Archive for July, 2010
The Charter right to use a credit card
Kwantlen students no longer able to pay tuition with a credit card, student association prepares for court
Students at Kwantlen Polytechnic University will no longer be permitted to pay tuition using their credit card. For the university, it is simply a cost saving administrative change, with a portion of the savings in user fees ($250,000) being redirected towards scholarships and bursaries. For the Kwantlen Student Association (KSA) it is a matter of human rights.
International students will still be allowed to use their credit cards because they may not have access to banking options that allow tuition to be paid online, as domestics students do. That’s discrimination says Bradley Head KSA director of academic affairs. A lawyer who Head consulted with told him that restricting credit card use by place of origin violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the B.C. Human Rights Act. If a solution cannot be negotiated with the university the KSA plans to take the issue to court as “a last resort.”
How dare you use student fees for protesting?
UOttawa Campus Conservatives indignant over student funded bus sent to protest G20
A Conservative club at the University of Ottawa says that the student union was wrong to use student fees to charter a bus of about 50 students to protest the G20 in Toronto. “I highly doubt that every single student who has to pay those fees would be happy to know their money was being spent to send a few individuals to protest for the weekend,” Campus Conservative president Peter Flynn told the Ottawa Citizen.
The Student Federation of the University of Ottawa’s (SFUO) Foot Patrol Centre pooled resources with the Student Appeals Centre and other campus groups to pay the $1,000 bus rental fee. Flynn took particular issue with the fact that services like foot patrol and student appeals have no mandate to protest. “If there was a ‘protest centre’ on campus then it would make sense to use its budget for this sort of thing, but these service centres have nothing to do with protesting,” he said.
SFUO president, Tyler Steeves defended the expenditure. “We try to capture the passions of our students and help students to pursue them, whether that means setting up intramural sports leagues or renting a bus so they can protest something they care about,” he told the Citizen.
For coverage from campus paper the Fulcrum, please click here.
For all of our coverage of the G20, please see here.
Ignatieff’s ‘education’
The opposition leader escapes a lie through clever snobbery.
Michael Ignatieff raised eyebrows this week when he proudly credited good old Canadian publicly-funded education for helping him get his start in life.
Before you could say j’accuse, journalists began pointing out that the young Ignatieff had been sent to Upper Canada College, that bastion of Ontario silver spoonery where school boys learn to be Old Boys. After that, the smarmy story kind of writes itself: Ignatieff, the PhD-toting, book-publishing, Harvard-professing elitist has pretended to be one of us.
Ignatieff’s handlers quickly fought back, saying that the Leader was referring to his education at the publicly funded University of Toronto, not UCC.
The problem is, the explanation only makes Ignatieff seem like more of an elitist. Only professors refer to the start of their education as the place where they earned their undergraduate degrees. If someone asks me where I was educated, I start with The University of Western Ontario, not Grandview Public School. Why? Because in the circles I travel in, elementary and secondary school is where you bide your time until you are ready for a real education. No doubt Ignatieff was thinking along the same lines.
But most Canadians don’t get a university degree, let alone three, so the real political problem is not that Ignatieff was lying about his past, but rather that he was speaking in a register that most people don’t understand. That’s fine with me, but then, nobody wants to vote for me, either.
Does the MCAT discriminate against francophones?
No French equivalent exists, and translating the exam is ‘too complicated’
Related news:
Original story from the Montreal Gazette
Also see:
Parents hope to profit from children’s education
Buying a ‘university home’ is a worthwhile investment
Like many parents of university students, Kim Leone desperately wanted to rescue her child from less-than-ideal living conditions during her final years of university. So instead of paying another $6,000 in rent for the school year, she and her husband decided to purchase a second home that could serve as daughter Sarah’s home away from home.
The initial goal was to provide a safe environment that would offset rental payments and perhaps even pay for itself. But with Sarah set to return home next spring, Kim is now hoping to sell the six-bedroom condo townhouse a few kilometres from Ottawa’s Carleton University for a tidy profit. “In the beginning we weren’t looking when we purchased it of making a profit,” she said in an interview from Hamilton, Ont. “But now, in keeping our eye on the real estate market, there I know we’re going to make a profit.”
Purchased two years ago for about $210,000, the unit in the Hogs Back district is being listed for $270,000. The Leone family put five per cent down and spent $15,000 to create two basement bedrooms. With five student renters each paying between $425 and $500 per month, the townhouse fully covered its costs and gave Sarah a less stressful environment to complete her studies and gain her independence. “It’s the best thing you can do for your child,” Kim said.
It’s a feeling echoed by 22-year-old Sarah, who said she’s thankful for the experience of being a landlord, which included collecting rent and finding replacement tenants. She urges parents to consider purchasing after their child experiences the first year living in a university dorm and advises them to do their homework to ensure rental income can cover costs.
A growing number of parents have turned to ownership over the past 20 years as an alternative to student residences or frat-style rentals, industry experts say. Patrick Walchuk of Keller Williams Ottawa Realty, who helped the Leones purchase the townhouse, said he’s seen interest grow as people have looked to real estate as an investment alternative during the stock market weakness. “People want to put money as an investment into real estate and they figure they can kill two birds with one stone and also provide shelter or accommodation for the kid that is going to university.”
With Ottawa’s real estate prices growing about six per cent annually, the nation’s capital presents an opportunity to make profits, he said. University towns, such as those in southwestern Ontario, are also good locations because prices are relatively low and with good resale markets. He urges buyers to be realistic about expectations. Most buyers end up in condo-style arrangements that include maintenance instead of relying on their child.
High cost cities such as Toronto, however, can be more challenging because it’s harder to get high enough rents to cover the costs of ownership, says David Larock, an independent mortgage planner.
He suggests that rental income should be at least 10 to 20 per cent more than the total expenses for the mortgage, property taxes, maintenance and food costs. “Any time the cost of carrying the property as an investor exceeds the rental income that can be earned, the investors are essentially subsidizing the renters so at that point it’s a better deal to rent than to buy,” he said.
Not exclusively the purview of the rich, buying a university home can also make financial sense for middle-class families, especially those with a few kids heading to the same academic institution. “It’s sort of like hand-me downs. You get a hand-me-down house as opposed to hand-me-down pants,” added Larock.
Like all real estate investments, longer time horizons put the owner in a better position to realize a financial gain and offset some of the costs like realty fees and taxes. Larock cautions that buying may not be the right option for everybody, including those parents with children heading to American universities.
Plummeted U.S. housing prices may seem like a great opportunity. But Larock said a high “shadow inventory” of homes may suppress prices and make it harder to sell down the line. “Personally, I would not be buying property in Florida right now, even though prices have come right down.”
Parents should avoid buying a second home if there’s a risk they won’t be able to pay the mortgage and may be forced to sell it with little notice, he added. With classes set to start in about six weeks, time is running out but it’s not too later to buy a home for this year. The choice of tenants may be limited but many students continue to scramble to find accommodations through to October.
The Canadian Press
‘Academic vandalism’
Proposal to shut down prestigious comparative literature program at U of T draws international rebuke
The proposed closure of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature has ignited an international campaign in protest. Scholars from all over Canada, the United States and Europe have written letters pleading with the U of T to reconsider shutting down the prestigious Centre that was founded by Northrop Frye in 1969. The proposal is one of several recommendations in a sweeping academic plan released by the Faculty of Arts and Science earlier this month.
Frye, author of the Great Code, was arguably Canada’s greatest literary scholar, with the world renowned Centre often seen as one of his most important legacies. There are currently 33 PhD students and nine master’s students pursuing degrees through the Centre.
Graduate studies in comparative literature will remain possible through a new School of Languages and Literature, where six previously independent units will be housed if the academic plan gains approval from the U of T’s governing council. Students studying comparative literature who graduate before July 2011 will earn their degree from the Centre, while those graduating after that will receive their degree from the school of languages. Once current students complete their programs, the proposal is for comparative literature to become a collaboration with other disciplines, where students would elect it as a supplementary option.
So far no professors are expected to lose their jobs, but the faculty hopes to save on administrative expenditures. “The general approach here is to find ways to reduce some of the overhead costs associated with each of these existing departments or centres while retaining the teaching and scholarship,” arts and science dean Meric Gertler said.
Other proposals include transferring courses previously taught by the Centre for International Affairs into the Munk School of Global affairs. The Centre for Biological Timing and Cognition would fall under the auspices of the psychology department.
But it is the possibility of closing the Centre for Comparative Literature that appears to have generated the biggest response. Students have organized a campaign called “Save Comparative Literature” that includes a petition with around 5,800 signatures, including Margaret Atwood’s. Online forums have seen an unfavourable acronym attached to the School of Languages and Literature at U of T, namely “SLLUT.”
Some students see the plan as a breach of contract. “I think something that is going to be very difficult for us going on the job market is that we are the last classes for the [Centre] and that’s damaging to us,” fourth-year PhD student Jonathan Allan said. “We didn’t agree to come to the University of Toronto to become a part of some school of languages.”
Professors are similarly disappointed. Linda Hutcheon, who teaches at the Centre, although her home department is English, says that interdisciplinary studies, like comparative literature, are being threatened. “There’s no other Centre that brings people together, not only from other languages to work together, but from other disciplines, from history to sociology to the theatre,” she told Maclean’s. “Almost every school in the United States has a comparative literature department. That’s the joke.”
In a previous interview with the Globe and Mail, Hutcheon remarked how the University of Toronto pioneered the study of comparative literature. “We had Europeans coming from all over the place because it was the only place in the world that you could do it,” she said.
Dozens of letters, from Canada and around the world, have been written in protest of the plan, with new ones coming in on an almost daily basis. Noreen Golfman, president of The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, wrote that she would be “remiss” not to express concern “about the fate of one of the better known Canadian assets in the humanities.”
Françoise Lionnet, vice-president of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) wrote: “As the premiere institution in Canada, and as the leader among Commonwealth universities, Toronto cannot afford to send the message that the Center for Comparative Literature is slated for disestablishment.” The ACLA is set to host its next annual meeting in Vancouver.
Daniel R. Lamont, of the University of Central Lancashire wrote that the Centre is “well regarded” in Britain and called the decision to close it “academic vandalism.”
Gertler says scaling down the number of units in the arts and science was necessary to address concerns arising from a 2008 external review that concluded that the faculty was growing beyond its means. In particular, the review noted that 15 new units had been added in the previous five years alone. Gertler does, however, emphasize that nothing is final, and that he is continuing to meet with students and faculty. “We’re certainly listening carefully to the comments that people make and we will continue to be open to good ideas,” he said.
McGill eliminates MCAT requirement
Claims the exam creates unequal access for Francophone applicants
McGill’s Faculty of Medicine has announced that the MCAT will no longer be a requirement for Canadian applicants.
Many med schools across Canada claim to treat every undergraduate degree equally. For these schools, the context of your GPA supposedly doesn’t matter: a 3.8 in Health Sciences, Philosophy or Social Work are all equivalent.
Some schools hedge their bets, encouraging students from a variety of backgrounds to apply, while noting that “the difficulty of the program” is taken into consideration.
The whole ‘every undergraduate degree is born equal’ policy is somewhat misleading. In addition to some schools having science prerequisites (including organic chemistry and biology courses), the MCAT has always been an Arts Degree Killer. The majority of Canadian med schools (11 out of 17) and almost every school in the U.S. require the MCAT, a multiple choice exam that assesses “problem-solving, critical thinking, writing skills and knowledge of science concepts.”
A degree in a traditional pre-med program, such as the Health Sciences or Biomedical Sciences, prepares students for the exam (and usually fulfills the prerequisite course requirement for most med schools).
Getting through the Verbal Reasoning and Writing Sample might not require any advanced scientific knowledge, but the physical sciences and biological sciences sections can pose a serious barrier to arts students with dreams of med school.
Fortunately for non-traditional pre-med students, the MCAT is becoming a thing of the past.
Applicants from Canadian universities are no longer required to write the exam.
“I feel what we’ve put in place is very acceptable and will allow us to properly evaluate candidates,” Dr. Saleem Razack, assistant dean of admissions for medicine at McGill, said in an interview with the Montreal Gazette. Dr. Razack says McGill would have kept the MCAT requirement if there was a French equivalent. “But we want to make sure there’s no barrier for a major segment of our population.” According to Razack, the regular med school class from undergraduate programs doesn’t have as many francophones as McGill would like.
The Northern Ontario School of Medicine, the University of Ottawa, and Francophone medical schools in Quebec don’t require the MCAT. After meeting with MCAT representatives about translating the exam- but ultimately finding it was “too complicated”- McGill is joining their ranks (some schools that require the exam actually make certain qualifications- such as McMaster University, which only uses the Verbal Reasoning section to determine interview eligibility and admission rank).
Interestingly enough, if you check out McGill’s Faculty of Medicine website, you’ll note that candidates who are not required to write the MCAT can still submit their scores, and the overall score will be evaluated by the Admissions Committee.
Related: McGill wants ‘non-traditional’ students
-photo courtesy of comedy nose
Grades disappear at Fleming College
Power outage erases hundreds of student marks
The advice that students should always save a copy of their assignments has never been more relevant for students at Fleming College. After a series of power outages, caused by construction at the Peterborough school, hundreds of student grades were lost when the learning management system had, at one point, gone offline. The problem came to the attention of the college on July 16 when students began reporting that they were unable to access their grades through the system.
Students were officially informed of the data loss last week. At least 1100 full and part-time students are attending the college this summer, but it is not yet clear exactly how many grades have been lost. In most cases backup copies, such as spreadsheets of grades submitted by instructors, exist. In cases where there are no backups available, faculty have been left scrambling to dig up old graded assignments. IT staff are investigating the direct cause of the data loss, and chief information officer Jim Angel says a full report on the malfunction will be made public.
Sask shuts down private college
Academy of Learning branch closed after investigation into ‘financial difficulties’
A private college in Saskatchewan has been shut down. The Academy of Learning (AOL) Estevan was denied license renewal after a hearing, held last week, concluded the college was in violation of legislation regulating private vocational schools. Eighteen students will be affected by the closure, but the Ministry of Advanced Education, Employment and Immigration hopes to have them back in the classroom by the end of this week.
AOL offers career training in programs such as accounting, hospitality and information technology.
As part of a routine annual review, it was discovered that the operator of the Estevan college was “experiencing financial difficulties,” said Ann Lorenzen, executive director quality assurance for the education department. Lorenzen was unable to offer specifics but said that private colleges are subject to “legislative requirements regarding the filing of financial information.”
The ministry had been working with AOL Estevan since May in an effort to bring the school into regulatory compliance, and when that did not happen the school was shut down. “In this case when we did our review, we discovered there were financial issues and we worked with the operator, and she was not able to bring herself into compliance with the legislation,” Lorenzen said.
AOL franchises are independently operated, so the decision to remove the Estevan branch’s license will not have an impact on other AOL schools in Saskatchewan. The province is working with the AOL head office so that students can resume their studies as early as Thursday or Friday. Although private schools do not receive any public funding, they are regulated in Saskatchewan under the The Private Vocational Schools Regulation Act.
Messages left with the AOL Estevan office, and the AOL franchising office were not immediately returned.
McGill wants ‘non-traditional’ medical students
Three spots reserved for students who had different paths to medical school
McGill hopes to attract “non-traditional” students to medicine through a new admissions program aimed at diversifying the faculty. Beginning in 2011, three spots out of 80 will be reserved for students who have been on a less than straight path to medical school.
“What’s different about this is that we are looking for people who interrupted their studies, which means that either they’ve been in the workforce, or raised a family,” said Saleem Razack, assistant dean for admissions for medicine at McGill. Traditional students who follow a more linear path to medical school are more likely to come from higher economic means, the dean added. “This [program] may help with the goal of having greater socioeconomic diversity in the profession.” According to Razack the program could also assist in addressing Quebec’s family doctor shortage because mature students are more likely to enter “generalist practices.”
The Quebec Federation of General Practitioners estimates that 2 million Quebecers do not have a family doctor.
The academic prerequisites will remain the same for students applying through the “non-traditional pathways” program, with the exception that the students will be eligible to apply even if they completed their undergraduate studies part-time. Regular students are required to earn their first degree through full-time study. Where admission criteria will differ will be with greater weight given to “life experience” such as working in a community focused environment or a health-related field.
When asked if the faculty had outlined a policy on how the criteria would be weighted differently, Razack said he could not disclose that information. “I’m not able to say that at this point. It’s usually stuff that we keep to ourselves,” he said.
Zero-alcohol limit a good idea for young drivers
Restrictions for drivers under 22 is strategic, not discriminatory
Is that a pig soaring over the Ontario Ministry of Transportation head office? Maybe so, because I’m about to applaud Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government.
Let’s just put that sex-ed flip-flopping, secret G20 imaginary lawmaking, eco-fee botching aside, and focus on the provincial government’s latest initiative.
Starting August 1, drivers aged 21 and younger in Ontario caught with any alcohol in their system will have their license automatically suspended for 24 hours. Offending drivers also risk a $500 fine and an extended 30-day suspension. Three violations will result in a cancelled license.
Now, perhaps I’m speaking with gloat of my recent 22nd birthday behind me, but this sounds like an all-around solid idea. There’s no reason why young drivers need to have a drink before driving, and let’s face it—most 19- to 21-year-olds aren’t pouring a glass to explore their taste in Argentinean Shiraz. Drinking and driving are not rights—exclusively or otherwise—so drivers under 22 can put their violins aside and decide between the keys and the bottle.
Easier said than done for some, however, especially the injustice-hunters who have been quick to inform the Twitterverse that the new regulations are “ageist.” Call it “ageism” if you want, but based on statistics that show drivers aged 19-21 are almost one and a half times more likely to be involved in fatal drinking and driving collisions than other drivers, it’s probably more appropriate to call it “strategic planning.”
Granted, a more infallible way to propose the new regulations would have been to extend the 20-month, zero-alcohol limit under the current graduated licensing system to up to five years for all new drivers, not just those under 22. That way, novice drivers, regardless of age, wouldn’t pair inexperience with alcohol.
But calling the new rules “discriminatory” is to ignore a plethora of information showing that young drivers, as a group, are not as safe on the road as older drivers. They simply don’t compare. And though it may be a group of bad eggs spoiling it for the rest, the differential treatment on the whole is justifiable. So put down the pint and find something else to do before you get behind the wheel. There’s always pig-watching.
-Photo by DOliphant
Students can barely Google themselves
Study shows students rely on search engines to determine credibility of online sources
University students are too trusting of internet search engines, according to a study published in the International Journal of Communication. The paper, authoured by a group of communication researchers at Northwestern University concluded that students considered a website credible if it was placed at the top of a Google, or other name brand, search engine.
Students included in the study were given information-seeking tasks and then videotaped as they completed each assignment. The results suggest that just because today’s university students have grown up with the internet, that doesn’t mean they are necessarily adept at using it for research purposes. More than a quarter of the 102 University of Illinois at Chicago students sampled, told the researchers that they clicked on a website because of its proximity to the top of a search list. “In some cases, the respondent regarded the search engine as the relevant entity for which to evaluate trustworthiness, rather than the Web site that contained the information,” the paper reads.
When one female social science student was asked by a researcher “What is this Web site?” she responded with, “Oh, I don’t know. The first thing that came up.”
Only 10 per cent “of participants made remarks about either a site’s author or that author’s credentials while completing tasks.” However, even among these respondents “none actually followed through by verifying either the identification or the qualification of the authors whose sites gave them the information.”
As search engines, like Google, don’t generally rank websites based on their credibility, the paper concludes that any intervention to educate students on evaluating the credibility of a website should recognize “the level of trust that certain search engines and brand names garner from some users.”
Lawsuit filed over violent Western arrest
Student Irnes Zeljkovic is asking for $750,000 in damages
A man whose violent arrest at the University of Western Ontario was posted on YouTube is suing the London Police Services Board, the school and officers who made the arrest. The lawsuit filed by Irnes Zeljkovic, who was a student at the university, is asking for damages totalling $750,000.
In the 90-second video, a half-dozen campus and London police officers are shown violently arresting a suspect in October 2009. Police maintained at the time the level of force used was justified and cautioned the video didn’t tell the whole story, saying the suspect had earlier been combative and was resisting arrest. Mr. Zeljkovic was initially charged with multiple offences, including assaulting a peace officer, but all charges were later dropped on the condition he complete a mental health program.
Related: Violent arrest of Western student causes controversy
His lawyer, Phil Millar, says his client is doing better since the incident and has spent the past seven months volunteering at a local high school. The lawsuit comes nearly a month after the university released a report on the incident, prepared by former Ontario Provincial Police commissioner Gwen Boniface. The report’s recommendations included having campus police officers take part in awareness training on de-escalation skills to assist in dealing with mental health issues.
The Canadian Press
LSAT-iquette
Asking someone what they got on the LSAT ranks somewhere between asking someone what they weigh and asking them how much money they made last year
The whole deciding, applying and accepting process for law school is a long and arduous process, of which the most time-and-mind consuming of it all has got to be studying and writing the LSAT. *
If you ever need to disabuse your mind of the notion that knowledge of the law is a prerequisite for law school, take a gander at a sample LSAT one day. The six-sectioned, nearly-five-hour torture exercise has precisely nothing to do with the law and everything to do with one’s ability to generate locker assignments for oddly-alphabetically named fifth graders who are possessed of complex social structures that would erupt were Betty forced to share with Carly.
Still, it’s mandatory. And thus, it becomes all-consuming for those considering law school, between studying for it and asking other people how they studied for it and obsessively checking law schools’ median LSAT scores for last year’s entering class against your practice results, et cetera.
The strange thing, though, is that even though the only point of writing the LSAT is to award test-takers a score which they will use to apply for school, asking someone what they got on the LSAT ranks somewhere between asking someone what they weigh and asking them how much money they made last year on the list of societally unacceptable things to inquire of people that will always garner you cock-eyed disapproving looks but rarely get you an answer.
I started studying for the LSAT last February and wrote last June, and for the first time in more than a year since I received my score, someone flat-out asked me what I got. I’m in Victoria at the moment, setting up my place for the forthcoming school year, and while opening an account at the video store around the corner, the clerk asked what brought me to the city, and upon hearing my answer the first words out of his mouth were “What did you get on the LSAT.” Literally, just like that. I almost high-fived him for being so forthcoming, being someone who is both naturally nosy and was just previously paid to ask strangers intrusive questions.
It turned out that he’s in the middle of studying for the LSAT himself, which is exactly the position I was in more than a year ago. Just like our curious video clerk, I too constantly asked previous writers how they did on the LSAT, only to frequently receive such maddening non-answers as “Well, I did well enough to get into law school.”
Even on the Internet, where everyone is cloaked in a veil of anonymity, there is a reticence to share LSAT scores unless prompted**. Over at lawstudents.ca, each Canadian law school has its own message board, and each of those has its own variant of an IN! thread, in which applicants post messages when they get in to said school. Now, every single one of these threads is populated by applicants who haven’t yet heard back, and every single time the same thing happens over and over throughout the life of the thread:
1. Someone posts that they’ve been accepted to school X, with very little other info.
2. Someone else immediately responds, asking poster 1 what their stats are, ie, LSAT score and GPA
3. The original poster responds, gladly willing to furnish such info on request, but almost never having put it in the original post, despite knowing that these are the only things the people who use these boards really care to know, so that they may judge their own chances of getting an acceptance letter in the near future.
I suppose the reason that it’s so verboten to either voluntarily disclose one’s LSAT score, or to ask what someone else’s is, is that if the conversation is taking place between two applicants or law students, unless they got the exact same score, such a discussion immediately ranks the participants in a supremely uncomfortable way by which the superior score-getter fears being seen as smug or a braggart and the inferior score-getter immediately feels subpar and both are keenly aware of both their own and the other’s feelings, neither of which are pleasant.
Accordingly, even though the LSAT is something for which people prepare for months, and which the only point is to get a score, once you’ve got the score you’ve worked so hard for, the only people who ask what you got are those who have no comprehension of the whole process or what a score between 120 and 180 even means, and so just nod pleasantly and blankly when you tell them and then immediately ask what kind of law you want to practice.
*The second-most is the personal essay, which I actually hated far, far more than the LSAT and accordingly spent far less time on, but will be discussed in a later blog post.
**Which is exactly why I have just written a 750-word post on the LSAT without voluntarily disclosing my own score.***
*** In case it hasn’t become obvious, I’m about 300 pages into David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest right now, which is why I’m probably going to be moderately annoying for the next month or so w/r/t using footnotes and so such.
Do universities need affirmative action?
Equity policies may have little impact.
Two things have put affirmative action on my mind lately. One is the Tory musings that the government might abandon the federal affirmative action policy. The other is that I am on a hiring committee at work.
My august institution has an affirmative action policy that seems, at least, in theory, fairly reasonable to me. In a nutshell, the policy says that well qualified members of visible minorities and well qualified women should at least get an interview — even if just on the phone or by video conference. Moreover, if it comes down to two more-or-less equally qualified candidates, the minority candidate or the woman should be preferred to the white man. Fair enough, I say, because the policy does not call for the less qualified to be hired over the more qualified — with all the potential pitfalls that can arise from there. And hey, all else equal, surely going for increased diversity is better than flipping a coin.
But does my university really need such a policy? And if we do, is it doing any good? I am doubtful on both counts.
Though university professors are far from perfect, they are, in my experience, more than usually aware of bias and more than usually broad minded. At the very least, they are intensely interested in seeming broad minded. Indeed, faced with a candidate who is a member of a visible minority, I suspect most university professors would make a point of being particularly open to the candidacy, if for no other reason than to allow themselves hearty self-congratulations later on.
The ethnic diversity of my university faculty colleagues seems to bear this out. Cape Breton is not, itself, particularly diverse, and it is not always easy to attract candidates who may feel out of place on a small, sparsely populated island where they are less likely to meet others with the same religion, linguistic backgrounds, or cultural traditions. Nevertheless, the university is far more culturally diverse than the surrounding community. I have colleagues from around the world and who follow a variety of religious traditions. The university is also one of the few places in Cape Breton where alternative sexualities can be openly discussed and displayed without fear of unwanted social consequences.
As for women, female faculty abound here, and not just in the arts, but in many science disciplines, too. The inequities that remain seem primarily a result of the fields that women choose to pursue — which may be a problem in itself, but not one likely to be helped much by affirmative action. I was on a Philosophy hiring committee once, and of the twenty-five applicants, only one was a woman. Why don’t women want to be philosophers? On the other hand, female candidates have always been taken seriously on the hiring committees that I have served on, and when it comes to continuing positions in my department, they have been evenly split between men and women — at least since I’ve been here.
Still, diversity in the ranks doesn’t proves the policy is unneeded. It could be a sign that the policy is working. But I doubt it. First of all, the affirmative action policy is trumped by Canadian law which privileges Canadian citizens and permanent residents; recent immigrants, who may often be minorities, are often neither and get pushed aside. Moreover, the policy does not cover every element of diversity, only visible minorities, persons with disabilities, and women. In other words, the policy does not help you if you are gay or of a minority cultural group that is not visibly different (as with Jewish people of European descent, for example).
More importantly, the policy only applies to you if you self-identify for the equity initiative. This makes a certain amount of sense, of course: you can’t necessarily recognize a member of a visible minority when you can’t see the candidate. And you really don’t want a committee trying to guess. In practice, however, surprisingly few candidates self-identify, especially women. I’m not quite sure why this is. Perhaps they feel that self-identifying makes them look weak in the eyes of the committee. Or, they may feel that they don’t want special treatment — that they want the job only if they are clearly the best candidate. So, if the job-seekers don’t want affirmative action, whose interests does it serve?
Finally, at the end of the process, the committee still chooses the best candidate. If that candidate is a member of a visible minority the policy was never needed; if she is not, the policy does not apply. In theory, the affirmative action policy might force a committee to consider a candidate they would have dismissed, only to find out he was great and hire him after all, but while I would welcome such an outcome, I have never seen it happen. Similarly, there could be a theoretical tie between two very good candidates, and the minority applicant would be chosen, but, again, while I would have no problem with that, I have never seen that happen either.
So while the current policy has little or no effect, a tougher policy would achieve more diversity only at the cost of fairness and academic quality. And how much more diverse than the surrounding community does the university need to be? But who knows, maybe this hiring committee will be the one. We professors are unusually open-minded, you know.
Sarah palinates bardigiously
Sarah Palin isn’t Shakespeare; she’s Dogberry. Not that she knows who Dogberry is.
Last week American political commentator Sarah Palin annoyed lovers of the English language by calling on Muslims to “refudiate” the building of a new mosque in New York City. Clearly Palin accidentally combined “refute” and “repudiate” to create her neologism, but, after briefly changing the word to “refute” which didn’t make sense in context, Palin was soon suggesting that the first word was a deliberate stroke of creativity. “Shakespeare loved to coin new words too,” wrote the former governor and potential presidential candidate.
Now, if anything in this internet age went without saying, it would go without saying that Sarah Palin is no William Shakespeare. Let’s also put aside the many instances in which Shakespeare laments how people are easily misled by surface appearances, and how authority is often invested in the wrong people, and let’s consider instead the way in which Palin’s gaff was the sort of thing we do see in Shakespeare.
Shakespeare characters frequently mix up words, as, for instance, when Bottom (as Pyramus) intends to cry out that a lion has “devoured” his beloved, but cries out instead that the beast has “deflowered” her. Ouch? Oops? Oups?. The king of such malapropisms and other verbal carnage is Dogberry, the bumbling officer in Much Ado About Nothing. “Comparisons are odorous,” says Dogberry (he means “odious”) but Palin’s “refudiate” is exactly the sort of thing that would pass the watchman’s lips without a second thought. He says “dissembly” when he means “assembly,” “senseless,” when he means “sensible,” and, when the arrested villain Conrade calls him an “ass” to his face, he is outraged that the sexton has already left and cannot record the insult:
Dost thou not suspect my place? dost thou not
suspect my years? O that he were here to write me
down an ass! But, masters, remember that I am an
ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not
that I am an ass. No, thou villain, thou art full of
piety, as shall be proved upon thee by good witness.
I am a wise fellow, and, which is more, an officer,
and, which is more, a householder, and, which is
more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in
Messina, and one that knows the law, go to; and a
rich fellow enough, go to; and a fellow that hath
had losses, and one that hath two gowns and every
thing handsome about him. Bring him away. O that
I had been writ down an ass!
What Shakespeare realized is that stupidity tends to come out in the words that we use, and an idiot who speaks frequently will soon be recognized as an idiot, even if a well-meaning one. The Bard’s buffoons thus frequently confuse words that sound similar (“suspect” for “respect,” for example) and this is a mark of their buffoonery. If Will were around today to write a play about Sarah Palin, she would speak, no doubt, more or less as she actually does.
In the end, Shakespeare’s clowns remain charming because they are never given much real authority. More grave men remain in charge. Let’s hope that Sarah Palin remains similarly harmless.
How to distract from your cause
For the UTSU, support for Pride Parade is more about exposure for the university
When the video of Neda Agha-Soltan dying on the streets of Tehran surfaced during the 2009 Iranian election protests, it quickly became an international symbol of the iconic struggle against the Iranian regime. The 40-second YouTube clip was seen by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, many of whom decided to tint their Twitter avatars green in solidarity with the Iranian demonstrators. The green overlay was a way for over 160,000 Twitter users worldwide to show their support for democracy in Iran.
The gesture, of course, was symbolic. The new green hue to your smiling pic wouldn’t stick a pin in Ahmadinejad’s side, nor would it motivate Iranian officials to open the floodgates to foreign media. But the idea was to offer ideological solidarity—a sometimes-powerful motivator to those pressing for change.
Now, as far as I can understand, fervent Tweeters weren’t looking to score a dark forest green over the default shade to demonstrate heightened support for the protesters. Nor did individuals race to go green before the herd, or boast they had convinced the greatest number of followers to adopt the tint. The idea was simply to offer solidarity; not to self-reflexively boast that one was doing so. That’s the attitude to take with these sorts of things, right?
Wrong. And here’s where I segue to the student movement. It seems to Adam Awad, student union president at the University of Toronto, showing support is about being seen and receiving proper recognition. Reflecting on Toronto’s recent Pride Parade in an interview with The Varsity, Awad said he hopes U of T will be featured more prominently in future years’ marches.
“As some of the most active members in the community and given the role that we have historically played, it would have been nice to be closer to the front of the parade, rather than the back, which is where we have been for several years,” Awad said. (He also erroneously said that the UTSU was one of the founders of the Pride Parade. The quote was subsequently deleted from the online edition. Here is cache version of the original story.)
The UTSU wants the prime real estate for next year’s parade—definitely an issue worth digressing from the cause. (Remember? The parade is about celebrating the LGBTQ community. Write it on your hand if you forget.) Offering support, demonstrating ideological alignment, exhibiting solidarity—it all means nothing if you can’t land a spot behind the Grand Marshall. Apparently, student unions are exceptional supporters and thus shouldn’t be shafted to the back of the bus.
Unfortunately, not only does UTSU’s naval-gazing distract from the greater issue, it sullies the genuineness of its support altogether. Are students there to march in solidarity, or there to be seen marching in solidarity? How much focus is being paid to the actual cause?
If nothing else, Awad’s comments do nothing to shake students of that dirty “me generation” reputation. But sorry, that’s just my egoism talking.
Your wages must freeze
Ontario pleads with universities to freeze wages
The Ontario government is asking universities that are in the middle of labour negotiations to walk away from the table and impose a two-year wage freeze. Although the wage freeze is being proposed for all public sector employees, as part of a plan to reduce a $19.7 billion deficit, the government is singling out universities because several of them are currently in the middle of collective bargaining. “It’s not that we chose them or they chose to go first,” a government official told the Globe. “It’s just that chronologically [their agreements] are coming up.” The Star added that after those two-years are up, that wage increases should be regulated inline with the province’s 1.9 per cent cap on spending increases.
Faculty groups are not impressed. “The government is trying to impose its wishes for zero compensation increases without the legislative tools to do so,” said a spokesman for the Ontario Confederation of Faculty Association quoted in the Globe. Executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers is concerned the move entails forcing universities to bargain as one unit, a move, he told the Star that would be “quite a worrisome development.”
University grads prefer Liberals
But that doesn’t mean the census debate is igniting a culture war
A new Ekos poll released today suggests that university graduates prefer the Liberals over the governing Conservatives. Ekos president Frank Graves says this “trend” might reflect not only discontent over the great census crisis, but is also indicative of “a deeper structural divide between the educated elite and what Galbraith calls the ‘not so rich.’” By “not so rich” Graves is referring to “college graduates.” In other words, we are in the midst of a culture war, the census debate is the catalyst, and the line is being drawn between the university educated and the college educated. Too bad Ekos’s own data doesn’t appear to support that conclusion.
The two-week survey, conducted between July 7 and 20, shows that 29.9 per cent of those with a university degree would vote Conservative against 32.0 per cent who would vote Liberal if an election were held tomorrow. For the college educated the numbers are 34.8 per cent Conservative and 23.7 per cent Liberal. Apparently this is what Graves means by a “deeper divide” between the “educated elite” and everyone else.
For that speculation to have even a whiff of credibility, wouldn’t it have to be shown that the divide has actually deepened over time, say by tracking Ekos’s own polls? If the numbers are substantially different than they were in May or June, before the phrase ” long-form census ” found its way into newspapers on an almost daily basis, than Graves might have a point. But that isn’t the case.
In the Ekos poll released June 24, results were nearly identical to the July poll. University grads still favoured the Liberals (34.3 per cent) over the Conservatives (29.0 per cent) and college grads still preferred the Conservatives (34.1 per cent) against the Liberals (23.7 per cent). Despite these largely unchanged numbers, support for the government among university grads in fact increased in July over June, if only a little (0.9 per cent) and decreased for the Liberals by 2.3 per cent. While support among college grads for the government also increased between June and July, (0.7 per cent), support for the Liberals among this group was unchanged. Hardly a widening cultural chasm.
Now, as the Globe points out, the second week of the July survey does appear to show a drop in support for the government among university grads (to 28.3 per cent) and a rise in support among the “not so rich” college educated ( to 38.7 per cent). Even these numbers, however, appear to be consistent with long-term trends as opposed to a sharp divide precipitated by recent events. The Ekos poll released on May 24 had support for the Conservatives among the university educated at 31.6 per cent, but it was 27.8 per cent at the beginning of April. In the May poll 36.0 per cent of college graduates supported the government, while the April poll had the number at 34.4 per cent.
Removing the long-form census may be bad public policy, and it might be fun to argue that university graduates (with their apparently superior understanding of data collection) would be particularly irked, and it might also be fun to argue that college graduates (with their obvious affinity for “red meat” policies) are ecstatic over no longer having to fill out lengthy census forms. But, this week’s poll is just another in a long list of polls that demonstrates shifting support for this or that party according to level of education. That’s not to say it has nothing to do with the census debate; however, even if these changes in polling numbers were the result of what’s in the news, and they might very well be, there is nothing special about it.
To be clear, Graves was only offering “speculation” over the presence of a “deeper structural divide.” But shouldn’t even speculation, particularly coming from a company that boasts the scientific accuracy in its polling, be based on evidence?
Photo: Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff speaks to University of Manitoba students: Ashley Gaboury
Newfoundland students mailed last year’s grades
Education department blames communication failure
Call it academic deja vu. Almost 12,000 high school students in Newfoundland and Labrador got their grades in the mail this week — except they were for last year. That’s nearly two-thirds of all high school students in the province.
The Education Department blames a processing error and is apologizing for any confusion or inconvenience. Final marks for 2009-10 will be mailed in the coming week. The error is being blamed on a communications failure when the transcripts were sent out for mailing without department approval. The department says communication protocols are being reviewed to ensure there isn’t another repeat performance.
The Canadian Press
