The best kept secret of academia is that it is, without hyperbole, a pyramid scheme.
Classically, a university employs well-paid, tenured/tenure-track professors to spearhead labs. Those professors then employ modestly-paid postdoctoral researchers to run their major projects. However, such projects are usually too large in scope for one person. Thus, an army of impoverished graduate students are taken on, each one guaranteed to see the project through, lest the fruits of their work, a thesis, rot. Finally, all of this work is propped up by an ocean of undergraduates, whose financial exploitation is always justified by saying that they will walk away from the institute with either a job, or the opportunity to climb one step up the pyramid.
You might say that Mount Royal is different. After all, the above model is research-focused and falls apart without the exploited middle tier of graduate students and postdocs. However, research is not the core financial commodity of a university. Most money flows through universities for what they teach. Tuition is the largest contributor to the budget of most modern institutions. Government funding, for the purposes of educating the workforce, is often the second largest contributor. At teaching-focused universities like MRU, the pyramid scheme manifests in how the teaching load is distributed and compensated.
Contract faculty, or “sessional instructors,” make up more than 50% of the faculty on campus. The vast majority of these instructors work on a course-to-course basis. The middle tiers of the pyramid are occupied by senior lecturers, followed by tenured/tenure-track professors, and finally senior administrators sitting atop the pyramid. The same courses will be taught by people who are compensated in wildly different amounts. Even considering service obligations, contract faculty are paid roughly half of what a mid-career full-time teaching professor would be paid for the same work.
What justifies such a difference in pay? Many contract faculty are equally qualified as their full-time counterparts, with Master’s and PhD degrees, and years of experience teaching. Herein lies the dishonest promise that makes academia a pyramid scheme, for pyramid schemes are not simply unfair pay structures: hustle hard, make a good impression, and someday, you too could be hired in a full-time role.
You may be saying to yourself, “If there’s such harsh inequity, why isn’t it more visible?” From students’ perspectives, the distinction between these roles is a new concept. Coming out of high school, the idea that different teachers would get paid different amounts for teaching the same class is absurd (because it is). Furthermore, the actual quality of education delivered by contract faculty tends to be the same as permanent professors. Institutionally, contract faculty also have little ability to advocate for themselves. The precarity of their positions means that any advocacy for better standards faces the real possibility of losing their positions entirely.
Then why do contract faculty accept this work when they know they are being mistreated? Why not go elsewhere? Many people do this work because they believe in it. Contract faculty know they are being exploited, and they do it anyway, because teaching is meaningful, good work. This vocational passion is taken advantage of when such passion would be recognised and rewarded in a more just institution. This also ignores the myriad personal reasons that a person may choose to work at any particular university.
Regardless, the real problem with accusing contract faculty of accepting their conditions is that, whether they need the university to employ them or not, the university needs their work badly. Put simply, MRU would collapse if contract faculty decided to stop working here. As precarious as contract faculty are, the university is similarly precarious in its reliance on their work. Administrators, and by extension the provincial government, are taking foolish risks by devaluing most of the education on campus, while trying to constantly expand the audience of that education. If that bottom tier of the pyramid is removed, the university will be forced to adopt more sustainable employment standards that should have been present from the start.
All of this is happening amidst two broader trends that make MRU’s exploitation of contract labour all the more galling. First, the institution is increasingly trying to model itself after most conventional universities—increased focus on research, higher enrollment, etc. Eventually this could mean increasing class sizes and lobbying for graduate programs, losing what makes Mount Royal such a special place. We already see this happening with the current teaching professor positions becoming increasingly replaced with the lower-paid senior lecturer roles or more research roles. Yet, while we functionally move away from the true parity of teaching and research roles that was special to MRU, other reputable institutions are doing the opposite: teaching faculty are finally starting to make advances towards the same pay equity and respect as their research-focused colleagues.
Second, the university continues to frame itself as a champion of equity, diversity, and inclusion. Senior administrators are particularly keen to espouse that they are champions of such values, yet those same people wring their hands and cry impotence when questioned about the inherent inequity of how education is delivered. If they truly value equity, then equal work should yield equal pay. If they value teaching, then they should value teachers. If they want to be inclusive of everyone, then contract faculty should be paid as members of the university community outside teaching, just as full-time faculty are. Without these things, then the university and its administrators are lying when they say that equity, diversity, and inclusion are important to them.
It is as simple as that.
2026-10-21
Katie Pita and Nolan Shaw (Members of the MRFA’s Advocacy Committee)