It has now been just five days since the launch of our new faculty union, the Association of McGill Professors of the Faculty of Arts, and we are starting to make some waves!

On Monday, April 8, CBC Montreal came to the McGill campus right after the total eclipse to visit the picket line of AGSEM teaching assistants and to interview AMPFA members. You can watch the segment below:

On Tuesday, April 9, the McGill Tribune, one of the major student papers at McGill, published several AMPFA-related pieces.

The first, entitled “Arts professors and faculty lecturers form McGill’s third and largest faculty union,” is a piece covering our April 4 launch rally, and discussing the issues that drove us to unionize.

The second, entitled “A conversation with Arts Senator-Elect Víctor Muñiz-Fraticelli,” is an interview with one of the key organizers for both AMPFA and the Association of McGill Professors of Law (AMPL), in which he discusses the role of faculty unions in rebuilding notions of collegiality and shared governance on campus.

The third is an open letter signed by 131 McGill professors from across the university, initiated by AMPFA members. It is addressed to the top administrators in charge of collective bargaining with our teaching assistants, who are members of AGSEM and are currently on strike. In it, the signatories call on the administration to spend less time threatening and dividing our campus community, and more time negotiating with our teaching assistants.

Finally, while not a news item per se, AMPFA member organizer Prof. Edward Dunsworth (Assistant Professor, Department of History and Classical Studies) published a post addressing a misleading all-campus communication that the McGill administration sent out on April 5. The communication was the McGill administration’s attempt to put its spin on a ruling from the Tribunal administratif du travail (TAT) regarding the issue of professors being forced to do the work of striking teaching assistants. As Dunsworth details, their communication offers “a masterclass in misdirection.”

Stay tuned for more news updates about AMPFA!