Archive for October, 2010

Faculty union requests conciliator file a ‘no board’ report

Professors at the University of Western Ontario are one step closer to going on a strike that could cancel classes for students. The negotiating team for the University of Western Ontario Faculty Association has requested a provincially appointed conciliator file a no-board report with the province, meaning agreement between the two sides could not be reached.

The union would not be in a legal position strike until 17 days after the report is filed. On Oct 1, the faculty voted 87 per cent in favour of giving the union a strike mandate. UWOFA has said that university proposals to centralize tenure and tenure review processes threatens academic freedom. Negotiation meetings between the union and the university are still scheduled into November.

For background, please see our earlier coverage.

Get your priorities straight.

I did something really stupid this weekend: I made a study schedule. My biochemistry midterm is tomorrow. The following week I have three more midterms, a lab report and a test. So I made a mini-calendar of the next two weeks, circling the days when I have a midterm.

I used a colour code to distinguish between each subject and listed the remaining chapters I had to read for each class, along with the suggested practice questions from the textbook and the relevant sections in the notes.

Then I created a detailed agenda, assigning a certain number of hours to each textbook chapter.

Now I’m ready. To study.

Students who study overseas drink more

Students who go abroad while in college are likely to increase or even double their alcohol intake while they’re away, a new study has found. Drinking increased most dramatically in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the study by researchers at the University of Washington found. Students reported drinking more when they perceived their travel companions were drinking more heavily, and those who planned to make drinking part of their cultural immersion did so.

The study published in the current issue of Psychology of Addictive Behaviours looked only at drinking habits of students who went abroad from the University of Washington, but UW graduate student Eric Pedersen said he would expect to get similar results at other universities. “I don’t think this is just a UW problem,” said the psychology student, who noted, however, that his study sample included more women than the national average for studying abroad and the students he looked at were more diverse ethnically than the national average.

His research did not pinpoint why students drink more while they study abroad, but the results don’t necessarily indicate binge drinking. Pedersen says a drink or so each night with dinner could add up to the 10 drinks a week European visitors reported on average. “In general drinking is an issue on college campuses. When you take that and put it in a foreign country there’s potential for more consequences,” Pedersen said. He noted, however, that most students who study overseas, including those who drink, do not get in trouble while they’re abroad.

Of the several thousand University of Washington students who study abroad each year, 177 answered a questionnaire before they went away and when they returned. On average, those students doubled their drinking while abroad, but most cut back to an average of three to five drinks a week when they returned to Seattle. A subset of students who travelled to the Middle East and other places where drinking is not as prevalent reported their intake decreased while abroad.

Students who were less than the legal drinking age in the United States increased their drinking while abroad by about 170 per cent, the study found. The overall increase was about 105 per cent.

Henry Wechsler, a lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was not involved in Pedersen’s research, said the finding that location is an important element in shaping drinking behaviour is consistent with his department’s research. “We found that college students in the United States tend to drink at the levels of young people in the states where the colleges are located. What seems to be added here is that being away from the home environment of the college may create a ‘spring break’ atmosphere,” he said.

Since an increase in college student deaths related to drinking in the late 1990s, more research has focused on student drinking. This study points to more areas that need to be examined, said Bob Saltz, senior scientist of the Berkeley, California-based Prevention Research Center. He was not associated with this research. Saltz said the next step is to use this information to find ways to prevent students from getting in trouble with drinking while studying abroad. He said several recent studies have found success at decreasing student drinking while in the United States.

He would like to hear more about these students and their drinking: Were they having a beer with lunch or a glass of wine with dinner, or was it something more?

The Canadian Press

Dorms face a ‘major problem’ and when kids come home, you could too

Imagine you’re a bedbug—a creepy nocturnal creature, maybe no bigger than an apple seed, that craves human blood. Times are good for you right now in North America. DDT once rendered your species a distant memory, a revolting relic found only in children’s rhymes. But you’ve evolved immunity to the short-lived, environmentally friendly insecticides of today, and you’re on the march. So where would you prefer to nest and spread your progeny? You’d look for a communal setting, one where people are frequently moving and swapping furniture. Tidiness is a minus; substance-induced inertia a plus. The ideal host population would include sheltered young people who have never seen a bedbug or learned to recognize its excreta.

“Universities are in the line of fire,” declares Don McCarthy, president of Braemar Pest Control in Bedford, N.S., and board member of the Canadian Pest Management Association. “You’ve got transient populations. You’ve got a lot of the social aspects that come with being at university—your buddies come over and sleep over; everybody’s going back and forth to parties and study sessions. There is not a major university anywhere in North America that does not know this is a major problem, whether or not they have it.”

There is no evidence bedbugs can transmit disease, and their whole modus operandi is to be noticed as little as possible. But news of their presence can ward off visitors and clients as effectively as any plague—as retailers are discovering in New York City, where flagship stores for franchises such as Niketown and Victoria’s Secret have had to close temporarily to address infestations, and as Toronto learned in August when a mere Internet whisper had Toronto International Film Festival organizers double-checking venues.

News of on-campus infestations occasionally slips through to public notice. Ryerson University in Toronto has had intermittent problems dating back to at least 2006. The same is true of the University of Alberta, which had to evacuate and treat the entire 20-storey Newton Place residence in 2008. McGill was hit tornado-fashion in 2007 and 2008, with New Residence Hall, MORE House, and Solin Hall all affected. The University of Calgary admits to a steady “one or two cases per year,” according to spokesman Grady Semmens. Humber College in Toronto is following up a positive finding last month with a campus-wide sweep of residences using bedbug-detecting dogs.

At Simon Fraser University, bug-sniffer dogs have become a familiar sight; the school uses them pre-emptively, checking every residence once a year shortly after the start of classes. “SFU has not been immune to the bedbug problem,” says Chris Rogerson, associate director of residence life. “No multi-unit housing provider is.”

But Rogerson emphasizes that universities enjoy advantages that private apartments or social housing don’t. “Universities have departments like mine whose job is to educate tenants, dispel myths and misconceptions, and organize quick reactions to problems,” he observes. “We encourage early reporting, and our attitude is, address the bug, not the person.” That’s why the dogs are brought in after the students arrive. “We don’t get into saying, ‘Well, the unit was clean before you got here.’ The best defence is to make sure there’s no stigma attached, so students don’t decide to suffer in silence.”

Routine pre-emptive inspections are becoming part of the arsenal for many schools, according to Mike Goldman, owner of Toronto’s Purity Pest Control and a pioneer of bedbug training for dogs. “Universities have to deal with students, but ultimately they also have to deal with parents,” says Goldman. (Some of those parents may be worried about secondary infestations acquired on home visits; bedbugs aren’t avid travellers, but they can be transmitted in laundry or other personal effects, a potential worry as thousands head back home for Thanksgiving weekend.) “Nobody wants to get the ‘What kind of school are you running over there?’ call.” Dogs can detect live bedbugs super-accurately, but Goldman says they work better when students are given advance notice to tidy up and minimize distraction. “They’re bedbugs,” he says. “The dog and I have to be able to get to the bed.”

University examines partnership with private international student recruitment company, Navitas

Carleton University may become the latest school to contract out its foreign student recruitment to Australian company Navitas. The university has struck a committee of department heads, administrators and students to consider Navitas’ proposal to run a private college for international students at Carleton. The company already operates two similar colleges at the University of Manitoba and Simon Fraser University.

For background, please see: The sneaky way universities are privatizing teaching.

Navitas, which would be responsible for recruitment, would offer first-year courses for international students who may not meet requirements to be admitted directly to the university or who need extra support, including with developing their language skills. Courses would be designed in consultation with Carleton, and, although Navitas hires its own instructors, they must meet the institution’s academic qualifications. Students who successfully complete the first-year program would then be admitted directly to the university.

Students are charged the same tuition as other international students, and Navitas pays a royalty to its host schools.

At Carleton, the proposal is being met with skepticism from professors and other staff who fear that their jobs may be contracted out. Similar concerns have been raised at the University of Manitoba, where the faculty association has questioned to the quality of education, academic freedom, and the fact that Navitas uses publicly paid for classrooms. The University of Windsor rejected a similar proposal with Navitas competitor Study Group International earlier this year.

How to take a stand… without getting arrested.

Carleton pro-lifers arrested

Pro-life students at Carleton University arrested

Within the bounds of what it’s appropriate for, it’s the best

As a child, if given the choice between spending time with a human or spending time with a book, 99 times out of 100 I would take the book, and the other one time it was probably only because my mother had physically taken my book away on that particular occasion. Books were my friends, and we were the very best of. In library contests where children had to move a paper totem along a wall advanced by minutes read, my little hot air balloon was often idling at the far end of the wall before half the others had even left the start gate.

In light of the hours upon hours I now find myself reading every single day, in retrospect, I kind of wish I had spent at least a little more time outside or developing the social skills that are probably going to atrophy over the next three years of law school.

Everyone tells you how much reading there is in first-year law school, but no one (read: me) really believes it until you get there. A few days before class started in September, some of the first-years were meeting up for lunch when our smart phones all went off with an e-mail from the Assistant Dean. It included, among other illuminating facts about first-year law, that we would probably be assigned 300 to 500 pages of reading a week.

“Okay, but not really,” we (again, read: me) said. “They’re probably just trying to scare us.”

Whether this tendency to believe things in the face of all evidence to the contrary will benefit or harm me in a legal career is yet to be seen. However, the Assistant Dean, unsurprisingly, was not lying. If anything, she was lowballing the estimate.

On any given night of the seven days of the week, I would say I have between two and five hours of reading. The real kick in the pants, too, is that all my amassed hours of childhood (and adulthood) reading has contributed very little to my ability to read what is assigned from law school. In fact, law school in large measure requires the same approaches that one used to learn to read the first time, like following the text with your finger to guide your eyes. The biggest thing, though, is having to pause three or four times a page to look up a phrase (frequently, and I would argue unnecessarily, in Latin) that you can’t quite figure out. And it is on this point that I would like to virtually kiss the feet of the originators of Wikipedia.

I will pause here to note that there are many objections to the use of Wikipedia in academic endeavours, and many of these are valid. I would never, nor would I ever advocate, relying on Wikipedia (or any other secondary source) as the first path of learning something. Nor would I ever cite Wikipedia in an assignment or even in class. My point is, there are limits to Wikipedia’s utility, but within the bounds of what it’s appropriate for, it’s the best.

I’d argue that Wikipedia’s main area of appropriate usage, in relation to law students, is its ability to put into plain language the dozens of new words or phrases we run up against when cracking into those 60-120 pages of nightly reading.

Real life example: Last week, for my property law class was assigned a really interesting case that had to do with the tort of conversion. As a precursor to reading, our professor suggested that we figure out what “conversion” was and my brain was all like “Duh. Conversion is either when you change one unit of measurement to another or that thing that Coach Taylor occasionally talks about on Friday Night Lights. Case closed.”

This is how the case defined conversion: “conversion-a tort that protects against interference with possessory and ownership interests in personal property.”

At which point my brain was like “No mention of measurement has been made, and it seems unlikely this is what Coach was imploring the Panthers to do. Harmonization of previous known definitions of conversion has failed. Wikipedia?”

Conversion is a common law tort. A conversion is a voluntary act by one person inconsistent with the ownership rights of another.^[1] It is a tort of strict liability.^[2] Its criminal counterpart is theft.

The two sentences are basically the same, but the one on Wikipedia managed to snap the legal meaning of “conversion” to the grid in my head by using plain language that the strict definition given in the case was not, and it did it in about three seconds. It’s pretty hard to argue against the utility of that. And it’s phenomenal how many of the terms and phrases I’m coming across for the first time have fully written and referenced Wikipedia entries.

How did people live before the Internet?

Photo by nojhan

Should students be scared when faculty threaten to walk out?

Labour unrest at Western and Carleton have, no doubt, students there worried. And as the academic year rolls on, more faculty associations across the country may reach tense periods in their bargaining processes. Could my school be next? But since students are not always familiar with the mechanics of such negotiations, the uncertainty can be unnerving. What follows is a brief outline of what goes on to help students feel a bit less uncertain.

At nearly every university in Canada, professors and other academics are members of a local faculty association, and in most cases those associations are legally unions according to provincial labour laws. For professors, most of those locals are part of a national union, The Canadian Association of University Teachers.

Faculty associations negotiate collective agreements with their university administrations and those agreements govern much of the academic workings of the university. Students may not be aware of it, but everyday things like the numbers of students in their classes may, in fact, be determined by the university’s contract with its faculty.

These contracts are made only for a few years at a time since neither side wants to be bound to one set of rules for too long — new problems may arise, after all. So, around the time the old agreement is set to run out, the two sides meet to try to negotiate a new deal. Often the changes are minor, but there are usually important things that both sides want to alter. Salaries, for example, are almost always on the table, but, as the recent disputes at Western and Carleton show, things like tenure and promotion can take centre stage.

Sometimes both sides agree within a few months to new terms and a contract is signed without much conflict. Just as often, though, negotiations drag on, impasses are reached, and things get tense. At some point, the faculty association’s executive may call a vote asking members to authorize a strike should they deem one necessary. Students should be aware that calling a vote for a strike mandate like this is very common in such negotiations and is nothing to be alarmed about. A strike vote is not a decision to strike; it’s only an authorization to call a strike if necessary. In fact, the strike vote may actually help resolve the problems because it shows the administration that faculty are serious.

When the vote is called, faculty association members typically vote in favour of a strike because if they vote against it, their bargainers lose almost all their power: they have to show the administration that, at the end of the day, they are willing to walk. That is the only real power faculty associations have.

If no agreement can be reached — and pending a variety of mediations that may be mandated by provinical laws — faculty may strike. They leave the university, cease their teaching and typically set up picket lines on campus. Depending on the particulars, the university itself may remain open so that students can go to the library, work in computer labs and so on, but those details will vary from one university to the next. Check the web sites of the university and of the faculty association itself to get information about your case.

If they do feel the need to walk out, associations typically try to arrange strikes for a time that will cause maximum disruption to the university’s operations so that the administration has plenty of motivation to make a deal. Faculty generally do not strike in the summer because the university can simply let them stay away without losing much revenue or causing a public uproar. Consequently, many associations try to time their job actions for the middle of the term to create fear that exams and courses might be in jeopardy if the situation is not resolved.

Does this sound like students are being used? They are. Associations want students and parents and members of the community to rally together and say “get those profs back to work for our kids’ sake!” which pressures the university to cave in to faculty demands.

At the same time, what is good for faculty is often good for students in the long run. If faculty win higher salaries at the bargaining table, it may mean recruiting better profs in the future. If they get better rules for academic freedom, it may mean better teaching because instructors are not worried about what they can and cannot say. If they get smaller class sizes, you may get more personal attention in your next course.

The good news is that for all the anxiety, faculty strikes are not usually very long (typically weeks, not months). So far as I know, no Canadian university has ever lost a term or semester due to a strike. So if there is a talk of a strike where you go to school, don’t panic. The strike is not likely to happen. If it does, it likely won’t be long, and by the time there is another one, you will have graduated and moved on.

UPDATED: Bargaining resumes Tuesday after 88.5% of faculty vote yes

Carleton University professors have voted an overwhelming 88.5 per cent in favour of giving the faculty association a strike mandate. Bargaining resumes Tuesday morning and a provincial conciliator has been appointed. Faculty would not be in a legal position to strike until 17 days after the conciliator recommends the Ontario minister of labour file a no board report, meaning a contract could not be negotiated.

Related: Western profs vote 87% for strike mandate and Carleton profs prepare for strike vote

At the centre of the dispute is the process of tenure and promotion, and the Carleton University Academic Staff Association (CUASA) says the university’s bargaining proposals would threaten academic freedom. “The message is that academic freedom and the tenure process are not up for negotiation,” CUASA president Johannes Wolfart said of the vote results.

Carleton’s director of communications, Jason MacDonald, says the goal is still to reach a negotiated settlement. “Strike votes are one of the tools that a bargaining unit has,” he said. “There is a history at Carleton of never having a faculty strike.” Despite the holding of a strike vote, the administration maintains that under the current collective agreement, the faculty association is not actually in a “position” to strike.

Last month, Carleton released a proposal to revamp its tenure process in an effort to bring it inline with other Canadian universities. Among the recommendations are to seek external peer review for candidates, whereas now all peer reviews are internal. The length of tenure-track positions would increase from three years to six years, and a more standardized tenure process would be established across the university, as opposed to the wide variation that currently exists between departments. Candidates for tenure would also be assessed “within the context of the university’s reputation and status.”

The report indicated a failure to reach consensus, between faculty and the university, on at least three points. They include proposals to strengthen the authority of an appeal committee to make final “binding” decisions, a role for an arbitrator to award tenure, and the ability for the president to overturn tenure decisions. In the case of the president, a tenure recommendation would be overturned in the event of a procedural error, not for “substantive” reasons related to the quality of the applicant.

Neither side would comment on the specifics of the negotiations, but Wolfart did say that “not much has moved at the table” in recent weeks.

There are approximately 19,000 full and part undergraduate students attending the university. Faculty have been without a contract since April.

- photo by churl

Ontario NDP says universities spent nearly $1 million on lobbying

After taking aim at hospital lobbyists, Ontario’s New Democrats are now zeroing in on hired guns paid by the province’s universities and colleges. NDP Leader Andrea Horwath is demanding to know why nine colleges and universities have been spending close to $1 million on lobbyists to influence the government.

They include Laurentian University, which had a contract worth $102,000, and Toronto’s York University, which had three contracts totalling close to $500,000. The University of Ontario Institute of Technology also has a lobbyist contract worth up to $130,000, according to documents obtained by the NDP under freedom-of-information laws.

“Something is very, very wrong here,” Horwath said in the provincial legislature. “Ontario students pay the highest tuition fees in the entire country. Why are universities spending that money on high-priced, well-connected, insider lobbyists?”

Colleges and Universities Minister John Milloy said the schools have no reason to hire lobbyists and that spending public funds on lobbyists is not acceptable. “There’s no need for them to be spending public money on lobbyists and my ministry will be working to make sure that message is sent loud and clear to the college sector,” Milloy said.

The revelations came a day after the NDP disclosed that 14 hospitals had hired lobbyists — a practice Premier Dalton McGuinty quickly condemned.

The Canadian Press