Jo VanEvery 0:02
Hello. This is Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide of jovanevery.co.uk. Welcome to Creating A Satisfying Academic Career. I am Jo VanEvery, and today I will be talking to Professor Janice Liedl. Janice, can you introduce yourself and tell people a little bit about who you are, where you are, what you do?

Janice 0:32
Janice Liedl, I am a tenured, full professor of history at Laurentian University. It’s a small regional university, [a] regional comprehensive in northeastern Ontario. So it’s a small university where I do a lot. I have been Chair of the history department in the past, Director of the School of Liberal Arts, and now I just teach and put out fires.

Jo VanEvery 1:01
[Laughter.] Not literal fires, though, you know, you do live in an area where there are sometimes literal fires.

Janice 1:07
So far, not the literal ones.

Jo VanEvery 1:08
So far, not this year. I’ve known Janice for quite a long time, and I thought she might have something interesting to contribute here. There’s kind of lots of different things. What I’m trying to do, partly with my blog, and my business and this podcast, is to help people understand that there are lots of ways to have an academic career. It’s not like “Oh, there’s this ideal, and then there’s a bunch of like lesser versions”. Like, depending on your values, and you know whatever, there might be different ways that you might want to pursue that career. Of course, you have to do it in the circumstances that you are given. So sometimes you decide “This is the kind of career I want”, and sometimes this is the job you got, and you decide, “Okay, what can I do with this job?” So Janice has been in this job for a really long time, doesn’t really matter how she got there. She’s made a lot of it now. You know, she’s living in northeastern Ontario and she’s teaching history. And the other thing that’s come up recently, though, is – and especially, I mean, I’m in England where there’s just a lot of restructuring, department closures, people being made redundant, you know, voluntary schemes, compulsory schemes, whatever reduction in staffing in- on the support staff side, all of that kind of thing, and that’s also happening in other places. And I went through a little bit of that in 2002, which is a long time ago now. And when it was kind of like our department, I think everybody that wanted an academic job – there were two of my colleagues, one had already taken early retirement, one took an early retirement package. I had decided to leave academia anyway, and everybody else got another academic job, right? Because, you know, it wasn’t like everybody. Whereas now things are really different than they were back then, and I just feel like it would be helpful to be able to talk about some of that, because some people are trying to, like, have an academic career, or you know they might be in one. It might be under threat. It might be, you know, whatever. Even if it’s not happening in your own department, you’re seeing it happening in your institution, or in your friend’s institution, or something, and it’s just like, “When is it coming for me?” It really affects the choices that you make and that kind of thing. And Janice is working in an institution that went through this five years ago now? So you’ve kind of come out the other side now. You’re not in the middle of all the terrible, but it’s still recent enough that I think it’s more kind of relevant to what people are doing right now, and that was one of the reasons I invited you on, and you very kindly said you would be happy to talk about that. Well, not happy, but you, yeah, we could talk about that. Neither of us really want to frame this as ‘how to survive and keep your job when everyone else is losing theirs’. Not least because most individuals have very little control. You’re not… If you’re being made redundant, it’s not because you’re bad at your job. That’s the thing I just want to say to people. It’s not even necessarily that, you know, the reasons just feel – people will give you reasons, but it’s kind of hard. But it might be helpful to just kind of think through some of the things that you might experience, some of the things you want to be careful for, that kind of thing. So maybe we could just start with a bit of a recap of what happened at Laurentian five years ago. You know? What was the scale, and how, like, how fast did it happen? That kind of thing.

Janice 4:51
Yeah. So the brief recap is on the 1st of February in 2021, we got an email, an all-persons’ email announcing that the university was filing for insolvency, and this is shocking, out of nowhere. While, like with many institutions, we had been talking about there are some difficult choices, there are some issues to handle. This was really strange. It was also under Situation Companies Creditors Act that was really for corporations, but they had decided that this would work for the university to restructure us using a court appointed system to do that. And, in short order, a few members of the university faculty and staff were brought on board in a very secretive process with the justice to restructure the university, to close some programmes, to terminate faculty and staff in April, so just a few weeks later, then you know, a ripple of email appointments went out to people, and mass firings were taking place. Terminations. People were told that their jobs were gone. 193 faculty and staff.

Jo VanEvery 6:25
And how big was the university at that point, roughly, in terms of…?

Janice 6:29
About 350 full-time faculty. I’m not sure how many staff members…

Jo VanEvery 6:36
But that’s still 190 people getting those notices. That’s like a quarter, to a third of everybody, right?

Janice 6:42
Yes

Jo VanEvery 6:44
Oh my!

Janice 6:45
On top of that, a few weeks later came a sort of a second wave, where we had three federated universities that also offered degrees in collaboration with Laurentian, church-based universities, which is very Canadian kind of system to do, but the funding to them were- was all terminated as a result of this Act insolvency, and so a further 143 faculty and staff lost their jobs.

Jo VanEvery 7:15
Wow.

Janice 7:17
And and it’s not just the individual people, who were also important, this also led to the closure of almost 70 academic programmes. So degree programmes that we had: philosophy, religious studies, ancient studies, my own area, the graduate programmes in history, the French language programmes in history were gone. And obviously then the linkage was that the insolvency allowed them to close unprofitable programmes, and then to lay off, to terminate the employment of people associated with them. And in a few cases, where the numbers didn’t add up to enough people to make the financial viability that the Insolvency Act permitted, they fired some more. So we kept a French as a second language programme, but we fired every full-time faculty member who was associated with that. That kind of insanity. Within two years, the insolvency was completed and run through. Materials were all fully registered, I guess, and we were out of insolvency actually in November of 2022. Nicely, I can say the the people who led the charge into insolvency, our then president and provost, both were gone as a result of the insolvency. The province’s Auditor General looked into this and released a report that condemned the decision to go into insolvency, showing why that was wrong-headed. The federal government closed the barn door afterwards and said “No more public institutions can use this insolvency pathway to restructure.” But we were left holding the bag, and yeah, five years on last month they paid out the small amount of creditor money that individual faculty who were terminated with no severance, faculty who were retained but who lost elements that we were owed as well, and other creditors to the university finally got paid off last month.

Jo VanEvery 9:36
Wow! So that’s a kind of more extreme version than what a lot of people are facing. And I’m really glad somebody realised that was wrong, and that it should never happen again. It would have been nice if they had stopped it at the time. I think there was some collective action to try and halt that process at that time. I remember seeing, you know, there were presumably letters, letter-writing campaigns, and calling your MPs, and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, that’s that’s yeah, that’s a pretty extreme version.

Jo VanEvery 10:08
My own experience 24 years ago was definitely that it happened very fast. Like we got letters in May offering us a voluntary severance if we left by the end of the fiscal year, at the end of July. You know, it was kind of it was very fast. And I remember having a conversation with somebody in one of the administrative departments, you know, student records or whatever, that you know the people that are responsible for making sure the university is complying with whatever, and all the students are getting what they paid for and whatever, was just, they were just like, “Oh my goodness!” Like, it happened so fast, and nobody thought about this, this, and this, and who was teaching…? You know, there was just a whole set of things.

Jo VanEvery 10:49
So they closed a bunch of programmes, and, and then… So like, what was it like during that two years? Well, like everything happens… Like, April is kind of the end of the teaching, so they kind of announce this, and you’re trying to teach the rest of that year. So, for people that don’t know, most Canadian universities finish teaching early in April and have all the exams, and everything’s done by the 30th of April. But that’s like they’re sort of saying, “Okay, like once you’ve like marked all these exams, goodbye!” So, how is… Like, how can you… Like, two months, not even six weeks, whatever. What was that initial period like? Like, was everybody just in shock?

Janice 11:33
Shock [was] definitely a big part of that. If you were on sabbatical at this point, also during severance, you were cut off even sooner because you didn’t have to finish grading. So there were some people who were desperately trying to get back to close out their office under these crazy pressures, and waves of students coming saying, you know, “Is my degree programme still active?” Or, “If my degree programme is closed, what are my options?” And all of us going, “We don’t know the answers either.” If we survived in some irrational way, you know, I kept my job, I didn’t expect to, you know. But now we’re, we’re trying to pick up the pieces, and help each other, and the students along. And yeah, there’s no communication. There’s no clear guidance. There’s just, well, you know, keep going, figure it out.

Jo VanEvery 12:28
Right. And the students, like, am I right in in thinking that a lot of students at Laurentian are local? Like, it’s not like… Just thinking, like, it’s not like you live in Wolverhampton, and people can get there on the bus. You know? Like local, as in… I mean, I went to the University of Ottawa, which is also a bilingual university, and and Laurentian was [too]. I don’t know how much that got affected by this whole thing. I remember the statistics, right? Something like 60% of the population of Northern Ontario is first language French, and if those people want to study in French, and not be in Quebec, and there are cultural reasons why they might want to do that, they don’t have a lot of choices. And, and so, even though they might come from a long way – Hearst is nowhere near Sudbury, but it’s still kind of local, right? It’s like, it’s like you’ve got… Like, this is one of the few options for some of those people, certainly, people in the immediate area, North Bay, Sudbury, and you know around that area – francophone and anglophone. I seem to recall from the time, there was a nursing programme that was shut down, and it was you know one of the few that was kind of located in the north, and therefore people were doing placements in like northern healthcare settings. And that you’ve got students who, maybe – it’s a long way to Toronto, or to you know some of those other places where they’re, they might be able to kind of complete a programme, even if you were in a position to like facilitate the transfer so that they could finish somewhere else. So, like, presumably, that was also – you know, like, they’re not necessarily going to be able to go there.

Janice 14:11
Yeah, I mean it, it was that that element of chaos. And having had experience serving as Vice Dean, so I did a lot of support for students. And in, er, the year before, we had had a few programmes closed in motion picture arts and theatre arts, and so we had experience that year before with helping students either transfer to another institution, or work to teach them out with a combination of maybe they had a distance course at some place. Maybe we offered particular courses that we still had in other programmes that could relate. But now we’re doing this on steroids. We’re doing this for hundreds and hundreds of students who don’t know enough about the programme – and I don’t, don’t blame them – to know what to ask for. We were blessed with helpful colleagues at other universities. I made lots of friendships with people at other institutions, saying, “Could, you know, could you take this on? Would you, you know, have room for these students with these kinds of programmes and needs?” Or turn around to my own colleagues and myself and say, “Well, what can we do? What, what are cross-listed courses we have in our programmes that can help a student finish out a religious studies degree, an ancient studies degree, [to] help the- help them to complete that in some way or another?” So yeah, we, we uprooted and changed everything about our plans, because we had to cancel all the courses that our colleagues whose jobs were terminated. [We had to] cancel those plans. Maybe if we still retained an expert in that area, [we would] teach something that was necessary, [or] teach other things that were now suddenly needed. So, the the first summer just went by in kind of a fever dream, and the the next academic year we’re still, we don’t know what’s going to come of all of this, what this restructuring is going to look like, [what the] administration would threaten there. There might be more changes needed there, you know.

Jo VanEvery 16:27
So you’re all… So you’re, like, you’re under a sort of sort of sword, right? Like…

Janice 16:31
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 16:31
Right? And that there might be more changes needed. You’re still trying to work out the process driven from the top, isn’t really thinking about: “Oh, we have this many students to whom we’ve made these promises about degrees.” Like that’s all left mainly to you. There’s no real plan. It’s kind of like “We’re just going to get rid of these.” Like somebody is…

Jo VanEvery 16:56
Okay. I keep saying this, but every time I hear about these things happening around. I’m like somebody is managing from the spreadsheet. Like, I like a good spreadsheet, don’t get me wrong. I like a good spreadsheet, and you know I run my own business, and it’s tiny. It’s nothing like the size of running a university. I have no illusions that I could run something that big. But, you know, I understand at a basic level the value that having your financial stuff there, and thinking about what percentage is going to different things, and where your costs are, and all that kind of thing is helpful for making decisions. But I don’t, for a minute, think that I can make decisions based on trying to make the spreadsheet look a certain way, right? And I just really get the impression that a lot of these decisions are being made by people who have a formula, and and the fact that a lot of it is there are consultancy companies that are serving all the same institutions, but there is a kind of formula that says, “Oh, for an institution with this level of turnover, the the costs should be this percentage, and the staff costs should be like that, this smaller percent, you know, we should keep staff costs under control because they’re an ongoing liability.” You know, all of this kind of thing. And I, you know, I just feel like they’re taking that, they’re not considering the mission of the organisation. They’re not considering, like, “How do you actually deliver the work?”

Jo VanEvery 18:27
And, you know, because, you know, again, I’m not an expert, but I know that a lot has changed in manufacturing, for example. And in addition to, like, shipping a lot of the actual people [or] jobs to countries where wages were lower, the other thing that happened is that, you know in the 50s and 60s, there were a lot of human beings working on the production line at Ford, right? Like, you went to Oshawa, or you went to Detroit, or whatever. If you walked into that factory, there was a production line, but there were a lot of people that made those things happen. And now you’ve still got a production line. There are far fewer people. You’ve now got a lot of robots. You still need some people, but you’ve got a lot of robots doing things that people used to do.

Jo VanEvery 19:11
And, and so, I feel like, okay, like, so an accounting model that works for something like building mechanical things for which we now have robots that can do a lot of the work. Sure, this, maybe your staff cost shouldn’t be above a certain amount, right? But for healthcare, or education, or social care, all those kinds of things, it’s like you can’t actually do the work with a robot. It just doesn’t, it doesn’t happen. And so there, there’s like somebody that’s got this kind of thing about: “But the way the spreadsheet should look is the percentages should work out like this” – and and then you’ve got them saying, “Well, okay, so therefore let’s, you know, we’ve got these affiliated colleges. Well, if we get rid of that, that’s this much money. And if we get rid of this…” Right? “And here’s where this… Here, we’ll just cut all of this.”

Jo VanEvery 20:07
And it’s like, but, but, but, but, but, but there’s there’s human beings here. You’re not building cars that you just then don’t build. You’ve got students that are in the middle of a degree programme, and you haven’t considered what: A) what the degree programme now looks like, right? Because, like, one of the things you just said is for the ones that the people that stayed did try and say, “Okay, this is the degree programme you’re on. These are the credits you still need to finish it. Here are the people we have hanging around the place. Here are the courses that we’re going to be offering anyway.” You know, like: “You’re in ancient studies, we’re in history. We could give you this one that’ll cover that…” But, it’s like, these students no longer have any options. They no longer have a coherent intellectual programme for the core of their programme. If it was anything like, I don’t know, like, nursing, or you know, any of those kinds of things, it’s like, there’s all kinds of accreditation requirements, whatever, social work, those things, and you know, like, I just, it just feels like, like… Like, it’s not just that you’re stopping building so many cars. It’s kind of like you’re now… I don’t know… It’s almost as if you’re like, “Oh, okay. Well, we’ll just take… We’ll stop making the wheel rims or something.” I don’t [know]. You know? Like, I just…

Janice 21:18
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 21:23
My metaphor has completely fallen apart. But… So the people that are supposed to be in charge of making sure the institution runs are basically working off a spreadsheet and a rationale that isn’t taking this into account. The people on the ground – which most of the people listening to this are going to be the kind of people that are on the ground. They’re not up there making those decisions. They have no influence over those people. We can yell, we can write letters, and we absolutely ought to. We can have, you know, union campaigns. We absolutely ought to. But like, at the end of the day, the students are coming into your office, right? Like, they’re coming into your office. You have no idea what’s going on. You don’t even know if you have a job in three months’ time, or a year’s time, and the institution will not reaffirm for you that you do. They’re like, “Okay, you’re not in *this* wave, but we don’t know. We don’t know.” Right? You don’t even know. You have certain expertise, but not other[s]. And you’re, sort of, like… So how do you…? How did you look after yourself? Or did everybody just, like, did we end up with this just wave of illness of various steps amongst all the faculty and staff that remained?

Janice 22:44
I mean, it it was very hard, and if I had truly felt alone, if there were there were possibilities that I could feel very isolated. On the contrary, though, it- we had a good connection. We had weekly socials that we would just be consulting because this was a practice we had started during the the height of the pandemic. So we had these socials. We had a group of people who were within our faculty and knew how things worked, know how the sausage was made. I was one of them, but we could reach out to each other and so, you know, commiserate, going: “Well, this is really hard. I hadn’t thought about this problem popping up. How do we help these students now?” That kind of stuff. Sharing that information, [to] that middle level of people, who are, you know, the dean, or who had served in department chairs. By the way, all of our departments were closed during this insolvency. They restructured seriously, and so we had faculties, and then we had schools. The faculty of art became one enormous school, so everything from English, through sociology was all together in one administrative unit with one person running all those programmes, signing all those forms, leading all that hiring, which effectively meant we were all doing the work we had done before, but now with no compensation, and no support, with fewer staff members doing that, but we could turn around and say, “Oh, well, you were serving as Vice Dean before, or you had done this work as department chair before. You know where those records are. You know where the last year’s files are. Maybe we can all come together and make this year’s plan? So having that informal network, that was the most important thing. It kept me sane. I know it probably helped with a lot of other people. And people that you could just call on the moment there or shoot an email. “And say, I’ve got a problem I haven’t run into before. What do we do? How do we solve it?”

Jo VanEvery 23:44
And when you were doing that, you were – so you were consciously building connections amongst the people at that kind of level of people that have been department heads, people that have been Deans or Associate Deans, or whatever, and have some kind of institutional knowledge beyond their own department, and so that was one thing, right? That you’re able to share, and kind of help each other, and support each other to make sure that certain things happen and that work, you know, how to navigate certain things.

Jo VanEvery 25:42
How did you support junior colleagues, like, you know, colleagues who didn’t have all that and who were kind of like you know, on this, like, were you, were you consciously trying to build a kind of collective…? I don’t know. I kind of feel like, you know you’re in a situation where a lot of people could go into a kind of, not only feel isolated, but sort of isolate themselves in a sort of ‘every man for himself’ kind of a way. There might be some people whose tendency is very much towards that to protect themselves by just basically [isolation], right? And then there are other people who you know who just naturally just sort of build right? And there’s a bunch of union stuff happening, and there’s a… Right? But it’s also, like, you know in a restructuring, you also see a whole kind of thing where people trying to defend. Sometimes you get people trying to defend their – the importance of their thing, and their whether they are consciously setting themselves above somebody else, or whether, just the way they go about it, kind of ends up feeling to other people, like, “Oh, these guys are are trying to like throw us under the bus” or whatever. Like, how did you kind of deal with the potential for those dynamics, and what kind of like…? How, how did you kind of build some kind of sense of solidarity amongst the people that were still there? Like… Or did you, or did it just kind of happen? Like… Because I can see how you’re saying amongst the people that with the institutional knowledge that did sort of happen, and that was important to you personally, and presumably other colleagues. But, like, did you do stuff with other historians, for example, like there’s still some kind of a history department, so it’s not called a department, but you still run a programme, and there’s still a few of you around, right? So how did you make sure everybody kind of felt like they weren’t alone?

Janice 27:33
Oh gosh, yeah. I mean, there were eight of us left because all the the francophone historians were fired, and we waved them a heartbroken goodbye and tried to help them out the door in various ways, and stayed connected through email, phone calls, and visits. But those of us who remained, yeah, we we met even though we no longer had official institutional recognition. We’re just [like] “Well, you contribute to the programme.” But we met and we talked, and for the most part, that was our our first kind of level of connection, and identity that we always prided ourselves on, working well together, and being supportive. And now, well, we really had to. And we could turn around in there as well and say, “Well, you understand this part really well. Could you give the rest of us some advice?” And I mean, people stepped up. We had one of our colleagues say, “I can write a constitution for the new school.” Collaborate. So give a draft, share it first with the historians, and then share it with all the everybody else, and let that process, you know, come out. We had another colleague sort of say, “Well, I can help the students who were in religious studies, which is now closed. I collaborated with them. I’ve got you know some expertise that’s useful.” So, people were volunteering, which was part of it. But we’d also, might poke and say, “Hey, well, you’ve got this expertise. Could you do that?” And so, even people who didn’t volunteer, you reach out and you ask, “Can you do this? You, you, you know, what can you you share?” And by just sort of saying, “Hey, we’re all in this together. We’re all helping each other.” It it that core of the people who had been part of my my unit before, and now we’re in this bigger unit. We’re we’re spreading that out. We’re sharing that out. And so, now I could sit there and say, “I’m part of this School of Liberal Arts” – which is everything from English down through Law and Justice. If you go alphabetically, we’re all in there. And we do connect more. We do collaborate more, because we’ve learned how to build that. So, that…

Jo VanEvery 29:46
Right. But one thing I I’ve heard you [say], like, in all that.. One of the things I wanted to pull out there was even though the institution officially closes your department, doesn’t mean you have to stop being a department. Right? Like, like, maybe you call yourself a ‘subject group’. Maybe you call your[self]… Like, whatever you call yourself. It doesn’t matter. Maybe you’re unofficial, but especially through the crisis, and when you’re trying to figure out: “How do we help these students?” Like, so initially: “How do we get to the end of April, [and] get all these students out of here?”, And then: “How do we get through the summer and figure out what we’re doing in September when the new students come, or when the existing students come back to do their next year?” Right? “We don’t even know what we’re facing.” You can… You don’t have to wait for somebody. You don’t wait for… You didn’t wait for somebody senior to say: “This is how you’re going to organise”. Not least because they had shown themselves not to really have a plan for that, but you just were, like: “Okay, well, we used to be a department, so we’re not officially a department anymore. For these official things, we need to go to this new school meeting. We need the official head of school, or head of the faculty, or whatever signing things. But for just making decisions about how we think this should go, and figuring out the proposal, and figuring out, you know, what we’re going to do with this group of students, or this group of courses, or whatever it is, we can just meet anyway and work together to do things.” So there’s there’s a – that kind of thing happening. That’s what you’re saying.

Janice 31:21
Exactly. [Which] is that we we function as a group. And yeah, I I’d say: ‘department’, but the the word kind of hurts, because they did take that away from us that identity, and, and all that, but we we function as a team. We function as a group, and we, we can sit there and say: “We’ve got that expertise that both can help us run the programme, develop new courses, come up with ways to improve what we’re doing, recruit the the students that fit what we have now.”

Jo VanEvery 32:01
Yeah.

Janice 32:02
…which is another big shift as well. And develop towards… You know, they use word ‘sustainable’, but from, you know, rather than looking from on-high with the spreadsheets, (what the spreadsheets say is sustainable), let’s look at from the grassroots what’s sustainable, from the ground level, that we can do, that we can provide for the students. And, and I think that, again, [it] has to be collaborative. And that was what we were able to do, with: “Okay, you, you know how to do this. You, you know you’ve got this expertise. Would you teach this course again next year? I know it’s a repeat, what you normally wouldn’t do, but the students need it.” [and] “Sure, sure. We’ll we’ll we’ll we’ll be a team.”

Jo VanEvery 32:47
Okay. Were there… Were there changes in things like staff student ratios, like: how many people in a class? What the… You know? I’m hearing from some clients that even before there’s any of this restructuring stuff, they’re getting like directives from on-high saying: “No module that has fewer than 10 students can run”, or “No….” Right.? Like, they’re changing the bar, like, the bar you – or the bar used to be at 10, and now it’s at 20, and all that kind of thing. They’re saying: “We want to consolidate and offer fewer options.” So, I had one client saying she had been, you know, she was a head of department, and the, there had come down this thing saying: this one programme their department ran, needed to cut this many of their, the courses they had, they offered. Right? The modules they offered. And it came down as a kind of: “Just tell us which ones aren’t going to happen.” [Laughter.] And her approach… [Janice nods.] I know. But her approach was very much like, what you were talking about, which was to get the group of people that taught on that programme together and to say: “Okay, what’s happening here is, you know, they’re saying ‘cut this’, but what they mean is: ‘we need to only offer this many’. Right? And there’s going to be this many students, and you know? So: “What, what are we proposing as a programme that would have some intellectual coherence?” – all that kind of thing. Because, I think, that’s the thing a lot of people are really worried about, is: “Are we going to lose the intellectual coherence of this?” Like: “Do the people making these decisions with their spreadsheets, (whether they’re the senior managers of the institution, or the consultants, or whoever they are), do they really understand what it means to have a history degree, or what it means to have a religious studies degree? Or, you know, that kind of thing. And what the – that these aren’t just a kind of pick-and-mix, you know? I don’t know. Like, like, sweets or something, where you might just be like, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter. These are the ones I like, and these ones I don’t. We put them all together, and they’re all serving the same function.” It’s more like a recipe, where you need certain things. You can’t bake a cake… You know? You can’t make an omelette without cracking eggs. It’s no longer an omelette if we have no eggs… Right? So, I think there’s, you know, there’s that kind of feeling that people feel this real attack, not only on their jobs, and their colleagues’ jobs, and their conditions of work, but also just this sense that the people running the institution they work for don’t understand the very basic things about what they’re doing, and about what teaching at the university level involves.

Janice 35:26
Exactly. There’s a huge disconnect between what we knew we needed to do, and what they were, sort of, saying: “Well, just…” You know? “Put the show on, and get those people in the classrooms.” We’re seeing… It’s… Everybody knows it’s more complicated than just: ‘we offer the number of courses required, and students take them’. You know? Sometimes you’re sitting there going, “Well, whatever you do, don’t run a course on Thursday night because that’s pub night.” You know? That, that used to be the, sort of the go-to to comment, now. And now we, we might be sitting there and saying: we’ll also be thinking about the students who are living off campus, and how they commute in, and what times. If you have this class running in, you know, in in in the hour where the bus doesn’t [run], you, you can’t get the students there, whatever. So, we’re looking at those complications. And yes, the university started to say, “Well, we need so many people. Raise that up.” Our, our French language minimums, which were always a little bit lower than our English Language, just because the student body group was a little bit smaller, those crept up from, I think it was a minimum of six, to eight or 10. And sometimes we have to push back and go: “You know what? You you just don’t have that many people who need that fourth year course. But if we cancel it, they’re not going to finish their degree.”

Jo VanEvery 36:55
Yeah.

Janice 36:56
You can’t have it both ways.

Jo VanEvery 36:59
Yeah.

Janice 37:00
So, looking at that, having them try to numbers manage, spreadsheet manage from on-high, and you know, our our deans would be in the middle, being squeezed from both directions, being told: “Well, you’ve got to make sure you have everything you need for your students to graduate, but we don’t want to pay for a small class when we know that classes should all have, you know, dozens of people in them.” It became really challenging. And so, trying to come up with ways: “Do we run a course in a hybrid format too?” Because now we’ve lost the local faculty member. Maybe we need to find somebody who can teach that course for us, but they’re in Ottawa, or they’re in Toronto area, so they’re going to have to Zoom in this year to finish that one course. We’re all sorts of juggling acts going on, but we kept saying, “What’s the Programme require? What’s that disciplinary expectation?” We didn’t have the accreditors, so everybody teaching an accredited programme had 10 times the headaches we did because they’re also answering to those outside institutions and oversight. But I also would sit down opposite, say, the engineering accreditors, and be talking to them about: “Well, what are we doing from the Faculty of Arts to make sure that those accreditation requirements are being fulfilled by the, for the engineering students? What are we doing for the nursing programme so that the students get the language learning that they are promised and need?” It’s all an issue of that cooperation. It’s all respecting what your discipline needs.

Jo VanEvery 38:51
So, would you say there was, like, a period in the immediate, like, during and immediate[ly] after, where everybody was kind of working extra hard, and going the extra mile? And are they getting a break from that now, kind of, five years out? Like, is it, is it easier now, to be able to say ‘no’ to things, to be able to actually say: “I need this time for my research”? Is it, you know: “I am going to take my vacation” – and all that kind of thing, right? Like, like… I’m just, you know, because I worry a lot. There, there is a kind of an epidemic of burnout, and it’s not really surprising given how much pressure people are under. But like, that’s, that’s basically a recipe for burnout, you know? And, and, and people care. Like, this is the thing, is, what you’re saying is: “We all cared enough about the intellectual content of what we teach, and the the, sort of the, the sort of academic integrity of the degrees. We cared enough about our colleagues, and about our students, that the fact that our employer was doing things that we thought were just fundamentally wrong, (and which had been, have now been confirmed to be fundamentally wrong by governments and others), that we still need to do this work. And we need, we need to go the extra mile, even though we’re not being compensated for it. Even though, right, it means we’re not going to be able to spend the summer writing a book, or an article, or anything else.” Right? Like, I mean, that summer, presumably nobody did any writing. Like, you know, you were all busy trying to just manage the mess. But… And you’re doing that on the, in anticipation of the fact. And I’m sure there are people in organisations right now, who are like: “Okay, we’re in that part, right, where it feels like it’s impossible, and where I feel like I have to step up, and go the extra mile” – and all the rest of it. And “I do have this expertise”, or “I could help”, right? And “I don’t want the students to suffer more than they have to”, whatever. But you’re doing that, kind of, in anticipation that there will be a point, not too far in the future, where a) you will still have a job, and b) you will be able to – your job will become a bit more, like, balanced, even if it’s now kind of a different job because of these increased student number in classes. That, that kind of thing. So, over that five years, how did, how did the shape of that look?

Janice 41:18
Wow, that’s a really good insight to bring, because, yeah, five years on, I can look back and say, the first year and a half was full out panic mode, pretty much the entire time, working late, working through the weekends, having problems live in my brain almost all the time, and so the struggle to sort of unload and disconnect was, was huge. After that sort of 18 months to two years of of being in crisis, that point where “Okay, I can breathe” on occasion. It’s not going to be… Everything’s not going to fall apart. We, we’ve got this. We’ve got, if not a new normal, we’re, we’re moving towards that. I I will admit I made things more complicated. I took on a role of director of a school. We, we created two schools within the Faculty of Arts in the next year after the crisis, and I took over one of them. So for the same amount of release I’d had being chair of the history department before, I was responsible for eight different programmes, almost two dozen faculty members, [and a] whole bunch of questions that that upped the the complication and the commitment of time. So, there were many nights [where] I was working till 9 o’clock. I was back up at the computer at seven the next morning. That was unsustainable. But one of the ideas of doing that work was also to say: “Okay, let’s start building back in the infrastructure that we need”. We created new positions of programme coordinators with some credit, so allocated to each of the programmes we run now in the school. Have a faculty member from that discipline who leads that programme, who does things like scheduling and advising, who helps lead the hiring. And so five years on, I could sit back and say, “We’ve got this – in that we’ve got a more sustainable model where people are properly compensated for that kind of administrative work that they’re doing. That our programmes and our disciplines have homes, and leadership that we can take vacations, [and] even if sometimes we’re taking calls on vacation, we can take that time to read and write, and think again.” People are, are becoming more active. And I mean, the other real highlight is in those five years, we’ve brought back four of our colleagues from the Faculty of Arts back to full-time tenured positions.

Jo VanEvery 44:18
Amazing!

Janice 44:19
Some in the programmes they were originally, [before] those irrational cuts. Some in other programmes where an interdisciplinary ability allowed them to move from one to the other. And bringing back those people, having them there and their wisdom, their skills, their their leadership, their teaching. That’s amazing. Having them back as people is just the best part of all.

Jo VanEvery 44:46
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s really good. Yeah, because… But I mean, that’s one of the things about being a relatively small institution, right? Is that you do have that sense of knowing people, and of community. And you’re also in a relatively remote place. I mean, it’s like a five-hour drive to either Toronto or Ottawa, isn’t it?

Janice 45:13
Yeah, and and the very Canadian way of measuring – we measure in hours of driving, and not in kilometres.

Jo VanEvery 45:19
Those are hours of driving on open road, like, you’re not hitting traffic until you’re in the last half an hour of that, really. [Laughter.]

Janice 45:28
Exactly.

Jo VanEvery 45:28
For people that live other places, like this is, you know, and those are the sort of large cities, and and the… Probably the closest other [place is], I mean, I suppose to Saint Marie is also got, but it’s like another sort of relatively remote place. But, you know, so you’re not in a place with lots of, you know, big urban centre. Like, like, Sudbury is a big urban centre for that area, and it’s, you know, it’s mainly a mining and industrial kind of heritage place. And, and so, you know, you do, as a university, then have this, kind of like, this is the sort of hub for that kind of thing. And, and you do get to know each other, you know, in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily if you were working at a big big university, or even you know, or even an institution in a bigger place, where there’s multiple universities around, or whatever. So, so I can see how that would be good having people [close], you know?

Jo VanEvery 46:26
And people therefore are are kind of… It sounds like, people have a commitment to the institution, that’s really not so much about the institution as an employer, or as, you know, a set of… Right? It’s like, it’s as a community, right? Like, the university as a community, that then also has this official form. So, I think that that kind of mirrors, in some ways, that sense of: ‘Well, they got rid of, they got rid of your departments, but you still had those…’ Right? ‘You still had those units.’ And you then, by taking on this director of school thing, set up official infrastructure for programme coordinators, and whatever, so that there could be those, officially, kind of groups, and leadership, and coordination around sensible academic, you know, programmes, or whatever. But also, it sounds like there is this kind of sense of the university as a community, which is in some ways not the same as the university as an employer and provider of education, and whatever. It’s like, we are in… And, and, that’s kind of separate from this question of the historical kind of collective governance issue. Like, because part of the reason this kind of thing can happen, is because there has been this constant erosion of collective governance by faculty of universities over a long time, so that senates no longer have the kind of power that they did maybe 50 years ago. Right? And that, and somebody in the the president’s office can make a decision: “We’re going to do this, and just email everybody.” And it, you know, it takes two years for even the regulatory bodies to be like: “Wait a second. No, you can’t.” By which time, it’s already happened, right? So, I think that’s something, maybe that’s worth people keeping in mind. But also, yeah, like, you you sort of need to protect yourself. But there is this period where, where it is panic mode, and you’re working a lot, and there are certain things that are important to you that are not happening, and you’re kind of taking it on trust that you’re going to be able to pick those up again. But it’s partly, you’re doing that on trust, basically because you trust other members of your community.

Janice 48:52
Yeah, building… Rebuilding some sort of trust. We trusted each other all the way through. The… Those of us who had been retained, those of us who we saw move on elsewhere. That, that kind of connection, and collective identity is still there. [On the subject of] Building trust, I I will credit that the interim leaders that were brought in, with the end of insolvency, they brought in two senior academics from other institutions who selflessly spent like, a year and a half, two years of their life helping us rebuild. Saying to us, “You’re right. That isn’t normal, what you’ve experienced here. And here’s a better way of doing things, rather than the systems that you have in place.

Janice 49:41
For the first time in my 35 years as a full-time faculty member, I was invited up to the top floor to the provost’s office for a meeting, and I told our provost that, and she was shocked, saying: “Well, that’s just not the way things were done. We were told from on-high in an email or a letter.” But to talk to us? Wow, that’s different. So in some ways, I will say that things are changing a bit. There’s a lot of hesitancy, a lot of concern, but we can look around at each other, and I can say: “Hey, I know you in the sciences. I know you over in the faculty of education and health, I…” You know? I I can talk to people across faculties, and feel like: “Yeah we get it.” Even if they are new people who’ve come in in the last few years, that sense that: “We connect to each other, we belong to each other.” Maybe the, the upper administration continues to support that, with little cookouts, and of special events, but it’s only going to really continue if we do it, if we buy into each other, and we say: “You’re important to me, you’re important to the collective identity of faculty here.”

Jo VanEvery 51:03
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s yeah, it’s it is a hard, it is really a hard thing. What would you say…? Like, before… There must have been a good basis. Like you said: “We already worked together as a team in the history department”, you talked about having already that sense of community, that, that sort of thing. So, like, what kinds of things would you say were important? Like, looking back, what what maybe was important from the before times, [Laughter.] (if I can use that term), that, that laid that, kind of, [that] you realised had provided a really good foundation? Like, looked at from here, you’re looking back, and you can be like: “You know what? The fact that we had done things this way, or that we had, you know, whatever, really laid a foundation for us to be able to respond in this way. I’m really glad we had already done that.” Like, what…? What would you…? Is there anything you might identify?

Janice 52:09
Yeah, there are a couple things. One would be that we had regular monthly talks that would be done by faculty members, or students, or invited guests in. So, we had that kind of connection every month, come to the, the colloquium and either present, or learn, and I would be wowed by something new that I got from one of my colleagues: “Yeah, we’re all historians, but this is amazing to me.” So, that kind of literally sharing just what we’re doing, sometimes a draft of a conference paper that’s going on. I had one colleague who said, “Hey, everything I gave at one of those department colloquiums turned into an article or a chapter.” What a, you know, great way to sort of keep that ball rolling on productivity, you know, for my my academic work. But, but also, that sense of: “Can we just connect in the hallway? Can we connect, you know, call each other up or text each other up, trying to build that that that kind of connection?” So, that would have been one thing, I think, that sense of the: “Listen to each other, respect each other, promote each other as, you know, academics.”

Janice 53:32
But the other thing really was turning around and sort of saying: “What can we retain that’s really great?” We have hundreds and hundreds of volumes of bound senior and graduate theses that students have written over the decades. I I kind of glommed onto them when, you know, the offices were being emptied and people are going, “Oh, what do you need that for?” You know? And I said: “No, no, we’re going to keep all those. We’re going to catalogue all of those on Zotero. Some of them are there in the library. That’s okay. We’re we have our whole collection now. We have it, you know, catalogued and organised.” And, and having that, [and] saying: “Okay, yeah, we’re still historians, and you can go back, and you can see what we- our students were doing in the 70s, in the 90s, in the 2010s. It’s there.” – keeping that sense of what we were, and what we still are. So, I’ve got a student. We’re finalising the last edits on her thesis, and that will go in the collection. That will carry it on.

Jo VanEvery 54:39
Right. No, that’s yeah, and and I think yeah. So, but what was… One of the way… The way you phrased that was really interesting, (I want to make sure nobody misses this), is you you phrased it as: “What do we want to keep?” Right? And really thinking about, like: “If we can’t keep all of this…” Right? It’s like… So, I think it’s so easy to be, like: “We’re, we’re being asked.” Right? The demand comes down (like that exam-, that example I gave earlier from one of my other clients), the demand comes down from on-high, asking you to cut things. Right? And it, like, it frames the question as: “What can we get rid of?” And of course, as soon as that happens, you’re just like: “I don’t want to get rid of anything. I don’t want to get rid of anything. How do we…?” Right? But switching the question around to: “What do we want to keep? What’s the core of this thing we do? What do we already do well?” Right? Like: “We don’t have… We, we, we can’t… If we tell them we can’t, we have to keep everything. We will have no control at all.” I think this is the hardest thing about this, right, is that what you want to say is: “Look, there is nothing wrong with what we’re doing. We want to keep all of it. It’s all important, and all we need to do is convince these people that that what we do is important, so they will let us keep it as as it is, what it is now.”

Jo VanEvery 56:01
And I think, while the impetus to do that is completely understandable, and while on one level that is absolutely true, there is also a sort of stereotype of academics that circulates amongst the more senior managers, which is that academics are resistant to change, and so as soon as you do that, that kicks in, and they stop asking. Right? And then you lose all control, or you’re very much at risk that you’re not going to have any input at all, or they’re not going to, like, respect your input, because they don’t, because they just think you’re being resistant to change, and that you’re not with the programme. And so, the, one of the really difficult things to do in all of this, is to kind of a, turn the story around to say: “What do we want to keep? And how do we do that within this new framework?” So, if the new framework says: “We can only offer this many options for people in the history programme.” – instead of saying: “What do we lose out of the, what we have now?”, we can start by: “What do we want to keep? What’s important to us? What kind of a history programme do we have? And what kind of history programme could, could we have in that? And how do we, how do we kind of create options that fit with that, and that allow us to do the things we’re good at?” All that kind of thing, even if that means you know, in some ways, feels like more work than just you know throwing a few things out, right? “How do we keep it coherent? How do we keep all that, you know, that academic integrity of whatever programme we’re offering?”

Jo VanEvery 57:39
And then, as you hinted at earlier in the conversation, you then have, also a much more solid understanding of what you’re now offering to new students when you’re trying to recruit new students. Right? Saying, like: “This is what this programme is now. It’s not this thing that’s missing a lot of parts. This is it. It’s a coherent programme.” But you’re trying to do that at a time where, where really you’re, you kind of know that, the the senior people only really care about: “Do you have the right numbers? How many people are taking each class?”Right? You know what I mean? Like, the the things that are important to you.

Jo VanEvery 58:14
So, it’s partly this kind of weird situation, where you’re, you’re kind of trying to deal with that tension. And I, you know, one of the things that occurs to me is that this there’s this concept that’s getting a lot more attention now, but it was originally formulated to explain things that members of the armed forces are experiencing, which is this notion of moral injury, right, where you are doing a job because you have a certain set of values, but where you are being actually required by your senior people to do things that are fundamentally opposed to your core values, and you have to do those things, but it is psychologically injuring, right? Seems to me that Romeo Dallaire’s whole… You know, how thick was that book?

Janice 1:02:18
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 59:10
So, Romeo Dallaire was the Canadian general who was in charge of the UN peacekeeping mission to Rwanda back in the 90s. And, afterwards wrote a book, which the English title of which is “Shake Hands with the Devil, if I remember correctly, and it’s a kind of scathing critique of the terms of engagement of peacekeeping as a model, and, and what it meant. And I actually have a friend who served in that peacekeeping mission, and you know, one of the things he talks about is, how hard it was, because as peacekeepers, you, you know, you’re there. I mean, you’re there. You’re committed to this mission of keeping the peace, right? The UN terms of of engagement are that: you are not allowed to use your weapons, right, unless you have been directly attacked. And, and that relies on the idea that these guys aren’t going to attack each other, right? The peace will be kept because you’re watching them, right? And what happened in that conflict, and I’m sure in others, was you know… So, my friend talks about how hard it was to be there, basically watching people massacre other people, right, and not being allowed to intervene, even though the reason you’re there is to stop the massacre, right?

Jo VanEvery 1:00:37
So, I think that example gives a very clear understanding of where the moral injury comes from, and clearly nobody is being literally massacred in universities. Like, it’s not the same scale as watching people with machetes kill other people and blood everywhere. Right? That’s not what we’re talking about. But I think that idea of that conflict between the values that you hold, and that you feel, are central to the work you do, and that you have been employed to do, and then the things you are being asked to do by your employer, and that disconnect – that there is a point where that disconnect becomes too much, and it is actually harmful. And that, that in these situations is often what people are trying to manage.

Jo VanEvery 1:01:31
And I don’t know what to do about that, other than to make people aware that that’s a thing, right? Because I think, if you’re aware that that’s a thing, you can at least name it, and see: “This is what I am being asked to do, and it is contrary to my values. And how do I maintain…?” Right, right? And one of the ways you did that was to say: “Okay, how do we as a group maintain the academic integrity of this thing? How do we support each other? How do we make sure, you know, we care about these students? We don’t just see them as numbers on a spreadsheet. How do we make sure that they’re getting something valuable out of this? Not because the university has a contractual obligation to give it to them, but because we care.”

Janice 1:02:20
Yeah. This matters, and it matters enough. So sometimes we have to say: “No. We can’t do that. We can do this.” So, again, being a bilingual institution, with so many of those closed programmes were francophone programmes, so many of the faculty whose jobs were terminated – they were francophone faculty. And one of the things we had to say was, “Well, we have to have a requirement to give enough courses so that our students can complete an entire degree in French in those remaining programmes, and and also have enough electives. But we’re also not going to try to offer courses that we don’t have that expertise, we don’t have that backing behind.” And that’s, that’s causing us to, you know, stop now, now that we’re five years on, and say: “Wait a second, we’ve maybe been operating on that emergency footing a little bit too long.” Maybe we need to say: “Okay, university, if you want us to keep supporting these students, you have to have that faculty, full-time faculty commitment here and there, where we’ve been pasting it over for a while, and making it carry on.” I mean, our school again, has also said: “We believe that any degree programme we offer needs to have be supported by three full-time faculty.” Sounds radical, I know.

Jo VanEvery 1:02:43
Well, I mean, it doesn’t even sound that radical, right? “We need three people to run a programme in history.” Like, seriously, like, that’s like… Like, because what you’re saying is, like, there needs to be a core of three full-time faculty, and then we’re going to hire a bunch of part-time and you know whatever. And you’re in a [remote] geographic location… Like, if you’re in Toronto and making that decision, there are any number of qualified people that live in commuting distance, right? Nobody lives in commuting distance [to you]. No, no, right? Like, like, like you only go there, right? And I mean, it’s the same for lots of places, right? Like, um, you know that, and they, so this, you know, especially when you’re in a more rural and remote institution, of course, you need.

Janice 1:03:51
No, no.

Jo VanEvery 1:04:06
Right? Like, like, like you only go there, right? And I mean, it’s the same for lots of places, right? Like, um, you know that, and they, so this, you know, especially when you’re in a more rural and remote institution, of course, you need [that].

Janice 1:04:32
Yeah, yeah, you need that commitment, and then you need to turn around and say, “Well, if you want us to do this, we can only do it when we have these resources, when we have this commitment.” Otherwise, say: “You know what? We, we close that programme”, or: “We can’t offer that minor anymore. You need to take it off the the record books, even as an option that way, because we just can’t do that.” And so, that’s the… I think that’s where we are right now in in terms of our our moral compass is saying: “Okay, we’re at, or close to, that new normal. Let’s take stock of what that actually means, and let’s continue to hold true”, because we’ve sit there- sat there, and said: “These students have needs. Yeah, we have these programmes, yes, but are there full needs beyond what’s just there in the programme?” That’s for a major’s at our university, 42 credits out of 120 in a four-year degree. So there’s, you know, the vast majority of credits are taking elsewhere. “Do we have enough courses that they can actually do that in a coherent way, or are we just shifting everybody?” Right now, we have a requirement for, in the Bachelor of Arts, you take six credits of courses that fulfil Indigenous content. Our francophone students have two, three credit courses, so they have no choice. It’s a false choice, really. There are very few others. They they can, if they’re in psychology at the upper year, they could take a fourth year psychology course that that covers that area. If they’re in the sociology programme, every other year, there’s a course that that might be offered, but for the vast majority, they’re they’re stuck with this. And that’s, that next step of of fighting for, and saying: “We need to be fulfilling this, not just on paper, not just in the way that makes the spreadsheets happy. We need to be fulfilling these programme requirements, and the student needs in ways that are really authentic and fair.”

Jo VanEvery 1:06:54
Yeah. And, and I guess then the question becomes, like, 1) if you’re saying: “Either do this, or we have to close out this programme.” – that you’re making, you know, the decision about programme closures ends up getting dropped down to the level of academics, and it feels like something you don’t really want to be doing. On the other hand, you’re also kind of saying: 2) “Well, if this institution has a mission to be a bilingual institution, here’s what’s needed to do that. If we need… I mean, yeah, we’re Northern Ontario rural institution. The Indigenous studies requirement seems completely [fair], you know. I mean, when I was an undergrad, we weren’t talking about that. But in the 21st century, not to be talking about Indigenous content in degrees, especially when you’re in in those kind of areas, like, I mean, it should be for everybody, but you know, especially somewhere like Sudbury, you just kind of feel like, well, we’ve made that. It was clearly the argument was made strongly enough that that requirement was put into these degrees, and now we need to make sure that we’re actually able to meet that in a way that isn’t just ticking ticking a box, right?

Jo VanEvery 1:08:03
On the other hand, you’re also kind of saying: 2) “Well, if this institution has a mission to be a bilingual institution, here’s what’s needed to do that. If we need…” I mean, yeah, we’re [a] Northern Ontario rural institution. The Indigenous studies requirement seems completely [important], you know? I mean, when I was an undergrad, we weren’t talking about that, but in the 21st century, not to be talking about Indigenous content in degrees, especially when you’re in in those kind of areas, (like, I mean, it should be for everybody), but you know, especially somewhere like Sudbury, you just kind of feel like: “Well, we’ve made that [decision]. It was clearly, the argument was made strongly enough that that requirement was put into these degrees, and now we need to make sure that we’re actually able to meet that in a way that isn’t just ticking ticking a box.” Right?

Jo VanEvery 1:08:04
And, and you’re kind of putting, as academics with the, with the thing about academic integrity, and how do we…? Right? You’re coming from those values around academic integrity, and whatever. You’re also thinking about your workloads. You’re also thinking about, you know, the students. But it’s partly about, like, the driving thing there is, the academic integrity of the programmes, and then the resources necessary to deliver those in that kind of way. And you’re basically going to the senior management to say: “If we’re going to have this as a mission statement, as a, you know, whatever, here are the resources that are required to do that.” And in a context where there’s a better than even chance, they’re going to say no…

Janice 1:08:52
Or, if they say yes, they turn around and say though, you know: “Give it to us, give that material to us.” You know, we talk about how workload burdens, you know, and service burdens tend to fall disproportionately on women, and on minority scholars. Well, this is also, then, take that linguistic minority, our, you know, our our [francophone] colleagues are getting that downloaded onto them. If we can’t come in and say: “Hey, wait a second, no, you’ve got to provide some resources that help us do it. We can provide leadership, and we can provide the oversight, but we can’t do all of these things, [and] create it from scratch. Especially when we’re taking our colleague, who, who’s there in the most unsupported elements, and saying, “Oh, well, would you do this additional service task for free? No problem.” [/sarcasm] [Laughter.]

Jo VanEvery 1:09:45
[Laughter.] Like, yeah… But, and that’s… But that’s the thing, like, there has to be that, kind of, like… And I guess for people at your stage of career, and with the experience you have, like, even when you’re not being the director of the school, or the head of department, whatever, like, [when] you’re not officially, in that… That… It sounds like, during the crisis at least, people in that sort of position, that sort of stage of career, with that kind of experience, were supporting each other to try and support people and make sure… And I think that, that… I think [that] is a very important thing when you get later in your career, is to, is to kind of, figure out how to protect your junior colleagues who may not have, either the employment security, or just the, you know, the kind of confidence that comes from having been around for a long time, to be able to push back, right? Like, a lot of times, you know, if they’re pre-tenure, or if they’re on a precarious contract, you know, it takes a lot for them to say ‘no’ to this extra stuff. And they do care about the student. Like, and the, the ‘yes’ is coming from the place of caring, right? The ‘yes’ is coming from a place of caring. And I think, you know, in in a lot of ways, the more senior people, and the more secure people, have to at least say out, out loud when demands are being unreasonable, even if it doesn’t change anything. Right? Like, you need to confirm for everyone that: “We know that this is unreasonable.” and try as much as you can to help people be confident, and know when they can say ‘no’ to things, right? That it… That it’s okay. Unfortunately, that just leaves people in your position at higher risk of burnout. Which, I guess, you know, a couple of years ago, when I wasn’t even really thinking about: “Oh, I need to do podcast episodes”, but I did it as a conversation because it worked for her. But one of the things, if you look back in the episodes of the podcast, is a relatively long conversation with a French academic called Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, who was at that time, suffering from burnout. She is now back at work. The: “You don’t recover completely, ever.” And part of that was, she was a full professor. She had… Right? And she talked about the solidarity amongst other women professors, about how they managed to juggle university requirements, that all committees had this percentage of women on them, but there was like a lower percentage. You know? Like, it wasn’t proportionate to the time. Sure, like, everybody listening is nodding, and they sometimes, you know, sort of collaborated to just refuse, (like, not, not just like me personally), “I’m going to refuse to sit on this committee”, but none of us are going to do that. They’re not going to have a woman on that committee because we’re the ones that are qualified. We’re the only ones they can ask, and that committee is not doing useful work, and we’re not wasting our time. But, like, in order to say ‘no’, you basically had to kind of agree in advance that the other people were going to say ‘no’ too, so that you didn’t just feel like you were pushing the burden onto somebody else, right? And even with all of that, it still was too much. And and she was, you know, diagnosed with burnout that under the care of a physician, and has had a very long recovery period. And because that’s what it is, you know, it is a very physical disease. Like, there is the phase where you feel like, you know: “I’m just really tired and exhausted, and I don’t know if I like this anymore”. But it, it gets worse. So, I think there is that kind of thing, that this this does increase the risk of burnout, of moral injury, of a lot of those things, and that I don’t know.

Jo VanEvery 1:11:40
It feels like what I’ve got from this conversation is that, really that sense that, you’re in it together. And that, you know, even though you’re not going to be able to save, I don’t know, that you have to kind of work out what you’re going to save. That’s that there is there. Unfortunately, that just leaves people in your position at higher risk of burnout. Which, I guess, you know, a couple of years ago, when I wasn’t even really thinking about, “Oh, I need to do podcast episodes”, but I did it as a conversation because it worked for her. But one of the things, if you look back in the episodes of the podcast, is a relatively long conversation with a French academic called Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, who was at that time suffering from burnout. She is now back at work. The… “You don’t recover, completely, ever.” And part of that was, she was a full professor. She had… Right? And she talked about the solidarity amongst other women professors about how they managed to juggle university requirements, that all committees had this percentage of women on them, but there was, like, a lower percentage. You know, like, it wasn’t proportionate to the time. Sure, like, everybody listening is nodding, and they sometimes, you know, sort of collaborated to just refuse, like, not, not just, like, me personally: “I’m going to refuse to sit on this committee”, but none of us are going to do that. They’re not going to have a woman on that committee because we’re the ones that are qualified. We’re the only ones they can ask, and that committee is not doing useful work, and we’re not wasting our time. But like, in order to say ‘no’, you basically had to kind of agree in advance that the other people were going to say ‘no’ too, so that you didn’t just feel like you were pushing the burden onto somebody else, right? And even with all of that, it still was too much. And, and she was, you know, diagnosed with burnout, that under the care of a physician, and has had a very long recovery period. And because that’s what it is, you know, it is a very physical disease. Like, there is the phase where you feel like, you know: “I’m just really tired and exhausted, and I don’t know if I like this anymore”. But it, it gets worse. So, I think there is that kind of thing that this this does increase the risk of burnout, of moral injury, of a lot of those things, and that… I don’t know.

Jo VanEvery 1:13:25
It feels like, what I’ve got from this conversation is that, really that sense that, you’re in it together, and that you know, even though you’re not going to be able to save [everything], I don’t know, that you have to kind of work out what you’re going to save. That’s… That there is… There… There’s going to be a lot that you don’t like about what happens, but that, you kind of have to… That the solidarity matters. Even if the solidarity is about: “What can we continue to do? How can we continue to support these students?” – and is very, is not focused on: “How do we fight this and make it not happen? But how do we, how do we…?” You know? And that thing you said about, just collectively kind of trying to figure out: “What can we keep? What do we really want to keep here? Where do we, where do we do that?” And these are horrible decisions. I wish nobody was having to make them. I wish we weren’t in this period where public funding for institutions has gotten so bad. And that even if now in Canada, it’s no longer possible for public institutions to use regulations designed for private corporations to to do this, that there are still these threats. Right? There are threats to programmes. There are threats to departments. I know in other countries, the legislative regulatory climate will be very different. There are a lot of small colleges in the U.S. that have just been completely closed, that, you know? Or… There’s been a few. There’s a lot going on in the UK. It’s really hard to keep track. The union at Queen Mary has a spreadsheet they try to update, but it’s updated by volunteers. So it’s, it’s just a really hard time. But I guess that focusing on what you value, and, and not letting them push you into the individualist competitive thing, really. Even if it’s not official collective governance, you know, taking what you can, to be able to maintain that sense that you are, that this is a collaborative.

Janice 1:15:38
It is so much, because if you say: “Well, I can make myself bulletproof by publishing a lot. [Or] I can make myself bulletproof by having the biggest classes. I…” – you know, whatever. You, you never know, when some point that spreadsheet’s going to come around and say: “Oh, but you know, you didn’t bring as much into the grants”, or, “You’re part of a unit that we now assess in a different way”, and, and so, you know, all of that goes out the window. So, to some extent, that yeah, that’s really scary. I have, you know, no control over over those bigger things, but I do have control over how I, you know, work with each other, what I I’m valuing and putting forward. And I also have some control… I’ve slowly learned over the last few years that if I don’t take time for myself, nobody else will make me do that, despite good family members who try to support me. So, sometimes I’m sitting there and saying, “Okay, I know I could be doing this as well, but I’m going to to close the computer at 4:30 and walk away. I’m going to take that weekend. I’m going to rebuild myself”, because that issue of burnout, and that issue of: “Oh, I’m going to try to to rescue everything. No, I can’t.” Let’s…

Jo VanEvery 1:16:55
No. And I think that’s where, that’s where that comparison with the, you know, the, the military moral injury stuff is. Like, like, seriously: nobody is going to die. Some of the bad things will happen, but also, you know? If you close your computer at 4:30, all of those things will still be there in the morning. And, and although some things are time sensitive, they are not all urgent in the way that, say, cardiac surgery is urgent, right? Like… And so, you know, there is a kind of situation where we do have to kind of get a grip, and say, “No, I’m going to be…” And, and also that, if you take that rest, and if you, you know, have that, then you are in a better [mindset], because panic mode is not a really good mode to do any really serious thinking. And, you know, it affects your judgement. It affects all kinds of things, and so the extent to which you can get yourself out of panic mode, and just into: “Yes, this is an emergency, but I have time, and I need, I need, you know, to be in this for the long haul.” Right?

Jo VanEvery 1:18:05
And so I think what we’re seeing from you five years out is you’re saying that, first, I mean, obviously the first two to six months, there was the first two months [which was] an actual panic, right? That was really hard, and then it was really quite urgent and time sensitive, and that that… But then you’re still rebuilding. Like, five years out, you’re now at the point where you’re like: “Oh, okay, so so we need to get out of the emergency provision of some things”, and really start saying: “Okay, we’re not insolvent anymore. We’re not… This, this… Like, what are we building? Right? Like, what do we need? What resources do we need? What are we arguing for? What is the case that we’re going to make for having another colleague, right? What is the case we’re going to make for ‘every programme needs at least three full time faculty’?” – like, that kind of thing. But that means that, if anybody is near the beginning of this, like, yes, you’re doing a lot right now in order to be able to get there, and sort of on the promise that there will be a moment when it’s less [stressful], right? But you also maybe have to start acting like: it needs less, before you think you’re ready, because you need that energy, and the capacity for the long haul, right? That, that there is… You, you can’t do this all as a sprint. Like, it, it really is… You need to make sure that you are filling your well, and and that is: taking the weekends, making sure you get enough sleep, making sure you’re eating properly, all that kind of thing. I think there is a case for, especially some of the more senior people, to encourage other people to take the time, right? You know, nobody’s gonna, nobody’s gonna make you do it. Why aren’t we making each other do it, right? Like, why has that become a phrase? If I don’t take, if I don’t look after myself, nobody else is gonna is gonna make me. It’s like, why not? Why are we not just saying to people, “No, that’s okay. Stop. You’ve done enough for now. Somebody else?” Like, we can make it a relay. We can hand the baton off sometimes, so that we all are doing it from a place of strength. And it’s still really hard, but I think that’s where a lot of times, we just have these internalised pressures, which are based on real things. They’re not, you know, you’re not hallucinating them. It’s… There’s nothing wrong with anybody, but sometimes we have to step back and be like: “Is that really a pressure, or can I actually take the weekend? And can I go…?” – and you know, whatever. And it’s hard. It’s really hard for everybody, right?

Jo VanEvery 1:20:41
Okay, I think we’ve talked for probably long enough. I don’t know why anybody wanted to listen to us talk about this terribly depressing topic for this long.

Jo VanEvery 1:20:50
Do you have like, if you were just to distil a couple of things, you wanted people who might be facing this, who are, who are worried that it might be coming down the pipe later, what would you say? Like, you can’t… Like we’re both saying: “You can’t just become a publishing machine, and a teaching machine, and hope that you’ve made yourself bulletproof. That doesn’t work.” But… I don’t know. What came out of this seemed to me to be, like: build some of that community stuff.

Janice 1:21:19
Number one is identify your allies both locally and further afield. I had lots of people reach out to me worldwide when Laurentian made the news, going, “I heard about this.” You know? “How are you doing?” And then following up with some of them, “What can I do to help you?” And even, it was just like, “Hey, will you recommend some good books to read when I’m out of the woods now?”, or or what have you. So making that sense of allies.

Janice 1:21:49
Another thing that’s actually brutally practical is set up your own data drawdown, your data export of everything at your institution at least once a year, ideally twice, we shared information again amongst the faculty collective on: here’s how to export everything in your Google Mail [or] Drive account, so forth, and that is just useful for anybody. You never know when things might go down, technology might fail, but if you have that, you’ve got control of your your information, what you’ve created in your material. So, having that kind of stuff makes you a little bit more secure yourself in all of that.

Janice 1:22:34
But the other thing is, for God’s sakes, have some sort of hobby or activity. I don’t know. You know, is it cooking on an outdoor grill? Is it going for long walks? You know, in the woods. I do counted cross stitch, and stabbing something 10s of 1000s of times is intensely therapeutic for me. I have to pay attention to what I’m doing there, and it makes my brain disengage from all the things around me. So, I mean, you know, those are those things that can [do].

Jo VanEvery 1:23:07
I saw somebody post recently, I can’t remember where, I just saw somebody, and they were like, “I really needed to punch something the other day, so I’ve made homemade bread.”

Janice 1:23:17
Yeah! See.

Jo VanEvery 1:23:18
They got to the end of the day, and they were like, “I need to punch something. Ooh, let’s make some bread.” [Laughter.]

Janice 1:23:22
Exactly, finding that, that hobby that fulfils. And sometimes, hobbies come with another sense of community as well. That you can meet with other people, or you can have a hobby that’s intensely alone. I just do it by myself. I disconnect from everybody. Whatever you need, but be be really ruthless about [it]. I need to do this for my own mental health, because yeah, burnout lingers there, leans on your shoulder and goes: “Are you ready to give in to despair? No, no, no. Let’s play.”

Jo VanEvery 1:23:52
Let’s play. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so thank you, Janice, for talking me today. There was probably loads of things we could have talked about. I mean, to begin with, you’re not even, you weren’t even Canadian to start out with.

Janice 1:24:07
No.

Jo VanEvery 1:24:08
And you’ve ended up…

Janice 1:24:08
[That happened] years ago!

Jo VanEvery 1:24:09
Right? You ended up, like… So many… I really feel like, at some point, there needs to be something where we just really talk about academics as migrants. You know? So many of us have ended up in completely different countries, completely different systems, and sometimes living in, you know, odd places, and and it’s, we’ve, we’ve made a satisfying choice like that, that’s, that’s worked out really well for us. It’s not for everybody, but that would have been also being a historian at a small institution is not always an easy thing, right? Like, you have to teach a lot of different things, so there was so much we could have talked about. But I really feel like this moment, it would be- it was helpful to have had that conversation about your experience with going through a pretty brutal academic restructuring. I think it’s probably fair to say more brutal than most of them, just because of the way that they did it. Right? And that was kind of acknowledged by the responsible governments after the fact, and they’ve made it so that it’s harder for people to do that. But still…

Jo VanEvery 1:25:12
So where can people find you, if people, if you want to be found, and people would like to connect with you? Social media, whatever? Like, you, you’re on BlueSky. What…? Is that your main thing, or, what are you…?

Janice 1:25:26
That is definitely my main place to find me. So I’ll share cross stitch pieces, and commentary on all things academic there. I have a semi-defunct blog, that I keep telling myself I’m going to get back to at: jliedl.ca, but really for me it’s BlueSky, and it’s the Academic Writing Studio. I’m really kind of fortunate to have found you and be able to reconnect with Meeting With [Your] Writing. [And] you know, the small group book group that we’re doing right now. That, that’s another place you could find me.

Jo VanEvery 1:26:02
Okay, so thank you, and thanks for joining me. And to the listeners, thank you for listening to us. I know it’s been a difficult topic. I hope you found it helpful. We’ll talk to you soon.

[End of Transcript.]