of these, AUS is a representative voice.

The VC indicated that our input was important to him, but his overt actions to keep the Union at bay make me think otherwise. Sure I’m bothered that the VC was offered an issue in the form of dove to re-build relations with this Union and he has openly rebuffed it. This action undermines our confidence in management’s reasons for the soon-to-be announced joint AUS-UC project through the Partnership Resource Centre, which we thought was to promote mutual trust and respect. But more than bothered, I’m disappointed that management has again signaled that they just don’t get it. The University is not the SMT.

Jack Heinemann
Branch President
August 2007