1/ Just seen the new @ccpa document on precarious faculty. Will live-tweet my analysis because OMG this thing is absolutely ludicrous. policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/…
2/ So to be perfectly clear, this study measures APPOINTMENTS not individuals. A permanent appointment by definition only happens once. A contract appointment in many cases happens every year
3/ So the way this study counts things, if you had a uni with two staff members - one permanent & one on a series of one-year contracts, always renewed, over the 11-year period covered by this study, 11 out of 12 appointments would be part-time. OMG 92% of appointments are PT!!
4/ Without knowing the length of the appointment, these stats tell you NOTHING about extent of precarity in unis. If all these contracts are one year, then in fact a 48% Tenure-track appt. rate is FANTASTIC. For every one-year contract, unis are adding a TT faculty! Fabulous!
5/ Curiously, the authors fail to note that we actually know EXACTLY what the distribution of academic employment in universities is, because statscan gets the data through LFS and CAUT publishes it every year in their almanac. Here it is: 
6/ Not quite the precarity nightmare you'd been led to expect, is it? (Better description of the data here: higheredstrategy.com/replacing-perm…)
7/ I get @ccpa's frustration with the inavailability of data. But when asking unis for data either they didn't ask for length of contract (poor survey design) or didn't include that data here (which would be full-on data hackery). Neither is a good look for them.
8/ The solution to Statscan imperfections is not to publish crap data. This report is going to be misread and misused as a talking point by everyone and their dog, as the authors know full-well. So, thanks @ccpa for adding to data pollution on PSE in Canada. Very helpful.
