How do collective agreements stack up: Implications for academic freedom

Abstract

The principle of academic freedom is officially articulated in the enforceable language in the collective agreements between universities and the respective faculty unions. Collective agreements are often the artefacts of previous dilemmas at institutions and tracing the language they contain will show the chronology and subtleties embedded in these documents that circumscribe faculty freedoms. This study analysed collective agreements from over 40 different Canadian institutions using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) to reveal anticipated issues.