Archive for December, 2009

UBC students knew of Olympics displacement when they signed their contracts

A story by the National Post on UBC fraternities renting out their buildings for the Olympics has raised eyebrows:

More than 200 students at the University of British Columbia are being forced out of their rooms by their own fraternities — which have decided to cash in by renting out to 2010 Games visitors.

The story insinuates that fraternity members are being unfairly kicked out of their places for a whole month with little compensation. One problem with the story: While it seems that one fraternity (Psi Upsilon) didn’t fully consult with its members before hand, most fraternity members were consulted every step of the way.

Adam Mattinson, house manager of Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE), said that discussions on renting out their fraternity for the Games had begun in early 2009 with the DKE council, and that all members who chose to live in the house for the 2009–2010 school year knew when signing their contract that they would be forced to find temporary accommodation in February.

“We knew well in advance that this was going to happen, so we’ve been doing everything we can to make sure there are no issues,” he said. While DKE has not yet fully decided where the additional funds will be going, all residents will see their rent lowered for January, March and April, in addition to not paying for February.

Another fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi (ADP), will be giving each of their displaced residents an additional $500 in exchange for leaving for the month of February. They also started consulting with their members as far back as early 2009, and also had a clause in their residence contracts explaining the situation.

“Ultimately, renting out our fraternity house during the games will benefit members,” said Campbell Bryson, ADP philanthropy chair. He mentioned, as the Post story did, that the point of renting out the fraternities—which are located across the street from UBC’s Thunderbird Arena, host hockey and sledge-hockey during the Olympics—is to increase funds for various initiatives: some are putting the money to scholarships, while others are using it for building maintenance.

So, put this one fairly low on the “Olympic Scandal” meter—it seems that the inconvenience of members leaving for a month is offset by the long term goal of helping a (fraternity) brother out.

Olympics visitors cause eviction of 200 UBC frat members

This strikes me as rediculous:

More than 200 students at the University of British Columbia are being forced out of their rooms by their own fraternities — which have decided to cash in by renting out to 2010 Games visitors.

In particular, the admission that frat members had no choice:

At Psi Upsilon, 30 fraternity members who pay $730 for monthly room and board have been ordered to leave their rooms. All possessions must be removed before the rooms are rented out.

Psi Upsilon house manager Aaron Thomson refused to say how much the group is making from its rentals.

He told The Vancouver Province the money would go toward a scholarship fund, to pay for repairs and maintenance work, and to top up the fraternity’s contingency fund.

“We have this great opportunity where we can fix the house and get all this money,” Mr. Thomson said on Wednesday. “It is, of course, difficult for most people to have to leave for a month.”

Thomson said frat members didn’t have a choice in the matter and no vote was held, but he said the majority favoured the plan.

If, indeed, the money will be used to improve frat houses, and directed towards scholarships, wouldn’t it be appropriate to put the case directly to members? Rather than evicting them without cause, why not try and convince them that it is in the best interest of the fraternity for tenants to leave for a month? According to Psi Upsilon’s website, house vacancies occur in September, and that if you want to live there, you have to wait for someone else to leave. Is there a rider in the lease that the agreement becomes during the Olympic? So much for Greek “brotherhood.”

Maybe someone a little closer to the action can tell us whether this is as outrageous as it seems.

UPDATE: As Justin Mcelroy has pointed out, not all fraternities have acted as outrageously as this Can West story has suggested. In fact, many frats consulted directly with members and ensured they were sufficiently aware of plans to rent out frat houses during the Olympics.

That still leaves the question as to whether Psi Upsilon, the frat featured in the Can West story consulted with their members or not. The Psi Upsilon house manager does say that no vote was held and that members did not have a choice.

My contribution to the year-end review potluck

December is always a weird time a year. It’s a month where the western world tries to grind to a halt and finally stops for about one week. Around this time, people start posting notes on Facebook that dissect the last year in their personal lives. And this year, news sites are filled with retrospectives on the news, people, fashion, pop culture and technology that defined the decade.

I read a particularly astute Facebook update in which the poster likened 2009 to a boorish house guest that overstayed his welcome. It made me think about how I felt and how I would remember this year. Truthfully, I am always glad when a year is over. December is a month of expectation and anticipation and I am always relieved to put it behind me. I am always more capable of making plans and looking forward when I am safely on the other side of the calendar instead of counting down.

That being said, 2009 feels like three different lives bound together loosely by the last four digits of my digital camera’s date stamp. From January to the end of April, I was in Toronto finishing my last semester at Ryerson. My last year of Ryerson was by far the most emotionally trying of the four years. I had to come down from the high of going on exchange, a summer of backpacking and settling back into routine existence. It felt like all the fun parts of university were over. It was the longest I had lived with my parents since I started university and I was not a happy camper.

Making meaningful summer plans are always a source of anxiety, especially in journalism school. If you want a good internship, you need to start applying in December. So what to do when you know you’re leaving in September to do something completely unrelated? Keep your head down, suck it up and take a retail job while you wait to leave? It was a worry I had since I returned to Toronto in September 2008. You don’t want to find yourself among those scouring the “writing/editing” section of Craiglist in May. It was more pressure this year since we were graduating and it was now possible (nay, mandatory) to search for a full-time job. Through a miraculous stroke of luck, I managed to avoid all this. In January I got an email telling me I received a scholarship to study Mandarin in Taipei. In hindsight, I chose to treat this like a free pass to sit back and suffer the rest of the school year until I could get the dodge out of there.

Taiwan was a completely unexpected stop in 2009. I can say now, without a doubt, that it was the best part. Before going there I only knew about its existence and never given the country a passing thought. There was also something amazing about revisiting the Chinese language. Learning Mandarin came so naturally, I astounded myself everyday. Lessons in the textbook would spill out of my mouth without having to put in study time. It was always full-steam ahead. Of course it’s much easier to like something when you are good at it. I left with a different attitude about Chinese language and culture and I have to credit Taiwan for a lot of that.

Which brings me to the here and now in France. This is the part I hate the most about these year-end lists–self-eulogizing while you’re still living. Increasingly I’ve been finding it hard to say positive things about my experience here. Until now, I have been fortunate and sheltered in my experiences abroad to avoid some of the normal feelings of living abroad, namely loneliness and isolation. It sounds obvious but the biggest adjustment was realizing that when you’re no longer a foreign student, you don’t have a ton of other foreign students always ready to hang out with you. When you are at a place where you can speak the language, however badly, you now have the option of trying to mix with the locals (and a nagging feeling that you should, instead of befriending other foreigners.) This has been proved harder and more intimidating than I thought. Being a new kid in a French workplace isn’t easy either. It has not only been getting used to the French way of doing things with my colleagues but also becoming a cog in a school system I didn’t grow up with.

In the past two years, I’ve begun to measure time in countries or associate periods of my life with a place. I remember Utrecht and Taipei as such beautiful and happy times in my life. However, they were instant gratification. Toronto is a mix of social circles from different periods in my life that I could fall back into, which makes things both mundane but comfortingly easy. The worst part for me so far is the disappointment that I don’t love France yet. I really hoped and expected that I would.

Lately I’ve been thinking that France serves another purpose in the greater scheme of things. There wasn’t much difficulty or responsibility in Utrecht or Taipei, so I rarely had feelings of dissatisfaction. Here, for the first time, I have to try and work at building a life and finding a niche for myself. Needless to say, I’m not there yet. The catch is my contract finishes in four months anyway. I don’t believe in being defeatist and resigning myself to waiting until I can pack up and leave. I’ve done that before (see: the paragraph about how I spent the first third of 2009) and it didn’t make things any better. So I think I have my new year’s resolution and the first part of 2010 cut out for me.

The academic labour market never gets any breathing room

It wasn’t that long ago when the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada was predicting that we would need tens of thousands of extra PhD graduates. It was reasoned that growing demand for university combined with a mass exodus of baby boomer professors, would create a glut in the academic labour market. The message to government was fund more grad school spaces. The message to students was, forget about all that negative talk of spending five years in a doctorate program only to wind up in temporary sessional appointments. Now is the time to get that PhD.

It is not very novel to point out that, in light of the past year-and-a-half, this scenario seems like a sad joke. Students are indeed piling into grad programs, but largely as a relief from a brutal job market. As financial trouble appears to be dialing down in other sectors, problems continue unabated in the higher education sector. Universities have been making changes in response to economic realities that will ensure that a tight academic labour market will remain the norm long after the overall job market recovers.

As one illustration, the Modern Language Association recently reported that there has been a 51 per cent decline in available English positions over the past two years.

Many institutions have said that they will leave open positions unfilled, which can be accomplished by relying on sessional instructors and eliminating small classes, while they wait to see what their respective provincial governments do with respect to funding.

Some universities are picking fights with faculty unions. And unions are having none of it. At Queen’s, the administration requested that faculty take a two per cent pay cut, which was rejected by a vote of 89 per cent earlier this month. Last week, the Lakehead Faculty Association protested administration imposed furlough days, stating in a release: “Employees should not be made to suffer because administrators are unable to manage university finances.”

Unfortunately, this unwillingness to make concessions may lead to even more drastic measures. Forget pay cuts and furlough days, the days of “voluntary” retirement have already returned. Only a couple of weeks after the faculty union at the University of Alberta agreed to discuss the possibility of unpaid days off, the administration announced that it will be offering voluntary retirement packages,  the Edmonton Journal reported on boxing day. The U of A has not ruled out outright layoffs, as have happened at other schools.

For example, the British Columbia Institute of Technology has announced that it will layoff five per cent of its staff in the coming year. Layoffs have been announced at the University of Calgary, and Guelph to name a couple others. We should expect much more carnage in the spring as universities finalize their 2010-2011 budgets. While it is easy to blame the economy, or the government, universities while crying cash poor over the past decade have, apparently, not taken many steps to prepare for downturns.

Though voluntary retirement may seem more humane than outright layoffs, it signals much deeper financial troubles than a simple trimming of the labour budget. Begging people to give up their jobs is never a good sign.

The voluntary retirement package was a common theme of the 1990s that, combined with leaving positions unfilled, led to a 10 per cent reduction in the total number of faculty across the country. It took years for the academic labour market to recover. The hiring spree across campuses during the early and mid 2000s was largely a move to reinstate positions lost during this period. The AUCC thought that this trend would continue well into the next decade. That’s just not going to happen.

This is compounded by the fact that, when given the choice, baby boomers simply won’t retire at the rate we have expected them to. It hardly bears mentioning that one of the great ironies of the recession is that while it has encouraged students to recede into PhD programs, it has also ensured that they might not have anywhere to go when they finish.

Going home and getting lost

I wonder what other people think of when they think of Calgary. Skiing and cattle, I’m sure. Co-Op Gold beer and mountains and the Conservative Party. Cowboys and the Stampede in the summer. Oil.

When I think of Calgary, I think of the winter: white and clean, with the ever-present threat of death if you even dare to leave your house. The movie Fargo reminds me of Calgary; just a wasteland of terrible climate and some terrible people. The movie ends with a man being shoved into a wood chipper. Coming back to Calgary after months in Toronto gives me the creeps, perhaps for the wood chipper scene alone.

Yes, the prodigal daughter returns! It’s been nearly two weeks and my stay has been nothing short of uncomfortably calm. I haven’t done much, and I’ve left my house four, maybe five times. I don’t read, I don’t write, I don’t talk. I just go from room to room, friend’s house to friend’s house, eating and drinking. What’s this around my midsection, you ask? Oh, just a food-baby.

Fargo is all about small, sad people trying to do something big with themselves. The film is named after the small town in North Dakota where nothing happens except for the frequent snowfall. Calgary is bigger, but ultimately filled with similarly small, sad, petty people. Perhaps they have a less pervasive propensity to murder but Calgarians have a lot in common with the fictional characters from Fargo. Winter jackets that look like they belonged to the Unabomber, weird accents that the rest of the country don’t understand and a horrifying sense of detachment from the rest of the world when you’re too embedded in this western winter wonderland.

Leaving Calgary was difficult. Leaving Calgary doesn’t get easier. When I’m not here, I often wonder what’ll happen in a few decades’ time when the dust has settled. When our parents have died and are well into the ground and when everyone is getting married and having kids and getting real, adult jobs. When the girls will stop using blue eye shadow and the boys will figure that sneakers are not all-purpose. Sometimes I think I made a mistake in leaving. It left me with no real roots. I know well enough that once my parents are gone, I won’t have strings tying me down anywhere.

This idea is solidified by my sister-in-law’s pregnancy. She’s due in a few months, but I’m unsure of how well I’m going to know their daughter. Her and my brother are bringing this new little person into this world and it’s going to be more of my blood than anyone else I know, but I don’t expect to know this kid. My aunts are strange and foreign to me, not to mention geographically far – why wouldn’t this be any different? This used to bother me, but I’ve come to accept it.

I have no strings, and sometimes I prefer it. There’s less to clean up.

Whenever I return to Calgary after a few months of my other life, I forget that there are people here still living and breathing. I’m always surprised when my family or my friends are actually up to things and are actually changing like I am. Surely, this is a narcissistic, to think that I’m the only one maturing. Still, it never ceases to surprise. My father has retired, my brother is having his first child, my friends are meeting other people and many of them have become ghosts. It’s as if whenever I come back, everyone else has been invited to some big party and I can’t even figure out where it is.

I’m unsure of where home is now. Coming back means unnecessary fights with family members. It means soul-crushing snow and near-complete darkness by 5 p.m. It means good food and my brother’s wiener dog, Steven. Toronto means fine company and freedom and adulthood. It means big things and work.

I like things big. Big career, big moves, big events. But big is scary and big requires effort and I am drained of anything big. What I’m sure of, however, is that I’m tired of the journey being my home. I want placement. I have two lives in two cities and there’s no feasible way to make them touch.

When I got to my old room in Calgary, I looked out the window and saw the ice formed around the molding, melting and dripping down the wall. It’s like that every winter. Outside was nothing, just white and dark. It’s Fargo – a sad place for me where so many people make good and great things here but I just can’t, and was always looking for a way out. Still, Calgary was home and I don’t know how to fit back in here.

At the end of it, I just don’t want to be the guy shoved in the wood chipper.

For many students, applying to get into a university is like applying for a job

The holiday break could prove a busy and stressful time for high school seniors in Ontario facing a Jan. 13 deadline to apply to university and a demand for high grades to enter competitive programs.

While the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre began receiving applications in November, many students will spend the holidays submitting forms before the deadline to ensure they’re guaranteed full consideration, said OUAC director George Granger.

Tyler Carson is among those students competing for a coveted spot next year.

The 17-year-old Toronto student says he did a lot of research over the past two years into which university he should go to next fall. The Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate Institute senior visited four university campuses in the Toronto area and checked out schools and programs online.

Carson applied to the University of Toronto, York University, Wilfrid Laurier University and McGill University to study sexual diversity and human rights. He later hopes to attend law school. Carson, who is student council vice-president, founder of the school’s first gay-straight alliance, and has a 94 per cent average, says he’s not worried about being accepted into a top university.

“I’m pretty confident I’ll get into all the generalized programs. I’m applying to Vic One which is a specialized program at U of T that only accepts around 25 kids from my stream, so that will be competitive,” he said.

For many students, applying to get into a university is like applying for a job.

The guidance counsellor at Carson’s school, Renee Rawlins, advises students to get their applications in early and do research. That includes speaking to recruitment officers, going to campuses, and looking into university programs and requirements, such as prerequisite high school courses and marks needed.

Business and engineering programs are more competitive than Bachelor of Arts programs, and require students to have marks in the mid 80s to 90s to get in, she said. “A student with a 55 per cent average in their six courses — they’re not looking to be very competitive anywhere,” said Rawlins. “If you have 90, we can say, well, you’ll be very competitive anywhere.”

Justifying the university means justifying what universities do, not what we want them to do

Over at University Affairs, deputy editor Léo Charbonneau, recently asked his readers for their thoughts about protecting universities against the possibility of massive cuts to higher education. He asks, “What’s the best line of argument to protect universities from the cuts to come?”

Charbonneau poses the question after reviewing an article by Paul Wells written for the alumni mag at Wells’ alma mater (see here, page 46). Wells, one of the few national columnists who thinks higher education is worth talking about, admonishes the idea that university administrators should take a pragmatic approach to protecting their funding.

Administrators like to emphasize the economic impact of higher education. Universities are special, they argue. Not only do they contribute to economic activity in the here and now (like every other large employer) but they make our workforce more productive, and contribute to job creation across the entire economy, and in the long term, in ways that no other sector can. Give them more money and we will get more economic growth as a result. ( The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada made this very argument in its pre-budget submission to parliament’s finance committee).

Such a line of argument would be great for universities if it were true, or, if it is true, if it could be proven. Unfortunately this is not really the case. As Wells writes:

The problem with that line of argument is that in a really nasty economic environment, governments on a tight budget will take that as a cue to go hunting for anything a university does that doesn’t, demonstrably, simplistically, generate the ideas that drive a new economy. Whatever they find that looks like a ‘frill’ by that definition will be in danger of getting cut. And frankly, most of what goes on at a university is hard to justify as part of a job-creation mill.

Charbonneau takes issue not with Wells’ analysis, but with Wells’ conclusions that universities “need to go back to basics and talk more … about the intrinsic value of knowledge, scholarship, beauty, contention, and an environment that urges scholars toward ambition and accomplishment.” Charbonneau finds Wells misguided, and says he doubts “whether it’s the type of argument that our current governments will buy into.”

Though Charbonneau does not come right out and say it, it seems obvious that he sides with the view that universities should adopt a pragmatic approach and tell governments what they think governments want to hear.

It should be obvious that Wells is correct on this question.

Of course current governments are not going to buy into the argument that universities are  justified by their core activities of teaching and learning. No one ever bothers to make the case to them. Instead universities act ashamed that they investigate the origins of the universe, or competing views on Milton’s Paradise Lost, and emphasize what are in actuality only incidental outcomes of higher education.

The logic of academia is internal, meaning its impact on the rest of society cannot be predicted or planned. And, if we start trying to plan it, then what made academia unique withers away. Taking the pragmatic approach does not convince governments to value higher education, it concedes the terms of debate to those who think intellectual pursuits are all about direct economic outcomes. What happens when people start looking for this return?

A more appropriate way to view universities might be something similar to how we view public spending on the arts. As a certain prairie based education writer put it earlier this week:

[T]he public is not stupid, and universities should not be so sheepish about what they do. If universities announced that they were no longer going to study ancient history, or the origins of the universe, or Shakespeare, then the public would likely be distressed.

After all, we support public funding for the arts because of the intrinsic good they are thought to confer on the community. Why not teaching and learning? Like the arts, higher education is a luxury of wealthy societies to be appreciated, not as a means to solve all our problems or to be debased on utilitarian grounds.

If schools want to justify themselves, or demonstrate their relevance, they have to show us what it is that they uniquely do.

To be sure, such reasoning puts schools at risk of being dismissed as frivolous, but it doesn’t have to. Higher education advocates should learn to own the debate and not be afraid to talk about what they actually do.

Will separate school board ensure Aboriginal student success?

These are tricky little quandaries. A community struggles to get its kids through high school, and every Tom, Dick and Sally thinks he or she has the answer. It happened when the Toronto District School Board talked about opening its first Africentric school, and it’s happening again now, with calls to create an Aboriginal school division in Winnipeg.

So, Sally here, with another opinion to throw into the mix. The difference? I’m not an enthused parent, community advocate, political leader or sociology PhD candidate. In contrast, I still wear many of the same clothes I wore in high school, and feebly swap university lecture notes with friends (some of whom happen to be Aboriginal) the night before exams. My point: I may not be any better informed than Tommy-PhD, but I am a little closer to the action.

Granted, I didn’t go to high school near a reserve, and I can’t tell you why the native dropout rates are where they are. But I do know teens who didn’t make it through high school. And no one’s proposing an “I have an unstable home life” school board, or a “Who needs school when I’d make so much money working full time!” committee.

My position is that kids don’t drop out because the curriculum doesn’t speak to them. A discussion of the “mothers” of Confederation wouldn’t have kept the 16-year-old pregnant student at my alma mater in school. Advocates for race- or gender-based alternative schools seem to rely on the premise that relevant material will keep bodies in seats. I just don’t think so.

Well, one might argue, can’t the dropout rates of certain communities be attributed to specific societal trends? Take, for example, ‘Community X’ with its high rates of teen pregnancy and poor high school completion statistics. Doesn’t it make sense to concentrate ‘Community X’ students under one school or board to create a catered learning environment, one which specifically addresses the causes of teen pregnancy to prevent dropouts?

Yes, that does make sense. I’m all for student-directed learning, a more holistic approach to education, classrooms that are about more than just facts and numbers. But while it may be “easier” to lump together students of like backgrounds, I don’t think it would ultimately be to their benefit. Each community, no matter how outwardly successful, has its failings. By isolating one group or another, aren’t we just “othering” them? Why not create a more holistic learning environment for everyone, where more than one community’s troubles are part of classroom discussion? Won’t it empower students to know that they’re not the only ones with statistics not on their side?

Even if a native school board is the answer to getting more First Nations students through high school (a premise of which I’m doubtful) what then? In university, it’s sink or swim. In the workplace, it’s ‘do your job.’ We’re all lumped together, and most of the time, success means cooperating with relative strangers. Hopefully, we’ll see each other as people. But if we keep incubating our kids in racial, cultural, or class bubbles, I’m not so optimistic.

Dalhousie gets international recognition for new sustainability program

When Dr. Deborah Buszard asked a classics professor whether his department had any interest in contributing to planning a new sustainability program, she wasn’t expecting much. Buszard, a plant biologist who researches the use of plants in built environments, had been tasked with contacting every program at Dalhousie University to solicit feedback on the university’s plans to develop an ambitious interdisciplinary sustainability college. So she was delighted when the classics professor responded excitedly, “Oh yes! You can’t understand sustainability without reading Oedipus!”

The classics professor’s suggestion that Oedipus—the story of a mythical Greek king who killed his father and married his mother—is an essential text for anyone trying to understand human behavior was exactly the sort of thing Buszard was after. Recognizing that sustainability issues now touch virtually every subject—be it business, engineering, science, the arts, health, you name it—Dalhousie set the goal of creating a program in which any student from any faculty could pursue a double major in sustainability, a first in Canada. This past fall, only a couple of years later, the program welcomed its first students, and has already gained international recognition by being short-listed for a 2009 World Innovation Summit for Education Award, awarded at the WISE conference in Doha, Qatar in November.

Buszard sees the Environment, Sustainability and Society undergraduate program as the next step in modern liberal education. The accepted view of a liberal education is that students should have a broad education when they graduate from university, having studied English, science, math and so on in addition to their main focus. Buszard says that considering today’s complex problems, sustainability should be added to the list of subjects every student should study. “Whatever you are doing in your career, if you are in a leader position, you need to have this understanding,” she says. “We can’t afford to graduate students without that.”

This is the thinking that is behind’s Dalhousie’s goal of providing sustainability education to every undergraduate student. The program, which can be combined with any other major, brings students from departments from theatre to business to chemistry into the same classroom to puzzle together over complex problems such as water security, climate change or increasing urbanization.

The idea was originally conceived when Buszard’s colleagues realized that there were nearly 150 professors at Dalhousie involved in research on sustainability, in subjects as varied as medicine, international policy, ocean management and law. But these researchers were typically isolated within their departments, without the place to engage with other scholars with similar interests. How could these experts be brought together in a meaningful way?

The result is a college that provides a physical and intellectual place for the exchange of this knowledge. The cornerstone of the college is the undergraduate program itself, in which students study complex sustainability problems in the context of their differing majors. The first year focuses on history of sustainability taught by three professors—a historian, an architect and a scientist—that covers topics such as the development of the wheat economy in Canada and the use of whales as a resource. By the third year, students take their knowledge outside of the classroom to apply to real problems as part of the Campus as a Living Laboratory course in which they identify sustainability issues at Dalhousie and try to develop and implement solutions. In the final year, groups of students team up with community partners such as government and NGOs to tackle community-based challenges.

The intention of the program is to give students an understanding of complex sustainability issues outside of the lens of only one subject of study. The interdisciplinary approach distinguishes the program from environmental science. “We didn’t want to create another silo of experts,” Buszard explains. “We don’t want to produce people who are, say, an economist and only thinks of an issue in terms of economics.”

Buszard says that the program is a first for Canada, and she knows of only one similar program in the States. And students seem to be responding positively. Although the school hoped to enroll 150 students in its first year, 300 signed up.

Students sound off over threat to school year

Fearing a repeat of 2006 when Ontario college faculty went on strike for nearly a month, or, worse, a repeat of the 2008/09 York strike where faculty walked for three months, Ontario college students have started an online petition opposing a work stoppage. The petition so far has nearly 2000 signatures.

Negotiations between college management and the the faculty union broke down earlier this week, and a strike vote is scheduled for January 13th. Some 500,000 students could have their school year interrupted.

Related: Another year, another strike

A Facebook group titled “Ontario College Students Against a Strike” has more than 12,000 members and counting. The group was created by Graeme McNaughton, who was quoted in the Toronto Star today drawing comparisons with the York walkout. “We don’t want a strike to happen. My sister went to York last year and lost out on a summer job because that strike,” he said.

Much of the group’s message board is filled with students concerned over losing their term, not getting their money’s worth in a shortened term, or missing out on summer jobs due to an extended school year. Much of the anger is directed towards the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. One student wrote: “I understand that they feel overworked and underpaid . . . How does ruining all of our semesters going to help that?”

The College Students Alliance is calling on both sides to work to come to an agreement. “Students are concerned with the fact that, yet again, there is a threat of a province-wide faculty strike looming over their education,” says CSA president Justin Fox.  “Students do not want a repeat of the 21 day strike of 2006, which nearly cost many their semester and graduation.”

The CSA also points out that many college students are in government retraining programs, meaning a strike could have far reaching economic consequences during a fragile recovery.

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to correct for the number of college students. It was previously stated that there were 200,000 college students in Ontario. The correct number is 500,000  comprising of 350,000 full time students and 150,000 part time students.