Archive for September, 2009

How to pick away at a provincial deficit

The Ontario government has just launched a $50 billion suit against tobacco companies. The reason? To cover damages “for past and ongoing health-care costs linked to tobacco-related illness.”

Alright, let’s get a few things out of the way. One—they’ll get their money. It’s all very legal and in accordance with the Tobacco Damages and Health Care Costs Recovery Act. Two—they’ve got friends. British Columbia and New Brunswick have their own suits underway. When one wins, the others will have it in the bag. And three—just so you know, it’s all for you:

“The taxpayers of the province of Ontario have paid a lot of money for health-care costs directly related to tobacco use over the decades,” said Attorney General Chris Bentley. “We believe the taxpayers should be compensated for the costs that they have paid. That’s what this lawsuit is about.”

How nice. Here I was thinking it was all a frivolous cash grab or an example of shameless double dipping by a government that rakes in billions annually through provincial tax excisions. I guess existing taxation on the sale of cigarettes, which totals almost 70% of the retail cost (when you add up federal and provincial taxes) was just preparatory collection to make sure Ontario has enough to pay its lawyers.

Now, I am not a smoker, government diplomat or a lawyer (I know—so far so good, eh?) but I do have a few humble suggestions for our McGuinty Liberals:

• Put the $50 billion in eHealth. They’ll know what to do with it.
• Sue to sun for skin cancer, Cookie Monster for promoting unhealthy eating habits leading to obesity, Steve Jobs for carpal tunnel syndrome and GM for pollution-related respiratory illnesses. (Uh.. on second thought… maybe wait a bit on the last one.)
• Watch out for class action suits. Someone might label you a conspirator.
• Keep it going. Everyone’s temporarily forgotten about HST.
• Can you somehow find a way to sue individuals for autoimmune diseases?

What a ridiculous distraction.

- photo by Stephan Geyer

Are you a physics major who dreads going to math class? Maybe it’s time to reconsider your career plans

So, you’re halfway through a four-year undergraduate program and you decide, for one reason or another, that you’ve made a mistake: you’re getting the wrong degree.

Maybe you keep flunking classes and you’re starting to suspect that you’re terrible at math and you’re going to be a lousy physicist. Maybe you realize that you’re scared of blood and embarrassed by naked people, so a career in medicine isn’t for you. Or maybe you’ve just found another subject that suits you better.

Whatever your reason, you’ve just put all of that time, energy and money into passing the prerequisites for a program you don’t want to complete and you’re halfway to getting a degree you don’t want to get.

What should you do?

Changing your mind about your major isn’t always a bad thing, particularly if it happens early in your degree. University, after all, is an opportunity to explore and to discover what you’re interested in.

The classic example, says Janet Sheppard, a counselor at the University of Victoria, is undergraduates who change their minds about going into medicine. “Science professors will joke sometimes that everybody in their biology 100 class is a pre-med student,” she chuckles. “But by the end of the year, things are starting to change.”

In your first few years of university, you’re exposed to a much broader world of learning than what you experienced in high school. There are whole fields of learning you probably never knew existed. Other subjects turn out to be very different than the little taste of them you had in high school — so it’s natural that your plans might change.

Sheppard advises students to keep an open mind, take a wide variety of courses and get involved in campus life. Exposing yourself to the broadest experience possible — both in class and through clubs, volunteer work and other activities — will help you discover what you are interested in.

“Students need to pay attention to the courses they actually look forward to going to, the ones where they actually enjoy the reading,” Sheppard says. You should also talk to people who have the degree you’re thinking about getting, and research the kind of career you’re setting yourself up for.

If you’re still uncertain about what to major in, then “decide not to decide,” says Sheppard. “Give yourself another semester or two to explore.” Staying in school for an extra couple of semesters is not the end of the world; loads of students are doing it. “The reality is most students take more than four years to do a four-year degree.”

The further you get into your studies and the more time you’ve invested in a program, the more difficult it can be to switch. Some changes can be relatively painless, because of the large amount of overlap in prerequisites — for example, changing from psychology to sociology. Transitioning from engineering to sociology, however, could add semesters to your degree and thousands of dollars to your student loan.

Get noticed in a sea of faces and make a name for yourself

The class sizes of many major universities are growing each year, and students have to learn to keep up. More and more do the individuals in the class fade into a crowd of 150-plus students within one lecture hall. Still, it’s important to differentiate yourself from the masses, or to be recognized. Here are some tips:

1. Swear in class
The use of impassioned profanity when answering a professor’s question is a sure-fire way to make fellow students love and respect you. It’ll make you sound intense and brooding – you’ll be the rebel without a cause if you drop the f-bomb nonchalantly in the middle of a chemistry class. You might alienate a few – professors included – but one can never put a value on the kind of following you’ll garner.

2. Wear an unbelievably irrational outfit
Can’t walk in heels? Strap them on and stumble your way into class like a drunk gazelle. Is it 40 degrees outside? May I suggest this giant parka that makes a rustling noise when you battle yourself out of it during class? Walk in late and you will be reassured that everyone’s eyes will be on you and your inexplicable attire.

3. Slather yourself in scented lotions, perfumes, colognes and hairspray
Beauty is important. It’s even more important than the ability of the person next to you to breath. Aim to bathe yourself in strong scents, like anything that really assaults the senses. Floral smells or something by Elizabeth Taylor will due. Extra notice will be take if you can get your hair to be so bouffant from hairspray and backcombing that the three rows behind you can’t see anything else.

4. Interrupt the professor every class with pseudo-intelligent and “witty” comments
No matter what they tell you, professors love this. Quite literally, they stand in the mirror every morning before class and say to themselves, “I really hope a self-righteous 20-year-old in an ironic Love Boat t-shirt makes a comment today that’s both a thinly veiled reference to the movie Half-Baked, as well as in no way helpful or interesting. I also hope they act smug and condescending for the remainder of the class.”

5. Complain as loudly as possible in class about how big of a waste of time the lecture is
Granted, we all have classes we think are useless, albeit mandatory or other wise inescapable, but there’s no better way to set you apart than to talk ad nauseum about how much you hate the class and everyone dumb enough to be in it. (Except yourself, of course.) Turn to the student next to you, roll your eyes in regard to the professor and sigh dramatically. When a break in the lecture comes up, bolt out of the classroom as if to say, Jesus Christ, you could not WAIT to get the hell out of there. At the end of every class, stand up and mutter as loudly as a mutter permits, “Well that was a massive waste of time.” Sure, everyone is allotted time and space to complain about their classes but you’re going to take it to a level that’s near-criminal.

These wanton, childish acts might not always get you friends but they will get you attention. And sure, you could spend this time trying to get through these classes to learn something, but who will remember you then?

How do you remain an idealist in the hard, logical world of academia?

I’ve been thinking a lot about idealism lately. I entered university an idealist, believing a more sustainable and equitable world than the one we currently inhabit is achievable. Over the course my my first three weeks here, my idealism has been consistently challenged by my peers, my professors, even my textbooks, and I find myself scrambling to reconcile what I’m learning with my beliefs and goals.

The challenges have arrived mostly in the form of logical arguments regarding why my idealism is unrealistic, so my attempts at reconciliation have been similarly rooted in logic, which is proving to be very difficult. For example, in discussing whether altruism exists or not, it’s very hard to come up with examples of pure altruism to prove that it does exist, since any seemingly altruistic act ultimately makes you feel good about yourself and is therefore in your self-interest. Logic, it seems, is inadequate to prove that altruism exists.

Similarly, in my Global Governance class, we’ve been discussing the idea of a world government which would legislate and enforce laws for the entire world and would therefore be much better than we are now at dealing with global problems like climate change or terrorism. But, for many practical reasons, the idea is considered overly idealistic and unrealistic: another instance of idealism getting bogged down in logic.

Even despite the seemingly overwhelming logic confronting much of my idealism, when I read great thinkers like Oscar Wilde saying that “a map of the world without Utopia is not worth looking at,” I think it might be worth clinging to.

There’s another quote I like that goes: “a mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It cuts the hand that uses it.” I recalled this bit of wisdom from the Indian polymath Rabindranath Tagore yesterday as I was listening to a monk at a Buddhist temple I was visiting out of interest, and it struck me that perhaps I’ve been overly focused on logic while neglecting intuition. Of course, universities are institutions of logic and reasoning, so my recent trend of over-intellectualizing things is perhaps understandable. At the temple, however, there was much talk of how to live a happy and yes, idealistic life, without logic ever being inferred.

Of course, religions rarely feel impelled to justify their teachings with logic, and yet the teachings certainly manage to resonate with many millions of people. After all, extolling virtues of generosity, peace and love, wisdom, and connectedness to others should hardly need justification, and these are essentially the virtues on which most idealism (most of mine, anyway) is based.

So for now, I think I’ll ignore the dissenting voices of logical pessimism and keep my eyes focused on Wilde’s Utopia, justified (I’m still not totally off logic) with one last quote popularized by the ever-wise Kanye West : “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

A new generation of M.B.A. graduates sets out to better the world. Honestly.

As the dusty red pickup truck bounced across Botswana’s rural outback, business graduate student Malaz Sebai nervously anticipated his first encounter with the country’s marginalized and indigenous San people. It was a steamy two-hour drive, and for Sebai, who had spent most of the summer in a small office coordinating the sale of handmade arts and crafts from the region, it was the culmination of an unusual career decision.

In the summer of 2008, while other M.B.A. students and graduates were working their way up through soon-to-be suffering banks and blue-chip corporations, Sebai volunteered as assistant manager with San Arts and Crafts, a non-profit wholesaler of handicrafts made by the impoverished tribe. At the time, he was halfway through earning his M.B.A. degree at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business in Montreal. He concedes that working in Africa, and at such a small organization, was an unconventional choice, particularly considering the high-powered jobs for which business school grads traditionally aim. But he doesn’t regret it.

“When we arrived at the village, we met these poor women we were helping, and there were children everywhere, and all these women were all kneeling on the floor selling their goods,” Sebai recalls. “Without us, these people would never have had access to that opportunity. I think that volunteer work is something that’s very valuable. Especially in this climate, when you go and apply for three positions and there are 150 candidates, this is really the type of thing that will set you apart.”

Sebai, 30, is just one example of the way many M.B.A. grads in Canada are changing their views—both of how to apply their degrees and of how their ethical impulses can merge with their careers. For Sebai, the working trip to Africa wasn’t only about touchy-feely volunteerism; it was also a calculated effort to put his professional acumen to work for a good cause.

Business grads all across the country are making similar choices, and in increasing numbers. And that’s occurring not just because the recent recession has made traditional M.B.A. jobs harder to find. According to Tima Bansal, who teaches strategic management at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in London, incoming M.B.A. grads are displaying unprecedented levels of social understanding of issues like climate change, poverty, literacy, women’s rights and international politics. “They have a greater awareness of people, and their position within society,” she says. “They care more about their social presence.”

M.B.A.s are giving the ethics of potential employers a much harder look now than they were 10 years ago, agrees Sharon Irwin Foulon, Ivey’s director of career management. She deals with students in both the admission process and in career placement. “I’ve been hearing from my colleagues that many of their students are refusing the few six-figure jobs that there are if they don’t like the values of the organization,” says Foulon. “People have been talking about this shift for a long time, but from my perspective business students seem to be increasingly giving their opportunities a genuine and thoughtful look.”

Despite homecoming cancellation, booze-fuelled bashes on campus keep police busy

They cancelled homecoming at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., but it didn’t stop the party.

Police say booze-fuelled bashes at on-campus houses in a residential neighbourhood have kept them very busy. Const. Mike Menor says at least 23 arrests have been made on charges including assault police and obstruct police since the parties began Friday evening. But Menor says officers on horseback have helped keep the drunken partygoers from flooding into the streets.

Last year, an estimated 8,000 people jammed Aberdeen Street, and officers made nearly 140 arrests. Twenty-five Queen’s students were also charged with illegally selling alcohol and hospital emergency rooms overflowed with grossly intoxicated partygoers.

The university decided to cancel the fall homecoming for at least two years after medical staff warned that the partying was bound to lead to a fatal incident.

- The Canadian Press

Last year, thousands of people jammed the streets and officers made nearly 140 arrests

Kingston police are bracing for another night of revelry by Queen’s University students after nearly two dozen arrests were made Friday night.

The university announced in November that traditional fall homecoming celebrations would be cancelled for at least two years due to safety concerns.

But revellers refuse to give up the partying that accompanies the festivities and continue to throw unofficial “faux coming” parties.

With the football game underway Saturday afternoon, police had already responded to 18 incidents including three rowdy keg parties, numerous liquor violations, an indecent act, a vandalized car, a break and enter, and a report of kids throwing tree branches onto a bus.

Const. Mike Menor says about 23 people were arrested Friday night and early Saturday morning on charges ranging from assaulting a police officer to public intoxication. He adds that partiers threw objects at a prisoner van after arrests were made.

Menor says police have also seen a number of underage drinkers this weekend and that homecoming weekend is always taxing on police and Kingston residents, who are fed up with the resources being poured into the event.

Toronto police on horseback and riot police have been called in to assist local officers in dealing with the influx of debauchery.

But he adds that police expect Saturday night parties to be even more out of control because it is traditionally the major night for celebrations.

Menor says 11 officers on horseback helped keep the drunken party goers from flooding into the streets Friday night.

Bigger isn’t necessarily better, at least when it comes to the university experience

I just read this article by Margaret Wente, which got me thinking about my school. She brings up a number of good points about a shifted focus in the post-secondary education system — a focus on articles, not students. Graduates, not undergrads. Classes the size of small towns, it seems.

I, quite frankly, can’t figure out how anyone can learn in a giant lecture-style setting. Actually, I’m lying; I can’t relate to it. A situation where I read and see someone talk from 20 rows away, rinse and repeat twice a week and never discuss the material almost seems to defy the purpose of university.

Why bother leaving your room? Listen to podcasts of lectures. I could even download lectures from universities around the world and do the reading and listen to them and learn just as much. A friend of mine, before I left for university, suggested to me that if I ever had a bad prof for a common course, to check podcasts from other universities. Why even bother joining any one university when you could theoretically pick and choose among professors from universities around the world and never even see them?

This trend concerned me when I read this post by a mom of two university students about her son and daughter’s swine flu protection plan:

“They’ll be doing two of their electives by distance education and, with the exception of two labs – where their physical presence is required – their other courses could easily be done by podcast if necessary.”

Darn those pesky labs — if not for them her children could spend all year in their residence rooms mainlining caffeine and Tamiflu. I think we’re all forgetting what I think is the most important part of the learning experience. It all comes back to that same reason why King’s students return: community. A growing, learning community of academics, one that starts in first year with an intense year living, eating, and learning together, complete immersion in learning.

Imagine: professors, TAs and undergrads all living in the same place. There would be class lecture/seminar/discussion-style classes, but then those discussions would spill out of the classroom and to the dining hall. You’d challenge your professor’s position over a drink in the campus bar. You would find common ground somewhere like the dining hall, or even the chapel because in this community, everyone is learning and learning from each other.

This is exciting. This is my experience of school, every day. At the University of King’s College, the faculty don’t live on campus as they used to but they may as well, they’re around so often; I see them in meal hall, in the bar, on the quad, at club and school functions. My biggest class this year is 25 people, since I take all courses offered at King’s and none through the King’s-Dalhousie partnership. I just find this a stimulating, exciting way to learn.

So, “Big Five”, here is what I propose to you. Smaller, not bigger. Be inspired by the Oxfordian model, the one we aim for at King’s. Our education system needs work, and I believe this is a better direction.

I can’t really speak to the experience of attending a large university like Queen’s or U of T, because that isn’t my experience, but I do encourage you to avoid isolating. What is the point of being a part of a community of academics if you never access any of this? And I do include other students in the category of academics. So take small classes, introduce yourself to your professor, go to tutorials, get involved in clubs, in student government, but please, please engage in your university.

League will give their students a unique opportunity, says school’s athletic director

Simon Fraser University will begin play in the NCAA Division II in the fall of 2010, one year earlier than originally planned, in a move that will save the school money while offering athletes a unique opportunity, athletic director David Murphy said Tuesday.

“We have the ability to provide a great Canadian education and we can also combine that with an NCAA athletic experience,” Murphy told a news conference. “No one else can do that.”

SFU is the first non-U.S. member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The school’s varsity teams will become the 10th member of the NCAA’s Division II Great Northwest Athletic Conference.

For all OnCampus coverage of the SFU/NCAA saga, click here.

Richard Hannan, the conference’s commissioner, said SFU was a logical choice.

The conference has institutions in five states, including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

“They are a prestigious, quality institution, academically and athletically, ” said Hannan. “Geographically they are a great location for us.

“We needed another member. We need to get to 10, then hopefully we can get to 12.”

SFU currently has 19 teams competing in the small-college National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics in the U.S. and Canadian Interuniversity Sports.

Murphy said joining the NCAA will save SFU money in travel and membership fees. It costs about $500 to belong to the NCAA, while CIS fees are “quite a bit more,” he said. “The savings in memberships will be over $40,000.”

SFU currently plays in the CIS’s Canada West conference, where they sometimes must travel as far as Winipeg for games – a trip of about 1,870 kilometers by air.

Another major difference is the NCAA pays to travel to any championship. In the CIS and NAIA, individual schools pay the travel costs. Under CIS rules, scholarships can only cover tuition and school fees. An NCAA scholarship covers tuition, room and board, which could give SFU an edge when recruiting athletes.

Originally, SFU had planned to compete in the CIS next season and move on the NCAA in 2011-12.

When a textbook’s bias is obvious

I always thought university textbooks were supposed to be objective. An unbiased source of information.

Until my history textbook referred to someone as a “mama’s boy.” Seriously.

According to the textbook, Ibbi-Sin, a king from the Dynasty of Ur, wasn’t just an incompetent ruler. He was “something of a mama’s boy.”

The term “mama’s boy” sounds like a subjective judgement, as opposed to an objective statement of fact. Sure, I know everyone has a bias. Even textbook authors. But I figured that university textbooks should at least appear to be making an attempt at sounding neutral. You know, something more along the lines of ‘attachment disorder’ or ‘parent-child relationship psychosis.’

When I saw that pharse, I was startled. If a history textbook is going to insult someone, I thought they’d call them “inadequate” or “inept.” My textbook is breaking the rules.

That Alexander guy who took over Egypt? A mega-jerk.

Aristotle thought there were only five elements. What a moron!

And Gandhi, whining about human rights and junk. Talk about a cry-ass.