Archive for August, 2010
The million dollar president
UAlberta buys president’s house for $930,000
University of Alberta president Indira Samarasekera has had a very good year. Not only did she bag a whopping $936,000 in compensation and benefits during the 2009-10 fiscal year, but she also made a lucrative real estate deal − by selling her house to the university.
Yes, that’s right. The University of Alberta purchased Samarasekera’s home on July 1, 2009 for $930,000, according to the Edmonton Journal. The house was bought to be the official residence of the president and Samarasekera continues to live in it, although she now pays rent to the university.
A handful of other universities including the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto also own houses in which the president lives. The residences double as venues for meetings and social activities related to university business. The added bonus of housing is a perk that also comes in handy when recruiting new presidents, Brian Heidecker, chairman of the board of governors, told the Journal. “The fact that you have a very good quality home available makes recruiting infinitely easier, and it makes the transition for the president much easier if they happen to be an outsider.”
What is odd about U of A’s decision to buy the home is not only that they purchased it from the current president, but that the home is off campus. Customarily, president residences are on-campus estates that are maintained by the university and conveniently located for university functions. U of A hasn’t provided housing for presidents for decades, and one of the last presidents to make use of an official residence (Walter Johns, who was president from 1959 to 1969) didn’t like being roused from his sleep by drunk students walking through campus in the middle of the night. Since then, presidents have lived off campus.
Before the sale, Samarasekera’s home was used for some university functions, and the university paid some operating costs to her. According to Heidecker, the house worked so well for these events that the board decided it should be owned by the university. “It was to our mutual benefit that we owned the house instead of Indira.” While I’m sure that the house serves its purpose as a venue to entertain just fine, it’s seems only prudent to look for other houses that would be more appropriate, and its unclear if the board shopped around before the purchase.
The Journal also makes the valid point that the timing of the deal could be seen as unfortunate by critics. When the sale was being arranged, U of A knew of looming funding cuts that would lead to layoffs, increased fees for students and unpaid furloughs for staff.
House sale news aside, the other interesting nugget of information in the Journal report is Samarasekera’s compensation. With a base salary of $479,000, her non-cash benefits pushed her total compensation to $936,000, making her one of the highest paid university officials in Canada by a wide margin. The top paid academic in Ontario in 2009, according to data released by the Ontario government, was Amit Chakma, vice-president academic and provost at the University of Waterloo, who bagged a whopping $737,640 in compensation plus $3,505 in benefits. The second highest paid university official was William Moriarty, president and CEO of the University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation, who was paid $605,728 in 2009.
Photo: University of Alberta president Indira Samarasekera
Court injunction stalls UVic’s plans to cull rabits
Activists say the university was not giving enough time to find the feral rabbits news homes
Legal fur is flying over attempts by the University of Victoria to trap and cull feral rabbits munching through its Victoria, B.C., campus. The University says it has been served with a B.C. Supreme Court injunction preventing it from killing the bunnies.
Trapping has been suspended while the university deals with the court action but a statement from UVic also says it continues to work with community groups trying to find new homes for the rabbits. Rabbit activist Roslyn Cassells, who applied for the injunction, says the move provides some breathing room, because members believe the university planned to cull the rabbits before arrangements could be made to move them.
A farm in Coombs, north of Nanaimo, has offered to take some of the bunnies and a rescue organization in Texas is prepared to take 1,000 of the critters. But, Susan Vickery of Common Ground, a Saltspring Island wildlife organization, says red tape has stalled efforts to obtain the necessary permits to ship the rabbits to their new homes.
If Cassells is able to get a court hearing by Aug 27 and the injunction stands, the university will be unable to reduce the rabbit population that surrounds student residences before classes resume for the fall.
The Canadian Press
Siblings sue CEGEP over ‘abusive’ fitness test
Athletic students say fitness test violates their Charter rights
Two siblings are suing their college because the two apparently athletic students failed a fitness test that kept them from graduating. Florence Dallaire-Turmel and her brother Olivier are seeking $25,000 each in damages from CEGEP de Lévis-Lauzon alleging the test is “abusive” and that it violates their Charter rights. Florence, who is a former gymnast, plays hockey and works out regularly, while Olivier cycles and plays hockey and tennis
The test, introduced in 2,000, counts towards 50 per cent of a students’ physical education credit, and requires students to walk up and down a couple steps at increasing speeds. A students heart rate is measured at different intervals. The goal of the test, according to a CEGEP spokeswomen, quoted in the Globe and Mail, is to give students a “healthy mind in a healthy body.”
After both Florence and Olivier failed the test the first time, they were given the chance to take it a second time, which they also failed. In Quebec, earning a CEGEP diploma is a prerequisite for being admitted to university. However, Florence was accepted to Laval on the provision that her diploma would be forthcoming. Her brother was permitted to take some university courses at Laval this past year.
The two are being represented by their father, Simon Turmel who is a lawyer and political aid with the provincial government. Turmel has told various media outlets that the test doesn`t take into account external factors, such as the fact that his son is mildly asthmatic. His daughter said on Canada AM that she has a heart rate that is naturally higher than others.
According to the lawsuit, the test is “illegal, abusive, arbitrary[and] unreasonable.” The college has so far stood by its fitness requirements.
Yet more on the LSAT
I guess my last post got some hackles up south of the border.
I guess my last post got some hackles up south of the border:
But is the LSAT pointless? Recently, a Canadian online newspaper asked why the great land of Canadia, home to mounties and maple trees, would eliminate the MCAT from medical school consideration while maintaining the LSAT as one of the principle determining factors for law school admission. The writer, Laura Drake, then postulated that the LSAT actually doesn’t test anything needed for law school/legal work.
*Waves frantically south of the border* Thanks for visiting! The author here is a fun, snappy writer, and you should check out the post, Why the LSAT is Useful, and one Canadian Newspaper is not.
. Now, on to some quick points.
1. I don’t think I actually postulated that the LSAT doesn’t test anything needed for law school or legal work. When I said it has nothing to do with the law, I meant the literal law. Current legislation, rules of evidence, civil procedure, etc. A lot of people who have never taken the LSAT are under the impression that the test includes those things, and I was simply pointing out that it doesn’t.
2. I also never said the LSAT was pointless, and if I gave that impression, then my bad for being unclear. What it does test — logical reasoning, analytical reasoning and reading comprehension — are probably useful for most things in life, law school inclusive. What I was more doing was try to start a conversation about whether its the best and, more importantly, only way to measure ones abilities at those things.
3. Maclean’s is actually a magazine, and I personally find it pretty useful at times. My own use to the universe, however, is definitely up for debate.
Alberta needs more family doctors
U of C might have the solution
The University of Calgary has found a way to bring more family doctors into Alberta.
According to an article from the Calgary Herald, Alberta needs hundreds of family physicians in both urban and rural areas. With an estimated 200,000 Calgarians without a family doctor, the city needs at least 150 new doctors, along with another 150 rural doctors.
It’s sort of a doctor shortage within a doctor shortage: we need more doctors, but we especially need more family physicians.
In the past, there weren’t nearly enough family doctors coming out of the U of C. In 2007, the department of family medicine accounted for 18 per cent of the school’s total graduating class, much lower than the national average of 33 per cent. At the time, the U of C held the second-lowest rate in the country. “The only school that had fewer students choosing family medicine was McGill (University in Montreal),” said Cathy MacLean, the head of family medicine at the U of C, in an interview with the Herald. MacLean said it was an alarming situation, considering the fact that the U of C’s medical school was founded to train more family doctors.
Fortunately, things are changing. This year, 24 per cent of the U of C’s medical graduates are on the way to becoming family physicians.
The article from the Herald describes some of the changes that lead to this turnaround. Dr. John Keegan was hired as undergraduate director of family medicine to promote and oversee the program, and the clerkship for family medicine was increased to six weeks (it was originally four). The department hopes this extended hands-on experience will translate into an increased interest in family medicine, as students gain more exposure to the field. Additionally, the department increased the number of family doctor teachers.
Despite the extra family doctors on the way, there’s still room for improvement. “We have a large number of people in the Calgary area without family physicians,” Dr. Valerie Congdon, AHS’s acting head of family medicine and the head of rural medicine for the Calgary zone, told the Herald.
The U of C is on the right track, but officials want even more students to choose family medicine. They hope that by 2013, half of all graduating medical students will become family doctors.
More med school news:
McGill eliminates MCAT requirements
UBC staffers caught watching porn
13 unionized workers suspended for using university computers to view sexually explicit material
Thirteen employees at the University of British Columbia have been caught watching and distributing pornography with their work computers. Although no one has lost their job over the incident, the workers were all given 10 day suspensions in recent months. “There was an investigation on the use of IT, and it came to the attention that a number of staff were involved in viewing, receiving and distributing sexually explicit material using UBC e-mail and computers,” UBC spokesman Scott Macrae told the Vancouver Province.
Macrae would not give any more details on exactly what the employees were viewing beyond confirming the material was “sexually explicit.” Nor would Macrae divulge which departments the disciplined employees worked in, except to say that they were all unionized workers.
However inappropriate using work computers for viewing pornography might be, it is quite common, sex addiction expert Paulette Tomasson told the CBC. “At least 70 per cent of pornography is downloaded between 9 and 5,” she said.
‘Don’t make surprise, unannounced visits’
Ryerson advises students and parents how to cope with university
Ryerson’s department of public affairs has some advice for students and parents to help both adjust to university life.
Here are the tips for students:
1. Relax. Everyone else is going through the same thing you’re going through. So go and introduce yourself to someone new. Chances are they don’t know anyone else either.
2. Get to know your city. Get on public transit and get familiar with the different travel routes.
3. It’s OK if you don’t know how to do everything right away. That’s what your family and friends are there for. So call them up.
4. Prioritize. It may be easy to “forget” to do your readings and keep up with your work, but if you let these things slide, chances are you won’t have a reason to be living on your own for much longer.
5. Get connected. There are numerous events going on to suit everyone’s tastes. Whether it be program-specific, faculty-wide, religious, athletic, or just plain entertainment — there’s a little something for everyone. This is your chance to meet new people, and the more people you meet, and the more activities you do, the less likely you are to be homesick.
6. Have a late class? Stayed late at the library? Be safe. Check out your school’s website for security programs or head over to your student union office to find out what they can do for you.
7. Balance is the key. There is so much going on all the time that you can easily lose track of time — so allocate it efficiently. Make sure you have time for your studies, yourself, and time to go out and have fun.
8. Enjoy it all. There are going to be some really great times, some really bad times, and some in the middle, but all of these experiences are necessary for you to get accustomed to this new life. So stay positive.
And here are the tips for parents:
1. Your continued support through any changes (dress, interests, level of academic success, etc.) will be an important part of your student’s success.
2. Don’t be surprised if there is an initial drop in grades or concern about workload.
3. Send pictures and news items from your hometown paper.
4. Don’t make surprise, unannounced visits.
5. Expect the frequency of communication to lessen with time, it means they’ve made a successful transition. If there is a sudden drop-off in contact, however, calmly and tactfully inquire to see if things are OK.
6. Write even if they don’t write back.
7. Ask questions, but not too many. Express interest without seeming like you’re interfering. Remember, this is a transition into independence. Students may take excessive parental interest to mean that you don’t trust them as they are gaining a sense of autonomy.
8. Anticipate more bad news than good news, at least at first.
9. Students are under a lot of pressure and stress, with a fair measure of insecurity. So when those first phone calls come, do not respond by saying, “But these are the best years of your life.”
10. Assess how street-smart your son or daughter is. Discuss safety issues with them and encourage them to find out about campus safety and security, travelling around campus at night and emergency procedures.
We need more grad students, says new GG
Will David Johnston bring attention to post-secondary education from his new post at Rideau Hall?
David Johnston, president of the University of Waterloo and Governor General-designate, has education on his mind. In an interview with the Waterloo Record published this weekend, he declined to speak about his upcoming move to Ottawa and instead focused on the future of education in Canada.
The profile, written by Luisa D’Amato, describes Johnston as “a man transformed by education and its opportunities,” having eventually found his way to Queen’s University, Cambridge University and Harvard University after having grown up in a family of “modest means.” As a former principal of McGill University and after having served at Waterloo for 11 years, he’s got some ideas about how to improve education in Canada — the primary and secondary education system as well as higher education.
Johnston is in support of government goals to increase the percentage of people who pursue university and college education. But he sees weakness in master’s- and doctoral-level programs, which leads to talented students leaving the country for academic opportunity. He blames Canada’s post-graduate shortcomings for a shortage of skilled, highly-educated workers and poor research capacity.
When it comes to proposing solutions, however, Johnston is less detailed. He doesn’t believe a master strategy will do the trick, rather he points to small institutional changes, such as Waterloo’s recent invitation to a group of Indian post-graduate students to visit the university during the summer to participate in research.
So while his selection as GG suggests that Prime Minister Harper looked to academia for the right person to represent the monarchy, Johnston’s comments in the Record suggest that, as others have already noted, the man knows his place. While his insight into the education system may attract some attention to the file, Johnston likely won’t be the guy to lobby for needed changes. And rightly so. As this publication noted when Governor General Michaelle Jean pushed the government to open a university in the north: the GG should reign, not govern.
If not MCAT, why LSAT?
Why are Canadian law schools so wedded to a standardized test that has nothing to do with the law?
Last week all the scuttlebutt was about medical schools that are removing the MCAT as an admission requirement. Right here at home, McGill just axed the standardized test as a mandatory part of an application.
I’ve never written the MCAT, but from my understanding, it does, in fact, test things that one would probably need to know for medical school, like biological sciences. I know I like my doctor to know about biological sciences, personally.
So if medical schools are starting to ease up on requirements for a standardized test that appears to at least have some relevance to the future subject matter at hand, why are Canadian law schools so wedded to a standardized test that has nothing to do with the law? All of the English common law schools in the country have it as a mandatory requirement, and while the LSAT isn’t mandatory for the French schools, some do require applicants to disclose their score if the test was written and many use it as a factor in admissions.
Can anyone present a really strong argument for it as a requirement? I do see the value for admissions officers, to be sure. Potential law students come from literally every corner of the undergraduate academic world, and the LSAT is a ready-made, tried-and-tested way of assigning those thousands of people, with their varied backgrounds, a standard by which to judge them against one another.
But the trick comes, as always, with the word “standardized.” The LSAT is not immune to problems that come along with all such tests, like predictive abilities for law school performance that are mediocre and apparent bias against certain ethnic groups.
Yet it’s well-known among law school applicants that many Canadian schools sort their applications into piles by LSAT score and simply axe off those below a certain percentile. How many brilliant future lawyers are lost below that line, who, for one reason or another, simply can’t handle the LSAT?
It seems to me that there’s some room here for a Canadian law school to set itself apart by announcing a new, more holistic approach to admissions by waiving the LSAT requirement and perhaps doing something like having admissions interviews, which no Canadian law school does, instead, on top of using references and personal statements and extra-curriculars and undergraduate performance. If not for a whole entering class, then perhaps schools could set aside a certain portion of first-year seats for applicants that do not require the LSAT, like the University of Michigan law school did in 2008.
Is there anything about the LSAT that makes it sacrosanct?
Second-year students more likely to binge drink
U of A study to help tackle student drinking
A University of Alberta survey challenges the assumption that it is first-year students who are most unable to control their drinking. In fact, according to Deborah Eerkes, who runs the U of As disciplinary office, it is second-year students who are more likely to find themselves in trouble over their drinking habits. “When they get more comfortable, into their second year, that’s when things kind of go off the rails, or it’s a little more likely,” she told the Edmonton Journal.
The online project, launched last year, saw 520 students answer questions about their drinking. Of the participating students, 195 said they had skipped class as a result of their alcochol use, 20 reported non-consensual sex after drinking, 66 regretted an alcohol fueled sexual experience, and 11 found themselves in the hospital as a result of their drinking. After answering the questionnaire students were given a printout comparing their habits to their peers.
Although the sample size was small, other findings were consistent with previous research on student drinking. In particular, students were likely to assume that their peers drink more than they do. For example, while students were on-average consuming three drinks at home before going to a bar, they assumed the average student had four drinks.
The results of the survey will help the university to develop orientation seminars for new students, as well as inform approaches to student discipline.
