Archive for November, 2010

More women than ever have university degrees, but men still dominate university leadership

When Elizabeth Cannon showed up for her first day of engineering school in 1979, women made up five per cent of the program. Now, as she takes the reins of the University of Calgary, women make up 23 per cent of the school’s future engineers and more than half of the university’s student population, a trend reflected in schools across Canada.

But as Canadians fret over the feminization of lecture halls and ponder affirmative action for males, they seem to have missed the fact that the number of women sitting in the president’s chairs remains stubbornly low. In the fall of 2000, 12 of the 68 leaders of Canadian universities—18 per cent—were female. A decade later, just 13 of 70—19 per cent—are women. The U.S. saw a similar rise and plateau: in 1986, women made up nine per cent of university and college heads; the number grew to 19 per cent in 1998 before growth stalled again, settling at just 23 per cent today. Female professors are being hired in almost equal numbers to men—45 per cent of new full-time teaching positions were awarded to women in 2008—but the upper ranks are still overwhelmingly male. Just 22 per cent of full-time professors are women, although they make up a majority of education departments and nearly half of arts teachers.

Related: Knocking on the glass ceiling

We asked some female university leaders why the growth in female leadership has slowed to almost nothing—and what can be done to fix it. “The fact that we’re getting more women in the academic ranks will increase the number of women at the top,” says Cannon. “But we can’t rely on demographics alone.”

Martha Piper, who oversaw UBC from 1997 to 2006, was surprised to learn that more women aren’t leading our universities: “Wow. My impression was that more women were being appointed than that,” she says. Piper says if women are going to win the top spots, administrations have to actively encourage them. That means identifying women inside the university during succession planning, encouraging them, and hiring from that pool. “Every time there’s a new president, there are these national search teams,” she explains, “I sit on a couple of corporate boards and they make it their job to figure out who the leaders are and how to develop them. Universities need to start cultivating from within.”

Ramona Lumpkin, who started her term as president of Mount Saint Vincent University this fall, encountered one roadblock in her 33-year career that she suspects is holding other women back. It took her awhile to realize that her less assertive and more collaborative leadership style was equal (if different) to the leadership style of her male colleagues. “Not everyone speaks in the bass range,” she says, referring to her soft voice that can get lost in a room full of men. Lumpkin says it will take some recognition on the part of administrations that women often lead differently, in order for them to feel comfortable leading male-heavy groups.

Piper says being a mother kept her from moving up sooner. She was encouraged to apply for a vice-president’s position at the University of Alberta around 1990, but she decided to focus on parenting instead, and wonders how many women give up on advance­ment entirely, due to family pressures. “Probably 80-plus per cent of women decide somewhere mid-career whether they want to throw their hat in the ring to be a head, a dean, or whatever,” says Piper. “You have to ask what they need at that stage of life.”

Sandra Acker, a sociologist with the University of Toronto (who was an associate dean once herself) studies how women succeed and fail in academic administration. In her recent paper, “Gendered games in academic leadership,” Acker profiled four female academic administrators chosen from 31 interviewees. While she notes that not every academic is a mother, she wrote, “the most striking similarity is the way that all four women talked about family and relationship issues affecting their choices.” Indeed, one of the women she studied said it was impossible to live up to the expectations of being both a manager and a mother when her boss was working 85-hour weeks. “I work a lot, but didn’t want to be there on a Friday night at nine o’clock. I have a family,” she told Acker. The man’s family was in another city, allowing him to work late nights and weekends.

Piper believes that universities should recognize that mothers are often the ones driving kids to music lessons and helping with their homework. “We look so much at maternity leave, which is important, but early teenagehood is just as demanding and we don’t have good supports at that period of time,” she explains. Some female academics may need after-school programs for their children, especially considering that highly mobile academics rarely have extended family members living nearby who can babysit, she says.

As Elizabeth Cannon decides how to shape her school’s future, she’s already thought about how to nurture women along the way. “We’ve tried on campus to increase access to quality daycare, to give [mom] academics peace of mind. Being supportive of women who have returned from maternity leave matters too,” says Cannon. “But really, it’s not just tangible things you can do,” she says. “It’s also the culture that you build.”

Photo: Elizabeth Cannon runs the University of Calgary; Ramona Lumpkin (right) runs Mount Saint Vincent

$275.6 million to be spread across 53 universities

The federal government is setting aside $275.6 million to pay for 310 new or renewed research chairs at 53 universities. Industry Minister Tony Clement says the money will help spur research in Canada.

The Canada Research Chairs program was started 10 years ago, drawing international experts to Canadian universities and supporting top researchers. Clement says the 310 chairholders covered by the latest funding will conduct research across a range of important fields, including water security, molecular neuroscience and globalization.

He says it’s part of an effort to encourage cutting-edge research. Chad Gaffield, head of the steering committee for the research chairs program, says it has helped build world-class research centres across the country. The program pays up to $200,000 a year for seven years to endow a top-tier research chair.

“For the past 10 years, the Canada Research Chairs Program has brought breakthroughs in clean energy, the control of infectious disease, business management, and digital technologies,” Clement said.

He said the program produces economic opportunities for Canadians in the application of new technologies.

Paul Young, vice-president for research at the University of Toronto, said the program allows Canadian universities to attract and keep some of the world’s best minds. “This program is vital for Canada, since it contributes to the development of first-class training and competitive research in Canada and abroad.”

The Canadian Press

Nearly half of all rabbits have been relocated to sanctuaries

The University of Victoria is in the final stages of winning its war against a rabbit infestation that has famously plague the school for years. Of the 1,400 rabbits the university hopes to remove, 637 have already been trapped and relocated to animal sanctuaries approved by the government. The plan that involves the sterilization of the animals began in September after months of controversy over earlier plans that involved actively killing the bunnies. The university plans to keep 200 rabbits on campus.

Warning: pulling an all-nighter may cause Social Moronitis

I had a little over two weeks to write the final lab report for my biochemistry course. It was the kind of assignment that seems relatively simple at first glance when you read over the outline. Meaning, the kind that’s tempting to leave on my desk for two weeks and finish at the last minute.

But the day before it was due, I realized the lab report had been hibernating in a cocoon on the corner of my desk and undergone a metamorphosis. Suddenly it included a bazillion graphs, charts, tables, figures, and in-depth analysis questions.

I stayed up the whole night and managed to finish the lab report on time, but there was a trade off: I had to spend every single last brain cell. For the next 24 hours, I was infected with Social Moronitis.

I spoke too loudly. I couldn’t hear so well. And I began to uncontrollably breathe through my mouth, exhaling too deeply. I lost the ability to make eye contact- instead, I had a weird, wandering soft focus.

As the day went on, I started to develop an annoying laugh. A couple hours later, I started giving people detailed descriptions of my dreams. I developed a sinus condition. And then I became convinced that people wanted to hear about it.

The road to recovery isn’t an easy path. I’m still re-mastering the whole “default-facial-expression-that-doesn’t-involve-my-jaw-hanging-wide-open” thing.

But I think I now understand why some people don’t have a sense of body space. They probably stayed up all night working on a lab report, and became infected with Social Moronitis. They can’t read facial cues from a normal distance, so they have to stand within three inches of someone’s face to tell if they’re happy, annoyed, or on the verge of beating the crap out of the person who’s now invading their body space.

Is there really anything wrong with ‘alot’?

A favourite pastime of English professors is complaining about students’ writing. It’s irresistible, really. The more confident we become with our own prose style and the more we teach others about good writing, the more we forget what it was like to struggle with the difference between its and it’s. We are fully confident that the active voice is often preferable to the passive and that “past experience” is a phrase up with which we cannot put. But we forget that there was a time we did not always know these things. It is sobering to revisit one’s old undergrad papers and see how many of the mistakes we now fume about were the same ones we were making years ago.

Thus, every once in a while, I see a news or opinion piece about how badly students write these days — as though there once was a magical time when to barbarously split an infinitive was unknown — and I have to smile a little. This is a war that will never be won because it is really a war against our younger selves, and it is one that I am increasingly uninterested in fighting.

Not that I don’t still value and teach good writing. Rather, I am less and less interested in chasing students away from what I will call wrongs. By wrongs, I don’t mean obvious errors like writing “loose” when one means “lose.” I mean those usages that are common in English but condemned, sometimes arbitrarily, as being wrong. Such wrongs become the black beasts of writers who see a sentence beginning with “hopefully” and charge off on a quest to vanquish the demon called Misplaced Modifier.

Consider the case of “alot.”  My colleague Jacob Serebrin gives the spelling “alot” (one word) as an example of the kinds of mistakes which must be drilled into (or rather out of) students’ minds at a young age. One web site calls the spelling “illiterate” if not “retarded.” Another conjures a whimsical beast called the “Alot” to help you avoid the wrong. But is there really anything so deplorable about “alot”?

The obvious concern is that “alot” is spelled as one word when it should be two. But then why do we allow “always” and “cannot” which, we cannot help but notice, have already been used in this very entry and used to be two words, just like “already”? If we have the wherewithal to turn other phrases into single words, we could do the same with “a lot.”

After all, “a lot” in the sense of “I have a lot of reading to do” does not use “lot” in the sense of a parcel of land (to build a house on a lot), or fate (my lot in life) or any other independent sense of “lot.” The phrase itself “a lot” means “a large amount” and we think of the two syllables as one unit of meaning. And because the phrase is so short, we sometimes imagine it as one word, just as “some times” became “sometimes.” And there is no real danger of confusing “alot” with “allot” (which means “portion out”) because context will make the meaning clear (“We must allot the remaining licenses, but before we do there’s alot of paperwork to be done.) You see, there’s really not alot to be upset about.

Rather than teaching such things as wrongs, I am increasingly teaching them as contested usages. For instance, I personally prefer that phrases with “none” be treated as a singular (as in “None of my students pays attention”) but alot of people disagree and I am not always consistent even in my own writing.

Teaching such usages this way allows students to see that languages really are living entities inasmuch as they grow and change and develop. Today it seems like an error to spell a phrase like a word, but that same word may be accepted tomorrow, nevertheless. Of course, there is a value to following standards, but we should be clear to students and to ourselves that when we say students can’t write, one of the things we really mean is that they have not yet mastered standard usage.

To do that is to descend from our highhorses and really talk about what words are and how they work. We will give students a fuller understanding of English, and students can stop feeling stupid over their many wrongs. Wrongs sometimes do make rights, English professors notwithstanding.

And on their curriculums, as universities Glee-fully cater to song-and-dance wannabes

Thank the Gleeks. First, the fans of the hit TV show Glee made singing and dancing programs cool in high schools everywhere. Now, just as the high-schoolers on Glee will wind up going to the same college, Glee-mania is migrating to real-life universities.

According to Jazz Times magazine, American universities have “noted a sharp rise in student interest and enrolment” in choral and music programs, and some have created new groups to meet the Glee-fuelled demand. Ditto in Canada. Earlier this year, after two students at Carleton University started the school’s first glee club, one of the founders, Emile Scheffel, told the school paper the Charlatan that, “I got, like, 47 comments from people wanting to join in the first two hours.” It could be only a matter of time before Glee mania becomes as ubiquitous in school as it is on TV.

Students and teachers alike say that they’re noticing a Glee-inspired impact on the popularity of that type of performance. James Medeiros, a graduate student in music literature and performance at the University of Western Ontario, says that the show is changing the old perception of musical theatre as “old-fashioned, too over-the-top and generally uncool,” and “making it far more popular” among the younger generation.

“Shows like Glee have made the style accessible.” Mark Sussman, assistant professor at Concordia University, adds that “it has an impact on students’ perception of the culture of the theatre department.”

The show’s power is even felt at universities that never associated themselves with show tunes. Cynthia Ashperger, director of the acting program at Ryerson University, was told by one of the music instructors that more and more students “seem to be singing and dancing. Our focus isn’t on musical theatre, but still he’s getting a lot of students in the music department who can sing and dance really well, and he attributes it to the TV show.” James Crooks, director of the singing program at Bishop’s University in Quebec, notes that the university choir, once dominated by women, “last year had approximately 140 people and of those, about 55 or 60 were guys. So something is going on.”

Glee is just the latest in a string of shows that make performing seem like a viable career choice. Charlene Kulbaba, at the University of Winnipeg’s School of Contemporary Dancers, says there’s been a dramatic rise in enrolment, and that when they ask students why they signed up, “nearly all of them have said it is because of the show So You Think You Can Dance.”

But there’s something special about Glee, because it makes students want to do every possible kind of performance. In the drama department, Ashperger explains, instead of specialization, “the acting students are singing. Dancing not as much, but some of them are.”

This interest in multidisciplinary performing isn’t good news for every theatre department. Gwen Dobie, who teaches theatre at York University, noticed that at their first-year orientation, “quite a few of our students asked me if we have a musical theatre program,” and the problem is that “it isn’t in fact what we specialize in.”

But Glee is helping to paint a picture that’s truer to the demands of modern theatre. For one thing, the show is about people who have to be strong in all aspects of performance, and this may be pretty much the way things are today: “No longer can you just be one thing—singer, dancer or actor,” says George Randolph of Randolph Academy in Toronto. “You’ve got to be excellent in one area and have potential in the other two.”

“Our job is to help kids get into the professional theatre and get them jobs,” adds Kayla Gordon, who has taught acting and musical theatre at the University of Winnipeg, and so it’s helpful that TV is opening up new interests for students “who wouldn’t normally have taken a singing class.”

Glee, then, could be part of a growing trend toward combining theatre disciplines into one. Of course, students may be surprised when they discover, as Medeiros says, that you can’t “be handed the sheet music to a song and perfectly sight-read it while executing flawless and unrehearsed choreography.” But that may just be the first thing drama departments will have to teach the new recruits.

If the government doesn’t act soon, there won’t be any students left to help

Being a student is expensive and, if you don’t want your studies to suffer too much, there are not a lot of opportunities to make money on the side. It’s especially hard in Nova Scotia, where unemployment is higher than in most parts of the country and tuition costs are among the most expensive in the land.

While student advocacy groups have cried for years that low opportunity coupled with high costs makes Nova Scotia an increasingly unattractive place to study, provincial authorities have done little more than dither back and forth about the answer.

And as the new NDP government just announced a third round of “consultations” with students to figure out the best answer, student groups have been through it all before.

“Students have already made their voices clear,” a representative from the Canadian Federation of Students told the Dalhousie Gazette. “We feel like the NDP is stalling.”

They can be forgiven for thinking so. This is the third time students have been through this exercise, and with talk of consolidating and restructuring universities and tuition deregulation, it’s time these students were given some answers about their future.

In reality, the equation is pretty simple. A province with low opportunity, but high cost of education and low chance of employment on graduation means fewer and fewer students will choose to study there. As more students come to this realization, they will escape to better funded options, in provinces where their chances of getting a job on graduation are higher, too.

In fact, it’s already begun.

Nova Scotia needs to stop consulting and start acting, or there soon won’t be any students left to help.

Edmonton Police’ “Don’t Be That Guy” anti-sexual assault campaign targets young men

Most people understand that “no means no” when it comes to not giving consent in sexual encounters. However, the definition of what constitutes “yes” to giving consent, especially when alcohol is involved, still remains unclear to some. This can lead to devastating consequences for those who are not in any state to consent to anything.

Alcohol was a factor in half of the sexual assault cases investigated by the Edmonton Police Service in 2009, and it was a factor in 52 per cent of cases investigated during the first six months of this year.

“In each of these cases, the victims were clearly intoxicated [... ]in some cases passed out at the time of the sexual assault,” police Supt. Danielle Campbell told the Edmonton Journal. “A person that is drunk or passed out cannot give consent.”

After noticing this alarming trend, Edmonton police partnered with SAVE (Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton) to launch the Don’t Be That Guy campaign against sexual assault. The campaign, aimed at young men aged 18-24, uses graphic ads to communicate that sex without consent, regardless of whether alcohol is involved or not, is sexual assault. The launch comes within weeks of the beginning of the I Know Someone campaign at the University of Western Ontario, that has the goal of  ”challenging male and female students to increase their awareness and involvement in reducing incidents of sexual violence.” Considering the Don’t Be That Guy campaign’s target audience, this campaign’s message should also resonate strongly with students.

One ad shows a man helping a woman to her car after a night of drinking. The text underneath the photo reads: “Just because you help her home . . . doesn’t mean you get to help yourself.” Another ad shows a young woman passed out on a couch with liquor bottles next to her on the floor, as the text underneath reads: “Just because she isn’t saying no . . . doesn’t mean she’s saying yes.”

The advertisements are being placed above urinals in several Edmonton bars, at LRT stations, and in the University of Alberta and Grant MacEwan newspapers and magazines such as SEE and VUE. The campaign began Monday and will run until Jan. 2011.

It is encouraging to see a campaign aimed at the perpetrators of sexual violence, when most anti-sexual violence campaigns are focused on prevention tips for women. Karen Smith of the Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton told the Journal these methods can sometimes be counterintuitive. “Tips just reinforce the myth that women are somehow responsible for anticipating and preventing sexual violence,” she said.

The campaign struck a cord with some University of Alberta students, who say the images displayed in the ads are all to familiar. “Probably the most effective part is this right here–Don’t be That Guy. Because every guy, kinda . . . they think that way, especially when they’ve had a couple beers,” U of A student Tony Travanut told CTV Edmonton.

However, it’s discouraging that potential perpetrators have to be so bluntly reminded to not take advantage of women who are under the influence and are in no position to give consent.

Especially when certain students still believe that women have only themselves to blame when caught in these situations. A columnist for Princeton University student newspaper the Daily Princetonian came under fire in February after arguing that a fellow female student had no jurisdiction to accuse a man of raping her because she was inebriated when they had sex:

“She knew what would happen if she started drinking. We all know that the more people drink, the less likely they are to make wise decisions. It is common sense,” wrote contributing columnist Iulia Neagu. “Therefore, the girl willingly got herself into a state in which she could not act rationally. This, in my opinion, is equivalent to agreeing to anything that might happen to her while in this state. In the case of our girl, this happened to be sex with a stranger.”

Peer advisors for the university’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources and Education (SHARE) centre fired back in an editorial published in the Princetonian a day later, stating that consent is absolutely necessary in all sexual encounters, regardless of whether those involved are drunk or not.

“If someone drinks to the point of an ‘advanced state of inebriation,’ there are certainly expected consequences. These could include hospitalization, blood alcohol poisoning and a massive hangover,” the advisors said. “To give carte blanche to perpetrators to take advantage of an inebriated person, however, is unacceptable . . . Agreeing to drink is agreeing to drink — nothing more.”

While it may be common sense that students need to be responsible and look after themselves if they are drinking, the belief that a woman is agreeing to anything and everything that happens to her if she becomes intoxicated is absolutely archaic. As the peer advisors stated in the Princetonian, agreeing to drink is agreeing to drink, not to be taken advantage of. Hopefully, the Don’t Be That Guy campaign makes this message clear to perpetrators of this awful crime.

Christie Blatchford is returning to UWaterloo on December 7

Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford is making a second attempt to speak at the University of Waterloo after her first go was thwarted by a few protesters with bike locks around their necks.

Blatchford was scheduled to speak about her new book, Helpless: Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy, and How the Law Failed All of Us, when some individuals decided that her “racist propaganda” was not to be given a public forum. The group of five successfully prevented Blatchford from taking the stage.

After the country became privy to the news that bike locks were suddenly sophisticated tools of political negotiation, the university released a statement apologizing for its embarrassing inaction:

The university considers Friday’s events as an attack on its presence as a place where issues are explored, discussed and at times debated. The freedom to speak and to learn is fundamental to the institution.

Protester Dan Kellar nevertheless remained committed to his heroic efforts to silence debate on campus. “[It's a] sad day when universities are used as a space to allow racists and nazi-apologizers to speak,” Kellar posted on his Twitter feed. “blatchford work is not academic”(sic).

Kellar, a maybe-PhD candidate at UW, appears to have failed to do some academic research of his own before unleashing his anti-Blatchford slander. In a reflective column about the charade, Blatchford responds to Kellar’s accusation that she is a “Nazi-apologist” for supposedly glorifying neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel by pointing out that she has mentioned Zundel’s name a mere five times in 35 years of daily journalism, and “mostly peripherally.” In the one piece she wrote about him, Blatchford simply defended his right to free speech. Maybe someone should send Kellar that column.

The other obvious qualm with Kellar’s position is that Blatchford’s hack-journalism, as he calls it, is inherently anti-native. Blatchford’s book, as anyone who has read just scantly beyond the title can attest, is sharply critical of the way the government has handled the Caledonia occupation. While she doesn’t come off as particularly sympathetic to the aboriginal position, her denunciation of government concessions is a far cry from being anti-native.

Still, even if Blatchford was a racist, ageist, neocolonial capitalist Nazi-sympathizer with misogynistic tendencies, Kellar and his clan shouldn’t be able to stop her from speaking simply by stomping their feet. Believe it or not, being a meanie is not illegal in this country! Nor is holding controversial opinions or expressing prejudice. You’re even allowed to be wrong! Fancy that, huh? These freedoms allow George Galloway, Ann Coulter, and Christie Blatchford to say what they want, even on university campuses, and even if we don’t like it. That is, as long as certain people leave the bike locks outside.

Ignatieff says access and student debt top priorities

Boosting access to higher education and lightening student debt loads will be a central priority for the federal Liberals during the next election. “I don’t have 20 priorities. I have about three, and one of them is post-secondary education,” Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff told an audience at Dawson College, in Montreal, Monday night. While Ignatieff did not go too far into specifics, he cited access to education for aboriginals and tackling debt that he says has “crippled” graduates. “We’ve worked out and costed a very ambitious proposal,” he said.  Ignatieff is touring the country as part of his “open mike” series.