CUPE chair shares concerns and suspicions of intellectual property foul play
Jacqueline Perlin
Assistant News Editor
@jackieperlin
For the last number of years, the university has been holding contests for teaching assistants to win an opportunity to become a course director by entering course outlines as entries. The university has reportedly retained and used the “rejected” entries for actual course syllabuses, alleges the TA union chair.
The TAs would hand in course outlines they wrote to enter a competition where the best outline would earn the winner an opportunity to teach a course. However, this posed a problem when a few TAs claimed to have discovered their course outline being used in a class taught by a different person.
“They entered into the competition and they weren’t awarded the teaching tickets, so it was their intellectual property,” alleges Karen Walker, chair of the Canadian Union Public Employees (CUPE) Local 3903 at York University, noting that the TAs who claim their outlines are being used have approached the Local with their concerns.
The course outlines, she says, have also been reported to show up as part of exams.
“It’s part of an exam, but [the syllabuses] end up being used by the department and the TAs don’t get any compensation,” says Walker.
While the TAs involved have settled with the university and received an undisclosed lump sum to appease the situation, Walker explains that reports from TAs have continued. She has prompted CUPE 3903 to seek changes to intellectual property as stipulated in their collective agreement.
However Rhonda Lenton, vice-provost academic, says that credit is given where due.
“We don’t take work that was produced by somebody else without giving them credit,” says Lenton, explaining that no department should be using a TA’s material without attributing it to them.
“These two people grieved, but it has happened to other people. We know that it’s happening in other departments,” says Walker. She believes that this is occurring mainly in the women’s and equity studies departments.
The main problem, says Walker, is that the current collective agreement uses the term “where applicable” with respect to intellectual property, which according to Walker, creates a loophole for the university. The university, she notes, has not agreed to change this language in a current proposal on the table in negotiations.
“We feel it’s just not strong enough to respect our members,” says Walker. “At this point we haven’t been able to make any movement on the issue.”
While Lenton refuses to comment on issues pertaining to the current collective bargaining, she says that her belief is that this issue is not linked to intellectual property. Incidents like these, she says, are “not widespread,” and normal standards of academic integrity apply in the situation.
“I certainly would not expect that material would then just be taken by somebody else and used in a course,” says Lenton. She says she can imagine times where a course director or professor would like to use the course outline but the permission of the person who created the course outline would be necessary.
“If someone’s course outline has been taken, then I believe that person should bring forward a complaint to the appropriate dean, and the matter should be investigated,” she says, explaining that once the issue is investigated, there would be a resolution.
The usual practise is to take the rejected submissions and either return them or shred them.
Lenton says no grievance or complaint has been filed. If such a situation has occurred, she says it may have been a simple lack of knowledge.
However, Walker feels most graduate students take it for granted that they would be expected to do unpaid work and therefore, not be as active in filing grievances.
“The department thinks it’s important to have [the course] if it’s an up-and-coming area of research that people are starting to look at, and it might be that a grad student is working on it,” she says. “There’s this whole idea when you’re a TA, you’re being professionalized. You’re gonna do work you’re not compensated for, so a lot of people wouldn’t necessarily question it.”
