“It’s business as usual at University of Toronto”, the Provost’s messages proclaim. These messages, meant for students and the media, assert that CUPE 3902 Unit 1’s decision to strike has had no impact on undergraduate classes or the daily operations of Canada’s largest university, recently ranked number 20 in the world. This union represents more than 6,000 graduate student employees. The provost’s claims seek to undermine both the value and importance of graduate student labour and justify the administration’s hard line against raising the minimum funding package, stalled at $15,000 per year, to an amount closer to, though not exceeding, Toronto’s version of a poverty line, the “Low Income Cut-Off” (LICO), which is $23,000. However, underneath the calm and unaffected airs of the university administration lies the reality that over 800 undergraduate classes and tutorials are no longer meeting or have been cancelled for the duration of the strike. As finals draw closer, so too does the possibility that students’ graduations may be delayed.

At base, the aim articulated by striking CUPE 3902 members is one of structural change to the funding relationship between graduate students and the university. The guaranteed minimum funding package achieved as a direct outcome of this union’s last strike, fifteen years ago, has dramatically diminished in real wage value thanks to the rapidly rising cost of living in one of Canada’s most costly cities, and has not seen any increase to account for inflation since 2008. Meanwhile, tuition––particularly for international students––continues to climb to the maximum rates legal in Ontario ($8,000-20,000––the highest rates in all of Canada). Combined, it is these two issues that have led to the now 21 day standoff between graduate student contract workers and the administration. If any tentative agreement is to achieve ratification, two core demands must be addressed: meaningful increases to the minimum funding package, and significant reductions in post-funded-cohort tuition.

Much to the frustration of striking graduate students, the administration has refused “on principle” to negotiate these matters with the union–this language was explicitly written into the original tentative agreement that was struck down three weeks ago. This stance has been hotly contested by members who argue that it is ludicrous to require teaching assistant/course instructor (TA/CI) labour as a condition of the overall funding package, but not allow any meaningful dialogue on the value or overall structure of said package. Beyond this, deploying our collective leverage as unionized workers is the only concrete means at our disposal to engage with the administration on such matters. A refusal “in principle” to negotiate these matters with CUPE is widely seen as a profoundly unprincipled political play at maintaining a highly uneven distribution of power squarely in the hands of high-level administrators, while silencing available channels through which graduate students may gain a direct voice in determining the conditions under which they must live. While not all graduate students are CUPE members, a significant portion of those under the guaranteed funding package are, and have articulated consent to be represented by the union through the establishment of a strong strike mandate built on these core issues.

The ongoing TA/CI strike at U of T has profoundly opened up space for a critical dialogue on a number of simmering ideological questions surrounding access to education, funding, and livable compensation for both contract labour and the full time research graduate students produce. It is irreducibly a political issue that cuts to the heart of the role of the university in society at large, and the structural experience of graduate students as disposable contract labourers who contribute substantially to the overall teaching load, and particularly to the qualitative pedagogical character of overburdened, over-enrolled courses in which few undergraduate students (referred to as “Basic Income Units” in university planning and finance documents) ever have a chance to engage directly with tenured faculty. Contract graduate student educators are the personal face of the university for most undergraduates, especially in the early years of their studies, as class sizes have dramatically risen apace with the cost of tuition. In this corporatized model of university management, undergrad students are increasingly paying more for less, while compensation for TA/CI labour wrapped into the fulfillment of the guaranteed funding package remains frozen.

This battle, as many voices have asserted since the initial strike vote, is fundamentally about the values and the valuation of university education–and the dedicated work through which it is produced. The stakes of this dispute go beyond the personal circumstances of these 6,000 union members––it is fundamentally a rejection of the corporatization of the university and the artificial de-valuing of the research and teaching conducted by graduate students. This is particularly so for graduate students in the humanities and so-called “soft” social sciences, who are most likely to fall within the base funding package, and lack the sort of departmental “top-ups” common (but still not universal) in STEM fields.

PhD students in the Anthropology Department at University of Toronto are guaranteed the baseline minimum funding package of $15,000 per year for four years, owe full tuition and fees for each year they are in the program, and must TA for every year they are in the funded cohort. During the fieldwork year, the subsequent appointment can be deferred to a later date, but that also means that because of the nature of our work as anthropologists, researchers in the field forego $8,500 of their funding guarantee in a year in which reliable financial resources are perhaps most crucial. This, while still paying roughly the same dollar value in tuition for a year in which they won’t set foot on campus.

Throughout the course of the strike, arguments made by unsympathetic parties have asserted that the low funding allocated primarily to social sciences and humanities students is reflective of the disciplines’ value as a whole. The rhetoric used by Provost Cheryl Regehr mimics this rationale: that the few disciplines stuck with the minimum funding package should be grateful they have even that. But is anthropology really so valueless? In the neoliberal university model championed by Dr. Regehr and her counterparts elsewhere, value is determined through numbers––enrollment statistics, production, and profit. A conservative estimate of the Tri-Council external awards brought into the department and university by anthropology graduate students for the 2013-2014 academic year is approximately $700,000. This number excludes any additional external awards that may have been earned by students, such as Wenner-Gren, and it also excludes money that the province provides to the university on a per-student basis.

One might expect, given the department’s apparent success with external funding, that few students would actually be making only the minimum funding package. One would be wrong. Within the Arts and Sciences Faculty, external grants earned by students are balanced by an equal reduction in guaranteed funding provided by the university. In other words, it is impossible for students to “earn” their way out of poverty. This forces even the most “successful” student-researchers to continue to take on teaching duties in order to make enough to pay tuition. Once students move into their fifth year, they are no longer guaranteed the minimum funding, may not apply to Tri-Council grants, and are no longer guaranteed a TAship to help pay for tuition. They must pay for the privilege of working full-time as researchers.

So where does all that money go? The University of Toronto Faculty Association reports document a phenomenon that is common in many universities–departments in the social sciences and humanities generate massive profits, which are often distributed to other departments with smaller undergraduate classes to help achieve parity. In the case of University of Toronto, each faculty must contribute 10% of its budget to the University Fund, which is then redistributed according to the “current goals and vision of the university administration”. What this means in practice is that funds from some of the departments with the least amount of funding available for their graduate students, like anthropology, are redistributed to professional programs such as business, medicine, and law in order to offset their exorbitant costs. At the same time, graduate departments across Ontario are experiencing pressure from the provincial government via university administration to increase their graduate enrollment as a means of artificially lowering unemployment statistics while increasing the provincial funding that flows into the university through graduate tuition.

The push to increase enrollment in graduate programs is a decision that, quite clearly, is not at all connected to a thorough consideration of the academic job market and the difficulties faced by convocating students upon completion of their degrees. The number of tenure track positions has not increased to match burgeoning undergraduate enrollment rates, and universities are cutting costs by using adjuncts and teaching assistants as the primary educators of undergraduate students. This underclass of academics performs 60% of the teaching hours at University of Toronto, and yet accounts for only 3.5% of the budget. If one were feeling particularly cynical, one might wonder if the push to increase graduate enrollment in defiance of a bleak academic job market isn’t a strategic move to ensure a ready supply of precarious, desperate workers willing to forgo security, fair wages, benefits, and the academic freedom of tenure in order to put their educations to use.

While university administrations are coming to see themselves more and more as CEOs of extremely large and powerful companies––and acting accordingly––imagining the corporatization of universities as an invasion of a sacred space by the vulgar shameless scrabbling of upper management suits jumping like fleas from one dog to another elides the responsibility of academics themselves for the current state of affairs.

Universities have welcomed the opportunity to maximize profits in order to offset decreases in government funding for post-secondary institutions since the 1970s, as government funding for universities has fallen from 90% to around 57% over the past forty years. In Ontario, which has the lowest ratio of per student funding in the country, 51% of provincial university operating budgets is paid through tuition. As the university structure as a whole shifts from non-profit services subsidized largely by taxpayers to a corporate model relying on profits generated by a consumer base, so too have those in privileged management and administrative positions seen to it that their personal compensation is commensurate with salaries and benefits in the private sector. University of Toronto staff and faculty garner a significant amount of space on the Ontario Sunshine List of public sector employees making more than $100,000 per year, with the highest salaries going to an ever-increasing cadre of senior administrators. Between 2008 and 2013, the number of U of T deans on the Sunshine List increased from 78 to 98. In that five year period, the combined cost of their salaries rose from approximately $14 million to nearly $20 million, not including benefits packages or housing allotments. While Toronto is an expensive city and talent and hard work should indeed be compensated, the administrative bloat at U of T and other institutions is a slap in the face to those on lower tiers of wealth and power who are told by those same administrators that they must tighten their belts and accept austerity measures for the public good.

Therein lies the rub. Former professors turned administrators who have successfully climbed the newly corporatized ladder within the university to emerge victorious on the higher reaches of the Sunshine List, and who routinely give themselves raises and cost-of-living increases, now peer down at the masses of precarious, poverty-stricken employees beneath them and declare that there simply isn’t enough to go around. University of Toronto administration is fighting tooth and nail, with ugly, shameless tactics more at home in corporate warfare, to avoid giving its teaching assistants and course instructors a cost-of-living raise to address the serious depreciation of value of the funding package over the past seven years.

Perhaps the most offensive aspect of the strike and accompanying battle with university administrators, for many, is that the person behind U of T’s intransigence and corporate-style heartlessness is Dr. Cheryl Regehr, a professor of Social Work whose research on poverty, inequality, and stress is foundational in the field. Likewise, Vice-Provost Dr. Jill Mathus, has written extensively on the representation of strikers and the labour movement in literature (for an excellent comparison of Dr. Mathus’ published writings on labour with her pronouncements on the strike as Vice-Provost, see Oliver Lue’s impressive analysis).

The suspension of personal and professional values in pursuit of profit maximization is a painful affront to those still at the beginning of their academic careers, especially since those in leadership positions are expected to maintain the integrity and social justice standards of their discipline (and the academy as a whole). This, almost more than other objectively difficult aspect of the strike, continues to be a source of confusion, indignation, anger, and distress for graduate students who had formerly respected and hoped to emulate the scholarship of both administrators, and of very well remunerated faculty within their own departments, some of whom are unsupportive of their students’ push to earn a living wage and yet built their own careers around studying the very inequalities their students are fighting.

Who is responsible for halting the advance of the corporate model in the university? Ultimately, it should not be incumbent upon the university’s most precarious and impoverished workers to do it alone––we need support. We need our mentors and teachers to stand on the picket lines alongside us and demand that the value of our work––the work that universities are absolutely dependent upon––be compensated fairly so that the future’s scholars, researchers, and teachers are able to pursue their work with dignity and security. We need our faculty members to use the security and academic freedom provided through their tenure to speak out against a university culture that refers to undergraduate students as “Basic Income Units” and views their educations as a means of profit generation that can be outsourced to the lowest bidding contracted labour. Finally, we need our administrators, those fortunate few whose leadership qualities have launched them into new spheres of power and influence, to use that power to influence a better future for our university system that doesn’t require the impoverishment and depredation of an entire generation of tomorrow’s scientists, researchers, philosophers, and teachers.

Let’s get to work.

*Sarah Williams is a PhD student in Medical Anthropology at the University of Toronto.  Her research focuses on the biomedicalization of childbirth in Mexico and the grassroots midwifery movement in Yucatan. Jennifer Gibson is a second year PhD student in social-cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto, and a proud member of CUPE 3902 Unit 1. Her research looks at Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan opposition to oil and gas pipeline development in British Columbia, and in light of this strike experience she is newly intrigued by the parallels and contrasts in strategic opportunity and practice between the informal grassroots coalition organizing that happens in the field, and the formally organized labour movement in which she has recently received a quick and rather thrilling education. Twitter: @jagbsn

Lorenzo continues with his version. This elder had no idea the land would become valuable one day, so he sold it piece by piece, often without papers. Some also say he gambled it away. According to one anthropologist who worked in the community in the early 2000s (see Weiant 2005), the land was informally sold, traded, gifted, and passed around for decades. These practices led to an incredibly complex and confusing land tenure situation, which worsened in the early 1970s when the Mexican government tried to clarify and formalize land titles in preparation for impending tourism and real estate development. This transformation from informal to formal tenure systems led to decades of conflict.

Lorenzo talks about increasing land disputes in Cabo Pulmo, especially over the course of the past ten years. All of these disputes can be tied to rapidly rising land values and real estate speculation. These conflicts include a couple of “land invasions,” the last one in 2009. According to Lorenzo, in that instance, about forty people from outside the community invaded Cabo Pulmo point, cut fence wires, and tried to claim the land. Members of one local family sent their own people, armed with machetes, shovels, and even Molotov cocktails. There was a confrontation. Someone smashed a person’s car. The invaders finally backed down and retreated.

Later, Lorenzo tells me, he saw one of the men who took part in the invasion in the nearby town of La Ribera. “Why are you doing this?” he asked the man. He answered: “Because there’s no work.” Lorenzo thought for a minute, then summed up the whole situation…in terms of money and value. It comes down to the valor de la tierra (land value), he tells me. The conflicts, he explains, are all because “people are walking on money.” He finishes the story with a question: “Who could have guessed that this land would someday be worth so much?”

Who could have guessed?

The Baja peninsula as a whole has been marginalized from Mexican politics — and history — for generations. The East Cape is just one of its many formerly unknown and disparaged hinterlands. It was long seen as an impediment to development, a barren, worthless place (see Alvarez 1987; Krutch 1986). But the people who lived there — descendants of missionaries, native peoples, migrants, 19th century colonists, even fabled castaways — have found ways to survive. They have created places of meaning and community, places with long histories and deeply ingrained values. Still, for many outsiders, much of the Baja peninsula remained worthless, valueless, and undesirable.

Times have changed. Today, small communities along the East Cape, such as Cabo Pulmo, are increasingly recognized by the outside world — not to mention the Mexican government — as high value destinations. They are places worthy of investment (see Li 2014), and exploitation. This change of heart was undoubtedly influenced by the East Cape’s beauty, ecological diversity, and uniqueness. But this is also because it’s a place where many outsiders hope to make money. This reconsideration of the East Cape as a renewed place of value, worthy of effort and attention, has also resulted in a broad “conceptual shift” (see Elyachar 2005). It’s a shift in which the formerly valueless is suddenly recast as vital and important. It’s a shift through which supposedly desolate, barren coastlines become conceptually and discursively transformed into places of solitude, beauty, and luxury — ripe for capitalist investment.

This shift occurs through the work of realtors, developers, government officials, planners, and others who help to inscribe the land, ultimately, as a commodity that is commensurable with other commodities (i.e. real estate) around the world (see Li 2014). The East Cape is in the early stages of this process of commoditization. Los Cabos, on the other hand, has been thoroughly transformed into a location that is dominated by the global tourism and real estate economies. The future of the East Cape has not yet been determined. But will it follow the path of Los Cabos?

The East Cape is no longer depicted as a dangerous, remote place. It’s no longer the worthless, “forgotten peninsula” (Krutch 1986) of the Mexican nation. It’s a place ripe for pride and promotion. It’s a safe, appealing, inviting place that promises high returns on investment. It also promises exclusivity — lonely beaches, wide open spaces, and distance from overdeveloped urban centers. For Mexican businessmen, government officials, and politicians, and a slew of international investors, it’s a place that’s primed and ready for integration into the global market. Suddenly, there’s a lot of money to be made from this place with no value. But at whose expense?

Marx’s task was to expose and radically challenge a system that he felt put things ahead of people. Marx’s theoretical work was meant to reverse this dynamic, to free people from the capitalistic tyranny of things (see Hart 2011:8). As David Graeber explains, Marx viewed the capitalist system as perverse because “it saw human beings primarily as a means to produce wealth rather than the other way around” (2005:223). Most debates about Marx’s theory of value, Graeber continues, completely miss the point. The point of Marx’s theory was to critically question why “we continually recreate a world we don’t like, that we find unjust, and in which we have lost control” (2005:222). Marx’s question was why making money has come to take precedence over making humanity.

Graeber argues that value theory gives us a way to understand that the “ultimate stakes of politics are the ability to define what’s important in life to begin with” (2005:15; see also 2013:226). “In value terms,” he continues, “the question becomes: who has the right to translate their money into what sorts of meaning?” (2005:14). Elyachar writes of the expanding neoliberal market as a process that is “simultaneously a mode of dispossessing the poor” (2005:13). What is being dispossessed, ultimately, is the ability to meaningfully participate in defining value — or, what truly matters in human social life.

The East Cape of Baja California Sur is one more site, among many, of dispossession. In the name of social and economic progress, places and communities are being made subservient to development models and real estate markets that, unmistakably, make the needs of people — and communities — subservient to making money. The slow, grinding process of commoditization continues to push many local residents aside, especially those who do not have access to enough money to stay afloat and survive the rising economic tide.

Money reigns supreme in this new conceptual order. It is the access pass that allows some people in and pushes others to the margins. The East Cape, like Cabo San Lucas, Cancún, and so many places before it, is in the midst of a process in which money is rapidly becoming the defining value system. This dispossession eliminates other possibilities, meanings, and potential values. It all begins when the unique values of a place are subsumed by and transformed into the commensurable, comparable value of global markets.

This process of transformation is incomplete. It is also highly contested. Many residents of the East Cape feel that Cabo San Lucas’s path is their inevitable future. So they prepare their exodus accordingly. Others, however, hold out hope for an alternative future. Because for them, the meaning of their land (and home) goes far beyond money. And yet, despite this resistance, and attachment to place, the speculative draw of the land remains powerful. While some residents continue to hope for that alternative future, others find it hard to resist the feeling that they might indeed be walking on money, and now is the time to sell. Trapped within this tension—between making money and making community—lies the future.

*This is not his real name.

References

Alvarez Jr., Robert R. 1987. Familia: Migration and Adaptation in Baja and Alta California 1800–1975. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession. Durham: Duke University Press.

Graeber, David. 2005. Preface. In the Carnival of Values and the Exchange Value of Carnival. The Commoner. Link.

—2013. It is value that brings universes into being. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(2): 219–243.

Krutch, Joseph Wood. 1986[1961]. The Forgotten Peninsula: A Naturalist in Baja California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Li, Tania M. 2014. What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 589–602 doi: 10.1111/tran.12065

Weiant, Pamela. 2005. A Political Ecology of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs): Case Study of Cabo Pulmo National Park, Sea of Cortez, Mexico. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara.