The headlines scream "crisis averted," but they should be screaming "obsolescence delayed." When the University of King’s College in Halifax reached a tentative agreement with its faculty last year to stop a strike, the media painted it as a win for the students and the community. That is a lie. This isn't a victory for higher education. It is a temporary ceasefire in a war that the traditional liberal arts college is destined to lose because it refuses to acknowledge its own structural rot.
We are told that faculty strikes are about "fair wages" and "working conditions." That is the surface-level narrative fed to the public to drum up sympathy. Beneath the surface, these labor disputes are the death rattles of an institutional model that can no longer justify its own cost of living. King’s College, with its rich history and small-class intimacy, is exactly the kind of institution that people want to save—but it's also exactly the kind of institution that is currently unsustainable without a massive, painful overhaul of how we value intellectual labor.
The Myth of the "Averted Crisis"
The media reports focused on the relief of students who wouldn't have their terms interrupted. But what happens when the terms aren't worth the paper the syllabus is printed on? By settling for "fairness" within an unfair system, the administration at King’s didn't solve the problem; they just kicked the can down the road.
I’ve seen this play out in boardrooms and faculty lounges for a decade. A strike is threatened. The administration cries poverty while sitting on endowments and real estate. The union demands a 10% raise to keep up with an inflation rate that has already eaten their lunch. They settle at 3.5% plus a one-time signing bonus. Everyone goes back to work, feeling slightly more bitter and significantly less solvent.
This isn't negotiation. This is a slow-motion liquidation of the academic soul.
The "lazy consensus" here is that a strike is a failure of communication. Wrong. A strike is a failure of product-market fit. If an institution cannot afford to pay its primary workers—the people actually teaching the classes—a wage that allows them to live in the city where the school is located, that institution is technically insolvent. It exists only through the goodwill of its donors and the debt of its students.
Why the Faculty is Asking the Wrong Questions
Union leaders often frame their demands around the cost of living. In Halifax, that cost has skyrocketed. But asking for a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in a dying industry is like asking for a better cabin on the Titanic.
The real question isn't "What do we deserve?" but "What is the value of this degree in 2026?"
Faculty members at King’s College are some of the brightest minds in the country. They are experts in the Foundation Year Program (FYP), a rigorous immersion into the Great Books. It’s an incredible program. I’ve seen it transform teenagers into critical thinkers. But the faculty is clinging to a 19th-century employment model (tenure-track security) while the university operates on a 21st-century gig-economy budget (relying on sessional instructors and adjuncts).
By focusing on incremental pay raises, the faculty union is ignoring the fact that the university is slowly replacing them with lower-cost alternatives. They are fighting for a larger slice of a shrinking pie. The contrarian truth? The faculty should be demanding a complete restructuring of the university’s administrative bloat, not just a bump in their paycheck.
The Administrative Parasite
In the last thirty years, the ratio of administrators to students has exploded, while the ratio of full-time faculty to students has stagnated or dropped. This is the "Administrative Parasite" theory, and it is the single biggest threat to the University of King’s College and its peers.
Imagine a scenario where every dollar added to a student’s tuition goes toward a "Dean of Student Wellness" or a "Vice-Provost of Institutional Synergy" rather than the professor teaching the actual course. That isn't an imaginary scenario; it's the reality at almost every Canadian university.
When King's "averts a strike," they aren't cutting the administrative fat. They are usually squeezing the operations budget or hiking tuition. They are preserving the bureaucracy at the expense of the pedagogy.
- The Expertise Fallacy: We assume that because someone is a great scholar, they understand the economics of their own institution. They don't.
- The Prestige Trap: Students pay for the "King's Name," but that name is losing its premium as the job market demands technical skills over classical rhetoric.
- The Endowment Illusion: Endowments are often restricted funds that can't be used for salaries, creating a "house rich, cash poor" dynamic that administrators use as a shield during negotiations.
The Brutal Reality of the Liberal Arts
Let’s be honest about something nobody wants to say out loud: The liberal arts are being priced out of existence.
At a school like King’s, the education is high-touch. It requires small groups, intense feedback, and deep engagement. That is expensive. You cannot scale a Great Books seminar without losing its essence. You can’t put 500 people in a Zoom room and call it the Foundation Year Program.
Because the "product" cannot be scaled, the only way to pay faculty more is to charge students more. But students are already at their breaking point. The debt-to-income ratio for a humanities grad is a terrifying math problem that most 18-year-olds aren't equipped to solve.
The "averting of the strike" is a temporary reprieve for a model that is fundamentally broken. The university is trying to maintain a luxury educational experience on a middle-class budget, and the math simply does not work.
Stop Trying to "Save" the University
The conventional wisdom says we must "save" our universities. I disagree. We need to let the current versions of them fail so that something more lean and focused can emerge.
If King’s College had actually gone on strike, it might have forced a real conversation about its survival. It might have forced the board to look at the unsustainable growth of non-teaching staff. It might have forced a conversation about merging departments or creating a new way to deliver a high-quality education without the massive overhead of a physical campus and a bloated C-suite.
Instead, we got a "tentative agreement." We got a press release. We got back to "business as usual."
But business as usual is what is killing higher education.
The Actionable Truth for Students and Faculty
If you are a student at King’s, stop asking if your classes will be canceled. Start asking where your tuition is going. Demand a line-item veto on administrative spending.
If you are faculty, stop thinking of yourself as a "worker" in a traditional factory sense. You are the product. You are the value. If the institution can't pay you, it’s because the institution is no longer a viable vessel for your value.
The downside of my perspective? It’s cold. It lacks the "community" warmth that King’s prides itself on. It suggests that some beloved institutions might need to close their doors or radically downsize to survive. It’s painful to think that the quad at King's might one day be empty because the economics of a liberal arts degree finally collapsed.
But ignoring the gravity of the situation doesn't stop the fall.
The strike wasn't the problem. The "agreement" wasn't the solution. The university is a house on fire, and the administration and faculty just agreed to stop arguing about who left the stove on while the roof is collapsing.
Higher education doesn't need more "agreements." It needs an exorcism of the administrative class and a return to the only thing that matters: a teacher, a student, and a book. Everything else is just expensive noise.
Stop celebrating the "averted strike." Start mourning the missed opportunity to actually fix what’s broken.
The next time the faculty threatens to walk out, let them. Maybe then the people in charge will realize that without the teachers, the university is just a collection of very expensive, very empty buildings.
