Archive for March, 2011

Riot police disperse some 2,000 protesters rallying against tuition increases

Student protesters in Montreal were pepper sprayed and at least four were arrested Thursday afternoon. Around 2,000 students had been demonstrating against the Quebec government’s plans to raise tuition by $325 a year for five years. Altercations with riot police occurred outside the Loto-Quebec building and officers chased several students down Sherbrooke Street, the Canadian Press reported. The protests coincided with a one-day strike by CEGEP students across Quebec.

As president of the University of Waterloo, David Johnston was the highest paid academic in Ontario

Governor general David Johnston was the highest paid academic in Ontario for 2010. Johnston earned $1,056,813 as president of the University of Waterloo, a post he held until being sworn in for his current role last fall. In fact, not only was Johnston the highest paid academic in the province, he was the second highest paid public servant overall, according to the government’s sunshine list which publishes the names of public employees who earn more than $100,000. Ontario Power Generation President and CEO Tom Mitchell topped the list at $1,335,000.

Senator too busy to keep university post

Pamela Wallin has stepped down as chancellor of the University of Guelph, due to her growing responsibilities as a senator. Wallin, who was appointed chancellor in 2007, was named to the senate in 2008, said, in a statement released by the university, that her time at Guelph “has been one of the most rewarding experiences” of her life. President Alistair Sumerlee called Wallin a “valued friend and champion of the University of Guelph.” Wallin sits on several senate committees and has assumed the chair of the National Security and Defence Committee.

Group wants university to divest itself of companies that hold relations with Israel

A board of governors meeting at Carleton University was canceled Tuesday night due to a protest of more than 200. The protest, which partially blocked access to the meeting room, was organized in part by Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA). According to SAIA members, the demonstration was a response to the university’s refusal to permit students to attend the meeting to debate a motion calling on Carleton to divest itself from companies that hold relations with Israel. The student motion, which targeted pension funds, was not included in the agenda, the administration says, because pension investments have already been reviewed and a policy was adopted in the fall that states “environmental, social and governance factors should be considered in investment decision-making.”

Why so many students dream of working for the government

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

It can be lonely for recruiters manning the booths for big banks or retailers at Ryerson University’s student job fairs. “The government agencies get a lot more attention,” says Ian Ingles, the organizer of the Toronto events.

That’s no surprise, considering the statistics. In a recent survey for Studentawards.com, 30 per cent of university students picked the government of Canada as their employer of choice. Then came Health Canada. Provincial governments did well too, beating out all of the banks and the video game developers. Even the trendiest private sector companies, Apple and Google, couldn’t beat the federal agencies.The results echo another recent survey of nearly 10,000 Canadian students by research firm Universum. In it, arts graduates, for example, gave the government of Canada, the provincial governments and Health Canada gold, silver and bronze respectively.

The recession explains some of the zeal for the civil service. During the rough days of 2009, students got the message that private companies were shedding employees while government workers were relatively unaffected: there was a record-setting 4,000 applications for 106 Ontario government internships in early 2009.

But how to explain the post-recession jump in applications for the same internship program? Last March, even with many private sector employers hiring graduates again, applications to the annual program grew by more than 20 per cent to just over 5,000 for 76 spots.

Demographics—and the altruistic goals of new graduates—best explain the march toward public service, says Sandra Botha, a campus recruiter for the government of British Columbia. Modern immigrants to Canada are proud to work for the government, she says. “Many students perceive a government job as having a lot of prestige, because it did in their parents’ country of origin,” she explains. “We have many more Chinese-Canadians applying in B.C., and if you come from China, working for the government is considered the job.”

The government would have been the only job available for Elias Samuel had he stayed in his native Ethiopia, he says. “You don’t really have any other options if you graduate from engineering,” says the 2010 graduate of Brandon University. Samuel fled his country as a refugee after he was threatened by police for demonstrating against the dictatorship. Still, he maintains a strong desire to work in the public sector. He’s even considering a master’s degree in statistics to improve his chances of landing a government gig.

Samuel says working for the government will teach him skills to help change the world. “Canada is a very democratic government and everything works smoothly,” he says. “Maybe if I worked for the government here, then I could one day go back to my country and implement change to the system,” he says.

Botha has witnessed strong altruism among Canadian-born students too. “If we have an external position posted for anything environmental, we have huge numbers of people applying,” she says. “They all want to make a difference to climate change.”

That may explain the growing number of degree programs directed at students with big plans for the planet. Trent University recently accepted the first class of students into its new masters in sustainability studies program, which includes political science courses to prepare students for work in government ministries. The University of Guelph is currently training Canada’s first ever Ph.D.s in international development studies.

David Turpin, the president of the University of Victoria, says more students want to change the world than ever, but he has another explanation for the lure of the government gig: they are successfully fighting the stereotype that the public service is boring, he says. That’s something Ingles, the Ryerson career expert, says he’s noticed too.

Of course, pensions, perks, and job security are nothing to sneeze at. Manvi Kapoor, a soon-to-be human resources graduate of Ryerson University, says the high starting wage was why she applied to the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services two summers ago. The benefits—including life insurance, guaranteed nine-to-five workdays, and plenty of vacation time—are the reasons she’ll go back. There’s no need to re-apply; even summer students have enviable job security.

Kapoor sees one potential snag in her future plans. “People of my generation are really restless to move up quickly,” she says. “But because of the good job security in government, people stay in their jobs 10 years or more before ever making a move.” That could slow things down. “If I want to move up, I’ll have to wait for people to literally die off one by one,” she says.

Whole grain education: what a fresh idea.

Peggy Berkowitz over at University Affairs reports on an interesting talk given recently by Louis Menand, whose talk, she characterized, in part, as follows:

He said the natural sciences have been able to reconfigure themselves to overcome the “silo” problem of different disciplines; but for a variety of reasons, the humanities haven’t. He pointed to the need for reform, acknowledging that “we’re right when we say that many reformers are not educational. But that is all the more reason for academics to take the task upon themselves to reform.”

Berkowitz doesn’t explain what Menand means by “the silo problem” because she doesn’t have to. Everyone in the university game these days has heard our institutions described as silos in one way or another.

The silo problem, as people like Menand would have it, is this: universities have always been arranged by discipline, where one group of scholars researches and teaches in one discipline and another group researches and teaches in another and so on. Like grain silos on a farm, the stuff is all there, but it never mingles or touches. Siloed as we are, university professors never think about anything outside their own disciplines and teach students only one thing at a time. So neither profs nor students ever have the chance to study the wonderful complexities of the world.

I have several problems with this metaphor. First, there is a whiff of snobbery about it. Siloes are so very working class, you see, and one can’t help but wonder whether subconsciously the anti-silo crowd has chosen this metaphor thinking that no intellectual wants to act like a (gasp) farmer. They could have called it the office-tower problem or the guru-on-the-mountain problem, but no . . .

Second, as it happens, silos are actually very useful devices because grains really do need to be kept apart from other grains so that they can be sold accurately for what they are. Some idealistic farmer might get it into his head that the old silo system is out-of-date, and why shouldn’t the buckwheat mix with the sorghum and the millet? Let’s break down the artificial constructs of the agricultural revolution, he says, and embrace inter-grainiarity! Sounds fun, but it wouldn’t work. Because the baker making a loaf of rye bread needs to know his rye flour is actually rye. The brewer needs to know her hops are hops and so on. Silos exist for reasons.

University disciplines exist for reasons, too. And it’s this: this stuff is complicated. Mastering even a narrow topic of intellectual inquiry requires years and years of painstaking study just to get going. Try writing 200 pages of original analysis of Shakespeare, and you’ll see what I mean. Seriously, get yourself up to speed on the current debate over the causes of the First World War, or Medieval ideas about the philosophical reality of evil, or how to locate exo-planets and you’ll see what I mean. At the highest levels of expertise, people must, as a practical necessity, specialize if they are going to do the best possible work. That’s why medical practitioners are trained in particular areas. We could have one big category called “Health Expertise” and you could just go to a health expert whatever your ailment. But such a person would not really be an expert. He’d be a dabbler. It’s much better to have your heart surgery performed by someone specialized in cardiac medicine and have your foot looked at by a podiatrist. Even if the heart surgeon and podiatrist never see each other.

Still, wouldn’t some interdisciplinarity be good? Shouldn’t students be taught to see that literature and science and all that stuff are not really separate things? Of course they should. Which is why we do it already.

Which brings me to the third objection I have to the silo metaphor. It’s wrong. Although academics do arrange themselves by discipline at most universities (there are a few exceptions), we are not locked in our offices, nor in or minds. When I teach literature, for example, part of what I teach is the cultural context of everything else that goes into producing literature. My classes on Milton, for example, bring in political history as well as theology. I use the the Pythagorean Theorem to teach Pope’s “Essay on Criticism.”

So too for research. My first book dealt with the way Shakespeare’s plays respond to the political arguments over legal medical practice in the sixteenth century. Maybe dull for the average reader, but my point is that my own research connects literature with medicine, history, law, and politics. And this is not unusual in my discipline, nor, from what I can tell, in other disciplines either. Philosophers work with mathematicians, physicists with biologists, and so on.  Recently, I’ve been working with a colleague in our Sports and Human Kinetics program to develop a new course called The Literature of Sport. I’ve even been discussing working on a research project with a chemist about how the periodic table has been interpreted.

Education critics love to invent problems that they think they can solve. Universities don’t use new technologies!  University courses are nothing but lecture! Students aren’t taught critical thinking! They are all based on half-truths, exaggerations, or outright falsehoods. But it gets them consulting deals and book contracts and, yes, invited to talks.

And as for the silo problem? It’s nothing but a straw man.

If Ignatieff wants to help students, targeted funds are better than washing everyone with money

Releasing part of his education platform this week — attractively titled the Learning Passport — Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff promised up to $1,500 for every post-secondary student in Canada to help offset the rising costs of a university education. The money would be a grant, issued to every student, to help pay for university.

Quite frankly, the idea is not thought out very well.

$1 billion is a lot of money, especially for students who, by and large, are broke. But not all students are broke and not all students are in need. Canada Student Loans, through its needs-based scholarships and bursaries programs, collects a lot of data outlining which students are in need of funds and which are doing just fine on their own.

In their own words:

“In 2006-2007, the CSLP provided over $1.9 billion in full- and part-time student loans to approximately 345,000 students and awarded $141.8 million in non-repayable Canada Study Grants and Canada Access Grants (87,368 grants).”

By taking that billion dollars and applying it to needs-based grants instead of washing everyone in cash, Ignatieff could be boosting grants to students by more than seven times while maintaining needs-based loans at existing levels. Tuition fees at Canada’s post-secondary institutions have more than tripled since the early 1990s and in some provinces it has quintupled. And it’s only rising. Student debt in Canada is spiralling out of control, limiting participation in larger life events like cars and houses.

Ignatieff is right to invest in post-secondary education and right to try to improve access to those institutions. But blindly throwing money at the problem is the wrong approach. Targeted financing could do much to reduce student debt and improve access, if only Michael were smart enough to realize it.

Online petition organized in opposition

A proposed Africentric program to be housed at a high school in Toronto’s west end is being criticized by students who say the plan could limit diversity. On Wednesday, the Toronto District School Board will vote on plans to incorporate the program into Oakwood Collegiate. Students, who, the Toronto Star reported on Sunday, were “blindsided” by the news have organized an online petition and a Facebook group in opposition to the proposal.

“Not that students are racist, but some parents could stop sending their kids because they could see it as potentially dangerous, which could reduce the enrolment of the school. The idea of segregation is not something Canadians like; we’re a mosaic of various cultures,” Grade 11 student Matthew Wong told the Star on Tuesday. Another student told CTV News that, “this is one of the most diverse schools I know. There are Asians, blacks, whites. It doesn’t matter. It is a diverse school.”

In 2009 an Africentric elementary program was opened at Sheppard Public School, and many who attend that school live in the same area as Oakwood Collegiate.

Plan would be financed by rolling back corporate tax cuts

Every high school student in the country would be eligible for at least $4,000 in student grants under a Liberal government, leader Michael Ignatieff announced this morning. A $1,000 payment would be provided every year while a student is between the ages of 14 and 17, if their parents open a Registered Education Savings Plan account. Students from low-income families would receive $1,500 a year, or a total of $6,000. The grants, called the Learning Passport, would be paid out while the student pursues post-secondary education, and could be used to fund university or college. The plan, part of the Liberals party’s Canadian Learning Strategy, would cost $1-billion a year, and would be on top of existing support for students. Funding would be provided by reversing corporate tax cuts.

UPDATE: The Liberals have clarified how the Learning Passport would be applied to CEGEPs in Quebec. Because tuition for the junior colleges only costs $500 per year, instead of payouts of $1,000 or $1,500 being made over four years, they would be made over five years, the Globe and Mail reports. Further changes could be announced to take into account differences in other provinces besides Quebec.

Additionally, as was announced this morning, the new grant would replace, while providing “significantly” more funding, than the education tax credit and the textbook tax credit.

Province says plan will cost $309 million

Ontario’s Liberal government is set to announce funding for 60,000 new post-secondary education seats in Tuesday’s budget. The plan, which would be fully realized by 2015-16, would cost approximately $309 million. The Canadian Press reported that despite a deficit of nearly $17 billion for the current fiscal year, Finance Minister Dwight Duncan says that education and health care will be safe from any cost cutting measures.