Post-secondary students want to learn from history by hearing from people who remember a 2011 strike at Vancouver Island University.
Members of VIU's history department were at Nanaimo Harbourfront Library on Saturday, April 5, hosting a 'History Harvest' event eliciting information from those who were affected by the Vancouver Island University Faculty Association strike. It began in March 2011, after negotiations broke down, and lasted approximately one month.
VIU student James Martin said the event was organized by history professor Katharine Rollwagen for a labour history class project.
"The university had gone a direction where they had relied less on local support and potential local knowledge and they had begun to hire externally, and a lot of that had led to disconnects between faculty and the administration," said Martin. "Which resulted primarily in a major grievance of departments and programs being closed or potentially being closed, without consultation of the faculty."
Michele Patterson, VIU geography department chairperson, was one year into an administration position in 2011 and had to show up to work or risk losing her job. It was a stressful and strange experience, she recounted.
"Basically there was a group people at the time, not many of them now because there's more people in the unions … who were considered admin or excluded people and so we were the forgotten group," said Patterson. "We really couldn't do any work because the strike was on. We just wandered around all the time and weren't attached to either side. We were in a weird zone, as far as our role in the strike."
She said improvements in the labour situation came from the 2011 strike.
"I think there's much better communication," said Patterson. "I mean, the last few years have been tough with budget challenges and international student declines, so things are a bit more stressful now than they were, but for a long time after that it seemed like there was a real willingness to work together."
While classes were cancelled and there was student angst, there was also some humour that arose from the strike, according to Martin.
"The understanding is that some classes, when there were departments being shut down, had been moved to a Moby Dick [Lodge] in Nanaimo. So there was a parody T-shirt made by that group … 'Moby Dick University' was the idea."
Strike-related information can be shared by e-mailing viuhistoryharvest@gmail.com.
