The sign that appears outside YUFA's office in York Lanes

Dear colleagues,

As you know, in the last round of bargaining YUFA negotiated a "research release" program to ensure that faculty members in the professorial stream who could demonstrate that they are active in research would be able to receive a 0.5 FCE release from teaching, if the normal load in their unit is 2.5 FCEs or above. We were originally attempting to follow the example of other faculty associations at universities such Carleton, Laurier, and Brock, where a default maximum load of 2.0 had been achieved in bargaining. In fact, we can now confirm that the faculty association at Ryerson (RFA) has recently achieved an across-the-board maximum teaching load of 2.0.

We have issued several reports over the past eight months about the process of implementing the Research Release Program (Article 18.15 in the Collective Agreement), including updates about the grievances that YUFA has filed and about the Dispute Resolution Process that was necessary to resolve differences between units and their Deans/Principal about criteria for awarding the releases. These unit documents have now been posted on the YUFA website. (For future reference, click on the tab "Unit documents" at the top of the homepage of the YUFA website.)

We are now writing to inform you that this process is complete and all unit criteria have been arrived at for this year's implementation exercise. In each of the first two years of the program (2017-18 and 2018-19), only half of the faculty members in the relevant units are eligible.

In the last few weeks, YUFA has been conducting a bargaining survey among its members. We look forward to your feedback on the issues of the Research Release Program and teaching load more generally.

Thank you for your input and support throughout this entire process.

In solidarity,
Richard Wellen
President, York University Faculty Association