Archive for September, 2011
Annual “Ig Nobel” Prizes awarded
University of Toronto researchers among this year’s winners
Still from video by gray726 on YouTube
Researchers with Canadian connections won awards at the annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony for their “improbable research.” They’ve simultaneously proven that research can be fun—and funny.
John Senders, Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, won the 2011 prize in the “public safety” category for “conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him,” as seen in this YouTube video from 1967. In it, Senders notes calmly that “the shorter the interval between looks, the more difficult that section of road is to drive,” as he speeds down a Boston highway with his view increasingly obscured.
The annual biology prize went to Darryl Gwynne, also of U of T, and Gwynne’s Australian partner “for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle.”
Although there isn’t a Canadian connection to this year’s medicine prize, it’s worthwhile research for all students to know. Two international teams won for “demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things—but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate.” That research is from two papers, Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains and The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults.
The awards were presented Thursday evening at Harvard University by real Nobel laureates. It’s easy to see why Nature calls the ceremony “arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar.” Congratulations to all.
Lethbridge retracts congratulatory note
Graduate works at magazine that denies holocaust, 9/11
Robert Wood, the University of Lethbridge’s Dean of Graduate Studies, told the National Post that he “unequivocally retract[s]” the note that congratulated 9/11 “truther” Joshua Blakeney for his writing job at Veterans Today, a magazine that also denies the holocaust. “The anti-Semitic content that is periodically published in Veterans Today is morally repugnant, and it deeply offends the core principles of tolerance, respect, and citizenship upon which the University of Lethbridge is founded,” Wood told the newspaper, adding that it was an “administrative oversight.”
Blakeney asserts in his writing for Veterans Today that the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were a conspiracy between Israel and the United States, rather than a terrorist plot by Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. His master’s thesis exploring the conspiracy theories around 9/11 caused controversy because it was funded partially by an $8,000 Alberta government scholarship.
Prof. removed from U of M thesis committee
Student passed despite “fundamental errors” says prof.
Photo by Rhett Sutphin on Flickr
One month ago, professor Gábor Lukács failed to gain standing in his lawsuit that accused the University of Manitoba of violating its own standards by awarding a PhD to a student who hadn’t passed a required exam because of disability related to exam anxiety.
Now, another professor at the University of Manitoba says a student who didn’t adequately meet a requirement was awarded a graduate degree.
Education professor Rodney Clifton tells Maclean’s On Campus that he was pulled from a thesis committee by an Associate Dean two days before a student’s oral defence of what he calls a substandard Master’s thesis that required serious revisions.
Clifton had served since 2006 as a member of a four-person Master’s of Education examining committee. When a draft of the thesis in question came to him in the summer of 2010, Clifton found what he considered “fundamental errors in the analysis of the data” on which the thesis was based. He pointed these problems out to the committee, including the supervisor Robert Renaud.
Clifton says Renaud assured him that the errors could be corrected after the oral defence, itself a fairly common practice when the errors are minor. But Clifton insisted that the data problems were too big for a conditional approval, that an entirely different method of analysis was called for, and that if the thesis did proceed to the oral defence, there was a good chance that he would vote against passing it. Because the university’s policies require unanimous decisions, his objections meant the student would likely have failed.
Clifton was rebuffed when he asked via e-mail to meet with the entire committee to discuss delaying the defence in order to give the student a chance to fix the mistakes. Telephone calls and e-mails Maclean’s On Campus left for Robert Renaud were not returned. But one of the e-mails Clifton received from Renaud indicates that the men disagreed over whether the whole committee should meet to discuss the errors. As the thesis defence date approached, Renaud wrote that he was not about to “waste the time of the committee” just to hear Clifton “rant” about problems Clifton had already pointed out.
A few days before the defence was scheduled, Renaud restated his case for letting the defence go ahead, insisting that he did not want the committee members to lower their academic standards, but that if the concerns about the thesis would eventually be fixed, and given that the student was approaching the deadline, why would Clifton want to “make things unnecessarily difficult?”
When Clifton still objected, Renaud wrote to express his disappointment with his refusal to compromise and cooperate. A day later, he wrote again, indicating that Clifton’s “reactions will negatively affect [the student’s] progress,” and telling him that since he was “unwilling to change [his] perspective,” Renaud was removing Clifton from the committee. Clifton fired back that Renaud had no business removing him from the committee, but that he was willing to have the student proceed to the defence to see if he could be convinced that his objections were not insurmountable. “It still remains to be seen,” Clifton warned, “if the student passes the oral examination or not.”
Less than an hour later—and only two days before the student defended the thesis—Clifton received the e-mail from Associate Dean Zana Lutfiyya saying that since “the majority of committee members are prepared to allow the student to move to the oral defence… I am comfortable with the defense proceeding, and in the change of committee membership.” The thesis was approved.
When Clifton asked Lutfiyya if he could see the final version of the thesis, the copy she forwarded showed, according to Clifton, that the changes to the statistical analysis were never made.
Taking him off the committee, Clifton says, violated principles of academic accountability. Faculty members must be allowed to debate the merits of a thesis. If administrators can simply replace a faculty member who objects, then that accountability disappears, he argues. The whole point of the committee, he says, is that the decision is not left up to individual administrators or even individual faculty members. ”We don’t have external agencies coming in to adjudicate us,” Clifton points out. Professors are bound to ensure the integrity of the degrees their university grants, he says.
In his more than 30 years as an academic, Clifton has never seen a case like this, he says.
Maclean’s On Campus tried to contact Dr. Lutfiyya for comment, but received notifications that she would be away until mid-October. U of M Dean of Education Robert Macmillan, the academic head of the faculty, did respond by e-mail on the school’s behalf to say that while he could not comment on the specifics of this case since he was not Dean at the time the events occurred, he had “seen instances elsewhere when committee members, and even supervisors, have been changed as a result of conflicting views over a student’s work.” In cases that he was familiar with, he said, “the decisions have not been made lightly.”
Todd Pettigrew (PhD) is an Associate Professor of English at Cape Breton University.
Students guilty of disrupting speech on campus
Ruling will make students afraid to express views: defense
Photo by Wikimania2009 on Flickr
Ten American university students were sentenced on Friday to 56 hours of community service and three years of probation in a case that has spurred debate about freedom of speech on campus.
Ten of the “Irvine 11″ students were convicted of conspiring to disrupt and disrupting Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech, which he delivered at the University of California Irvine early last year. The court ruled that there is a difference between expressing one’s own opinions and preventing someone else from offering theirs.
The students, all members of the Muslim Student Union, disrupted Oren’s talk by repeatedly by yelling messages they had planned through e-mail exchanges, such as, “it’s a shame this university has sponsored a mass murderer like yourself.”
Prior to the trial, UC Irvine disciplined some of the students and suspended the Muslim Student Union for an academic quarter, which the dean of UC Irvine’s law school, Erwin Chemerinsky, believed was sufficient punishment. He called the decision to prosecute the students “harsh” and “a terrible mistake,” despite the fact that “there’s no free speech right to shut someone down.”
Last year, Canada experienced its share of free speech controversies on campus when both Ann Coulter and Christie Blatchford had events shut down because of protesters who had planned ahead of time to disrupt their speeches as a form of political protest.
Tony Rackauckas told the court that the Irvine 11 committed “censorship” and “organized thuggery.”
The defence lawyers, on the other hand, argued that the students were exercising their own rights to speak and that a criminal sentence amounts to “shutting down” their rights to free speech. Worse, they say, such harsh punishment will deter student activists from expressing their views on campus in the future. Reem Salahi, a lawyer for the defense, said they will appeal.
Another election, another vote mob.
More people are pushing youth to vote. Will they listen?
Photo courtesy of a.drian on Flickr
Much like during the run up to federal election that happened in May, campaigns to encourage youth to vote in the five provincial elections happening this fall are popping up everywhere students look.
The question is—will they work?
Elections Canada has not yet released details on voter turnout by age from the 2011 federal election, but overall voter turnout was up just two per cent in 2011 over 2008 (from 59.1 per cent to 61.4 per cent). In other words, it looks like the rock-the-student-vote campaigns failed to get the big results they aimed for. The 2008 turnout for youth aged 18 to 24, by the way, was 37 per cent.
The failure to boost turnout much in May hasn’t stopped political scientists from creating campaigns like U2011: Understanding the Manitoba Election project. U2011 has tried to spur interest with several events that connect the public with experts on issues including women in politics and politics in Northern Manitoba. The team also created VoteAnyWay, a social media campaign aimed at 18- to 24-year-olds, which enlisted several Manitoban celebrities for video pleas asking youth to vote.
But will cringe-inducing PSAs like this riviting “poem” by Gail Asper really motivate youth? ”Even if you got small pox / you can still go check that box / If politics gets you dejected / maybe you should get elected,” Asper enthusiastically rapped on the steps of the Manitoba legislature. She deserves credit for having courted 2,500 views on YouTube. But other celebrities’ videos, like Fred Penner and Rosanna Dearchild’s joint plea, haven’t exactly gone viral with only a couple hundred views.
Bartley Kives, a reporter with the Winnipeg Free Press, offers a more convincing argument as part of the paper’s Democracy Project: ”People all over the world do not have the opportunity to vote because they live under dystopic, tyrannical regimes. They are dying attempting to vote. Therefore, if you do not exercise your right to vote, you’re kind of spitting in their faces and telling them they’re dying for no reason,” says Kives in his video. He admits he was inspired by Rick Mercer, whose video during the federal election got 58,000 views. But few youth could have heard Kives’ video. So far a grand total of zero people have shared his video on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook.
Nationwide, the Vote With Me project similarly proves that making your message available for sharing on social media doesn’t mean people will necessarily bother to share it. The campaign asks voters to not only get themselves to polling stations, but to bring one friend—and to take the Vote With Me Pledge promising they’ll drag that person along. As of publication, only two Manitobans, one voter from P.E.I., one from Nfld. and 15 from Ontario had taken the pledge.
Student Vote tries to interest elementary, middle and secondary students across the country in the electoral process. Too bad they haven’t reached voting age yet.
And no round of campaigns could be complete without a flurry of student advocacy groups making videos. The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance created this vote rap video, which may rival Gail Asper’s for artistic merit, though it has an even smaller viewership so far.
So, why aren’t students paying attention?
Jennifer Black, a University of Manitoba arts student, thinks voting is important and that’s why she took part in a Vote Mob at the University of Winnipeg in the spring. But even she doubts the effectiveness of such campaigns. The vote mob got a lot of attention from the media, but she felt it was preaching to the converted. “We all got together and made each other feel good that we’re voting,” she said. But shouting “just go vote” doesn’t really motivate anyone, she says.
When student unions do create more specific campaigns, it’s almost always about tuition fees, says Black. “Everyone has to pay tuition fees, generations before us had to pay tuition fees,” she explains. “It’s a little patronizing—it’s as if we don’t have the capacity to grasp larger issues.”
She’s not the only one who feels that way. A survey by the Historica Dominion Institute ahead of the federal election found that education is surprisingly low on the list of students’ political priorities.
Ethan Cabel, a fourth-year political science student at the University of Winnipeg, is similarly cynical about get-out-the-vote efforts. He also believes that student-led campaigns fail to enumerate the many issues students should care about. Besides, he says, if students don’t know the issues, do we really want them to vote? So far, the get-out-the-vote campaigners haven’t convinced Cabel.
But, as we’ve seen this fall, that doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying.
KSA responds to Maclean’s On Campus
Student union disputes allegations of multiple controversies
This letter is a response to the article “Controversies Continue for Kwantlen Student Association.”
Dear editor,
On behalf of the Kwantlen Student Association, I wish to respond to the article published by Maclean’s (Controversies Continue for Kwantlen Student Association, September 2, Josh Dehaas) in which your reporter sought to prove that our current student council was facing “numerous controversies.” In an attempt to prove his point, Dehaas has insinuated a great deal about the KSA’s current council and its directors. We intend to set the record straight.
First, Dehaas reported that the current council has ignored potential conflicts of interest regarding a lawsuit against former council director Aaron Takhar. Takhar is one of five former directors accused of breaching their fiduciary responsibilities to the student association, none of which has been proven in court. As we confirmed for Dehaas by email, Director of Finance Nina K. Kaur is a relative of Aaron Takhar, and has removed herself from any decision-making concerning the lawsuit. Tarun Takhar is not related to Aaron Takhar, despite Dehaas’s characterization of their relationship as “unclear.”
More importantly, the current council is a new team of student representatives with whom the implied connection to Takhar is completely unfounded. In fact, the current council has taken a number of proactive measures to address the legacy of issues it was handed by previous councils. For example, the current council has engaged Deloitte, one of Canada’s top accounting firms, to conduct a comprehensive accounting and governance review of the student association’s records. The review will ensure the correct policies and procedures are in place to enable good governance and money management moving forward. This is the first time the KSA has ever conducted such a review. Our members are very pleased with this initiative.
Second, Dehaas reported that the KSA “impeded journalists” by withholding funding from the student newspaper. The Runner’s funding was held in trust with the university while we resolved issues concerning journalistic accuracy. The funding has since been forwarded to the newspaper’s board of directors, and we have requested the use of a third party mediator to resolve outstanding issues and rebuild our working relationship with the newspaper.
As elected student representatives, the KSA’s primary concern is for the responsible management of student money, a portion of which goes to support The Runner. We became concerned that The Runner’s reporting was not being held to acceptable journalistic standards, and had the potential to seriously damage the reputation of our student association as well as our school.
It is important to note that Matthew DiMera—who is referenced in Dehaas’ article and provided the file photo for the story—has been a significant critic of the KSA in his work at The Runner. DiMera also ran, and lost, in the most recent student election.
Finally, with regards to student council spending, Dehaas insinuates that the current council has been prejudiced or irresponsible in its decision making. He claims that our council funded a “seemingly religious parade,” the Surrey Vaisakhi Parade. The event, a celebration of harvest, is a significant community event attended by up to 200,000 people annually and an important occasion for many of our members. And, like the Chinese New Year parade and the Christmas parade, the Vaisakhi Parade welcomes participation by people of all faiths.
Dehaas also addresses funding for our annual back-to-school celebration, Cram Jam. The budget was raised this year, but was in line with spending from previous years. As we mentioned in our email to Dehaas, Cram Jam is subsidized every year to make this event affordable and accessible for all students to attend. Similar practice is employed at other college and university campuses where ‘frosh weeks’ are the norm. For those who attended Cram Jam this year, the event was both safe and memorable. Students continue to ask us when we will host our next event.
We want to articulate our extreme concern and frustration at Dehaas’ overall reporting effort. In addition to factual errors (which have been noted in the article), we believe there are areas where he has been deliberately vague.
Dehaas writes that DiMera, acting on the part of The Runner, visited the private residence of one of our directors. Our directors maintain he was never at their home and that his story was a fabrication. Dehaas fails to recognize the complicated nature of this particular source, and rather than presenting DiMera’s story in quotes, Dehaas presents it as fact.
Dehaas reported that the KSA reduced summer attendance requirements and increased pay based on an increase in workload, insinuating that our council is doing less work for more pay. He fails to mention that this council maintained the summertime meeting attendance record of previous years, with or without the rule.
Dehaas reports that Richmond Campus Director Harj Dhesi received a cut in pay, writing simply, “The executive said he was ‘not doing any work.’” Maclean’s was provided with the full report on this matter, explaining in detail the reasons for the pay cut. None of it was included.
It is our opinion that Dehaas shaped the evidence to sensationalize the story for his readers and to prove his hypothesis that the KSA is facing numerous controversies.
As always, the KSA welcomes feedback from our members and fair journalistic inquiry. Unfortunately, Dehaas provides neither.
Sincerely,
Sean Birdman, President
Kwantlent Student Association
McGill accused of illegal replacement workers
Injunction forces smaller, quieter picket lines
McGill student courtesy of Evan Shay on Flickr
The union representing striking support staff workers at McGill University has filed a report with the Quebec Labour Board alleging that the university is using illegal replacement workers, reports Canadian Labour Reporter.
The report followed an investigation by the Quebec Ministry of Labour that found 15 of the 110 workers filling in for striking staff were not managers or otherwise eligible replacements.
Michael Di Grappa, vice-principal of administration and finance for the university, disputes the accusation. “All the contingency actions taken to keep the university operating in its core mission of teaching and research during the MUNACA strike are fully within the law,” he said.
Meanwhile, the university has obtained an injunction to force McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA) workers to reduce the size and volume of picket lines in order to allow more access to the school, at least until a hearing on Oct. 3.
Di Grappa told the Montreal Gazette that the school asked for the injunction because of concerns that students were forced off sidewalks by picketers and that the delivery of perishable research items had been impeded.
MUNACA went on strike since Sept. 1. and is seeking what they call “a proper wage scale.”
So much for the ‘People of Einstein’ myth
A student makes Jews look bad. But that’s a good thing.
Photo by wokka on Flickr
By Emma Teitel. Republished from Macleans.ca.
There’s an inside Yiddish expression used by Jews to describe other Jews behaving badly in the public sphere: “shanda for the goyim” — shanda meaning “shame” and goyim denoting “gentiles” (non-Jews). The phrase is most commonly employed by Semitic seniors, when the modern media informs them that Jews can in fact be lechers (Dominique Strauss-Kahn), alcoholics (Amy Winehouse); unsuspecting nudes (Scarlett Johansson); and now, thanks to one 22-year-old Toronto Jewish girl, dangerously obtuse.
The woman in question—with whom I share at least one mutual Facebook friend (I am also a 22-year-old Jewish girl and it’s very possible we crossed paths, maybe at B’nai Brith summer camp, or perhaps in the annual United Synagogue Youth Limousine Sukka Hop)—is a York University senior named Sarah Grunfeld, who last week made shanda-esque headlines when she put her social science professor’s career in jeopardy over an anti-Semitic remark that turned out to be—well—not. The statement “All Jews should be sterilized,” Professor Cameron Johnston explained in the introductory lecture to his class, was an example of an invalid and dangerous opinion; his point was that in academia especially, opinions must be reasonably qualified. Grunfeld failed to catch that qualifier, though, perhaps because before the prof had a chance to offer it, she had stormed out of class and enlisted the on-campus Israel-advocacy group, Hasbara (Hebrew for “Explanation”), to call for his immediate resignation.
Word of Johnston’s so-called racism exploded virally online by way of what National Post columnist Jonathan Kay has dubbed the “Bubbie-net” (Jewish grandparents frantically emailing their kin with fresh findings of alleged anti-Semitism); at the same time widely-respected Canadian Jewish civil rights association, B’nai Brith (Children of the Covenant), leaped in with equal gusto to champion Grunfeld’s claim. Then came the big reveal: Ms. Grunfeld had made a mistake. Not only was professor Johnston not an anti-Semite, he was a Jew. To borrow a more accessible Yiddish phrase, political correctness at York University had effectively schtupped itself. Not to mention Sarah Grunfeld.
The maligned university student has since “qualified” her accusations against Johnston with claims twice as ludicrous as the original. “The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’,” she told the Toronto Star recently, “still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”
A lot of Canadian Jews are embarrassed and ashamed by this kind of doublespeak, and so was I, until I re-examined the root of my disquiet. There’s a reason why this particular shanda—and not, let’s say, Woody Allen’s marriage to his adopted daughter, or Garth Drabinsky’s defrauding of his shareholders, or The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart’s changing his name from John Stewart Liebowitz—ignites such fierce indignation in the Jewish community: Because Grunfeld doesn’t simply make us look bad (like the guys above); she makes us look stupid, and in doing so debunks the cultural stereotypes of intellectual superiority that we sometimes not-so-secretly enjoy.
Jewish American author Michael Chabon explored the seductiveness of this stereotype to Jews themselves in the New York Times last year in considering the calibre of the discussion following Israel’s botched raid of the Gaza bound Turkish flotilla, Mavi Marmara, in which nine activists died at the hands of Jewish soldiers (a debacle Diaspora Jews had trouble reconciling with our supposed “cultural” cleverness):
“I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over—God love them—any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.”
Sarah Grunfeld—God love her—is one such counterexample. But we’d be wrong to let our gaze skip right over her, because there’s another, more disturbing lesson to be drawn from the Grunfeld affair and it’s this: as Jews, we hold the moral high ground to call out anti-Semitism. That’s why, in part, Grunfeld’s accusation had the legs it did, and why, perhaps, it got the backing from the Jewish infrastructure organizations such as B’nai Brith, which still hasn’t distanced itself from Grunfeld or denounced her fallacious claim, but has instead published her unapologetic letter blasting Professor Johnston for a sin he didn’t commit, with a logic even more addled than before. And there lies the biggest shanda of all: Grunfeld’s false allegations and the group’s uninformed decision to support her are bad mistakes, but both parties’ inability to own up to those mistakes renders them inexcusable. Because when we cry wolf —especially on one of our own—serious apologies are in order.
But it’s doubtful that apologies of any kind will be made, and B’nai Brith will continue sniffing out anti-Semitism where there may not be any, all the while undermining cases where there is. If anything good does come from this debacle, however, it’s that our enemies and unsolicited friends (Glenn Beck comes to mind) may think twice before attributing all things grave and glorious to the “People of Einstein.” Because if public representatives of the Jewish faith continue to make exceedingly stupid mistakes, then the various calumnies the conspiracy theorists like to heap on all of us—the blood libel, the plague, AIDS, the Iraq War, and our obvious plans to take over everything from Saturday night TV to the World Bank—start to ring kind of hollow. After all, with Sarah Grunfeld leading the way, for what exactly can they blame us?
Five more apps for students
Improve your finances, romantic life, grades, research…
Photo by miss karen on Flickr
Scott Dobson-Mitchell has sifted through dozens of apps for students. Earlier this month, he reviewed five of his favourites. Here are five more.
Tired of your parents nagging you about wasting money? Now there’s a website that can do that for them! Mint offers tools for budgeting, tracking investments (like you have any) and managing your money. When it’s time to pay a bill, it sends a reminder via e-mail or text message. The website also categorizes all the money you make and spend and then gives you ‘personalized recommendations.’ Can you still afford pizza night after buying textbooks? Mint can tell you. Free for Android and iPhone.
That’s ‘professor’ uptight to you
Website offers profs group therapy
Photo by Laura Mills
June Madeley is annoyed with the increasingly rude demands she gets from students at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. Ten years ago, it was common for them to see her during office hours when they had a question. “Now there’s an expectation that we’ll answer their emails immediately and meet them whenever there’s a good time for them.” And as surely as the leaves pile up on campus each October, the communications professor knows her inbox will soon fill with complaints about mid-terms scheduled for the week after the Thanksgiving holiday. “There are a lot of people who feel they can’t make the exam because of travel arrangements,” she says. “And others who think it’s unfair that they have to study that weekend.”
But when Madeley gets frustrated, she doesn’t fire off a snotty email to the student. She logs on to “That’s ‘Professor’ Uptight to You, Johnny,” a Facebook group with 297 members, all of them teaching at universities and colleges. The members-only site is a place where university educators can vent in the form of steaming emails they wish they could write to their students but can’t because that would be, well, rude. Madeley, who says she hasn’t posted yet, enjoys reading the rants from her colleagues. The site is run by Khrystyne Keane, a Connecticut-based editor for a non-profit group, who took over its administration as a favour to a professor friend. The logo—a unicorn standing under a rainbow—is a jab at students, some of whom feel they are every bit as special as the fabled one-horned horse and the multicoloured arc.
The posts are all written to anonymous Janeys and Johnnies, but they share one trait: carefully crafted sarcasm. “Dear Johnny, I suspect that if you had spent as much time and effort on your last assignment as you did on the long flaming email you just sent me, this whole ‘conversation’ would never have happened,” reads one. “Dear Janey, I want to assure you that we didn’t do anything important in class. We just stared out the window for three hours in silence,” reads another.
Nothing riles a professor more than asking about material covered in a skipped lecture. But Joey O’Kane, a vice-president of the University of New Brunswick Student Union, thinks it’s no big deal. He also thinks it’s reasonable to expect email responses from profs within 24 hours, preferably 12. “Professors have a pretty good gig,” he says. “You put in some office hours, you teach for a few hours and then you end up with a decent paycheque, so taking 10 minutes out of your day to respond to a few emails . . . I don’t think that’s asking too much.”
Kevin Maness, another Facebook member from Eastern University in Pennsylvania, recalls a student who emailed him a couple of weeks after the last semester ended and asked if there was anything he could do to increase his grade because he had been “too busy” playing basketball. Incredulous, Maness wanted to shoot off a caustic retort. Long before he had even heard about That’s “Professor” Uptight, someone else had addressed the same complaint with a post that read: “Dear Johnny, Just tell me the grade you want and I’ll change it in the book, because it doesn’t really matter anyway.” After joining the group last month, Maness has found it to be “great group therapy.”
When Maness attended the University of Pennsylvania in the early ’90s, he accepted that professors would challenge him. In return for doing the coursework, he was rewarded with the grade he had earned. Now, if he hands out a C-minus “it’s almost like a complete shock to them.”
So why the attitude? In their book Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education, University of Western Ontario sociologists James Côté and Anton Allahar say it started when higher education became purely a financial exchange. Funding pressures forced universities to accept as many students as possible, even those who weren’t suited to academics, says Côté. That crowds lecture halls with students who shouldn’t be there.
At the very least, one educator feels students should learn to mind their manners. At the University of Minnesota, law professor Michele Goodwin added “civility” to her course requirements this September. “Failure to follow this guideline will affect your final grade,” she wrote in the class syllabus, explaining that emails should include the basic salutation “Dear Professor Goodwin” and not “Hey Prof.”
She even assigned practice email as homework. “It’s a bit awkward for professors to think, wow, this is actually my job now?” says Goodwin, who blogs for industry publication The Chronicle of Higher Education, “but it’s necessary.” If the new rules don’t work out, at least she has a place to commiserate. The professor can always join That’s “Professor” Uptight to You, Johnny.
Editor’s Note: I wrote this story for the print edition of Maclean’s. As both Profs. Maness and Magatha have pointed out in the comments section, it should have included more nuance. For one, I should have made it more clear that every single professor I spoke to for this piece exuded passion for teaching. Indeed, research shows that North American professors work on average around 55 hours per week and many of those hours are dedicated to helping students learn beyond the classroom—something they get little credit for. The profs. also made it clear that there are many students who don’t fit the stereotype of entitled. I agree. While it’s a challenge to decide what to include in the space allotted, I should have done a better job. I also want to note that there was a factual error in this story that was introduced in the editing process. Maness did not read a complaint “months earlier” from another professor who sarcastically offered to change a student’s grade. That was merely what he said he might have written had he know about the page at the time.
Lethbridge congratulates “truther”
9/11 skeptic now works for magazine that denies holocaust
“Josh Blakely was appointed as a staff writer at Veterans Today which is a quite popular media venue based in the US. He has also appeared on several media outlets in the U.S. and Canada discussing his research area. Congratulations Josh!,” the University of Lethbridge wrote on their website last week.
We think they mean Josh Blakeney, the 9/11 conspiracy theorist who was hired as a columnist for Veterans Affairs. The National Post came to the same conclusion, questioning why Lethbridge would want to congratulate someone who goes to work for a magazine that suggests “the main purpose of keeping alive the Holocaust is to protect Jewish banking practices.”
This isn’t the first time Blakeney was in the news. His master’s thesis The Origins of the Global War on Terror: Intellectual Debates and Interpretive Controversies, generated an outcry because it was subsidized by an $8,000 Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship from the province of Alberta.
In a recent column for Veterans Affairs about the Sept. 11 “truther” conference in Toronto, Blakeney argues that 9/11 was a plot by anti-Islamic Israelis and that Islamic jihadists were not involved. He writes “documents going back to the 1980s, emanating from Tel Aviv rather than Washington… suggest that the “war on terrorism” was an Israeli inspired initiative.”
Is this bake sale racist?
Campus Republicans could lose funding over cupcakes
Photo by Mr. T in DC on Flickr
Campus Republicans at the University of California Berkeley will be selling cupcakes on Tuesday — a move some are calling racist.
At the “Diversity Bake Sale” white men will pay $2 per cupcake, Asians will pay $1.50, Latinos will pay $1, African Americans will pay 75 cents and Native Americans 25 cents per cupcake. Women will get a 25 per cent discount, said the original Facebook event invitation, which has since been changed according to student newspaper The Daily Californian.
Campus Republican president Shawn Lewis told KGO TV that the bake sale is meant “to cause people to get a little upset” and to draw attention to a proposed bill that would allow (but not require) universities to consider race, nationality and gender in admissions policies. Such affirmative action was outlawed in the state in 1997.
The Associated Students of the University of California, the school’s student union, has called a special senate meeting to decided whether to take away the club’s funding. The event may have violated the student senate’s anti-racism policy, says the ASUC, which condemns the event.
The planned protest has prompted ample discussion of Bill 185 on Facebook. Some students have shown their support on the Campus Republicans. Others have called them racist.
One recent poster says, “for full accuracy, make sure black students aren’t allowed to buy anything until 12:30, and then they have to let white students skip ahead of them in line until 1:15. Women can’t buy until 12:45, and they’re limited to two items per customer….”
Another recent poster writes: “We need a candid discussion on how Asians will be affected by the new policies.” Asian Americans made up 12 per cent of California’s population in 2008, but represent 43 per cent of UC Berkeley’s student body, reports USA Today.
Job market improves for languages professors
But annual hiring is still one-third lower than in 2007-08
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The Modern Languages Association’s job board is North America’s dominant website for posting full-time professor jobs in English and foreign languages departments. That makes it a decent barometer for the two fields’ PhD job markets.
An analysis of this year’s listings shows that full-time job availability improved compared to the previous two devastating years—a period in which listings dropped 40 per cent. There were 8.2 per cent more English professor jobs posted in 2010-11 than in 2009-10. The number of foreign languages jobs was up too—7.1 per cent year-on-year. It’s a welcome improvement, but annual hiring is still one-third below its peak in 2007-08.
Continue reading Job market improves for languages professors
College can add more earnings than university
Relative value varies by industry: study
Ever wondered whether an applied college degree or a traditional university degree will add more to your paycheque?
The answer depends on what industry you work in, according to a new study published by the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. While university degrees generally offer a higher rate of return (as measured by increased earnings over people with only high school diplomas), there are some jobs where the college degree is worth more.
Not surprisingly, university rules in health care, senior management and in the legal field. In those industries, workers with university degrees make about 40 per cent more than those with no post-secondary credential, while college degrees bring only about 20 per cent more earning power.
But chefs and cooks, child-care workers and sales people who have college credentials have a roughly 20 per cent advantage over those with only high school, while those with university better their pay by only five to 10 per cent.
And in the trades, including construction and transportation, college credentials offer roughly a 20 per cent premium over high school alone while university adds only about five per cent.
What’s not considered in the study is the fact that there may be an advantage to earning a university degree and then adding a college credential. To read more about The College Advantage, click here.
The decline of the B.A. continues
But will business degrees really lead to better jobs?
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Communication, critical thinking and problem solving are just a few of the skills that are gained from an arts education. But for many students, that list of skills doesn’t add up to a job, so they’re choosing business instead.
Worries about the decline of the Bachelor of Arts aren’t new. But when Ontario universities welcomed their biggest class ever this year, the headlines masked the fact that arts programs shrunk in size again in the province, this year by 0.3 per cent. Job-focused programs such as business accounted for much of the growth, increasing 2.9 per cent.
It’s not a new trend. Data from the Ontario Universities Application Centre (OUAC) show that between 2006 and 2010, in the average year, arts confirmations for first-year students coming from high school decreased on average by five per cent (that includes fine and applied arts, humanities, and social sciences). Business and commerce saw an increase of approximately 12 per cent.
Is your water fountain safe?
Fredericton schools find unacceptable levels of lead
Even as universities across the country are banning bottled water, alarms are going off about the safety of the water coming out of drinking fountains at some Canadian campuses.
The student newspaper at St. Thomas University is reporting that eight drinking fountains at the small university are being shut down because of high levels of lead detected in the fountains. University officials were uncertain as to the exact source of the contamination, and vowed to replace the fountains with newer models equipped with filters to make the water safe.
According to the report, STU only looked into their fountains after recent tests at the University of New Brunswick showed unacceptable levels of lead in 18 per cent of fountains and sinks — along with others that were very close to the limits set out by Health Canada. New fountains are on order there, too, according to The Brunswickan, coming in at a total cost of roughly $100,000 dollars for twenty fountains.
Why does this matter? Long-term exposure to small amounts of lead can harm the nervous system. According to Health Canada:“Recent scientific studies on lead show that adverse health effects are occurring at lower levels of exposure to lead than previously thought.”
Concerns over water quality at school drinking fountains are not new. A US investigation in 2009 turned up lead-contaminated drinking water at schools in every American state. Some of the lead came from the school’s own well or local water supplies, while lead-soldered pipes were identified as culprits in other cases. In Canada, one study found that 27 per cent of “first draw” samples taken in Ontario schools had high levels of lead, and 9 per cent still had high levels even after the system was flushed.
How many more schools have contaminated water that is going undetected? Since STU only identified its problem after learning of the UNB case, universities across the country may need to begin more systematic monitoring of water quality. At present, Ontario is the only province that has legally mandated monitoring of school drinking water. Mandatory or not, universities should consider conducting tests of their own.
21+ rules may violate human rights code
Adults of legal age have a right to be served: expert
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Young adults, especially men, are being barred from entering drinking establishments in Canada based solely on their age — and these are men who are have reached the provincially-mandated minimum age for drinking. Many clubs are restricting entry to those over the age of 21. Women often get a free pass if they’re of legal age.
But the practice may be a Human Rights Code violation, Raj Anand, former commissioner of Ontario’s Human Rights Commission told The Globe and Mail. “There are certain circumstances in which the stereotype of irresponsibility that attaches to young, unmarried men is sanctioned by law –– see their car insurance rates –– but visiting a bar or nightclub is not one of them. In my view, exclusion of an adult of drinking age is a violation of the Human Rights Code.”
Club owners and event planners defend the practice, suggesting that younger men are more likely to arrive drunk and spend less money.
But the rules are the rules. So young men, the next time a bouncer looks at your ID and tells you scram, just point out that it’s a human rights code violation. That ought to get you in, right?
Should universities punish students for off-campus behaviour?
STU’s new code of conduct strikes the right balance: Petz
Photo courtesy of eliduke on Flickr
Keep on your best behavior St. Thomas students or you could not be a STU student no more. The university has a new code of conduct that will apply to your activities both on and off campus. A committee of university officials, students and faculty will now be able to impose punishments for things like hazing, including fines of up to $500 and expulsion. Seems draconian, right?
The new rules are the result of a policy review that followed the death of Andrew Bartlett. Bartlett died last October after attending his volleyball team’s initiation party at an off-campus residence where hazing and excessive drinking allegedly took place before he fell down a flight of stairs and fatally injured his head.
Though it’s clear that universities should be accountable for their students while they’re living, working and studying on campus, policing student behavior off-campus is more controversial.
But by limiting their code of conduct to occasions when students are clearly representing the university, STU’s new code of conduct strikes the right balance between student rights to behave how they like and the university’s right to protect its reputation—-not to mention their duty to keep students safe. The code rightly spells-out which behaviours are acceptable and which are not.
To violate the code, an incident must involve at least two STU students and occur at a university-sanctioned event or one where the student is representing the university. Hazing is highlighted, with a list of more than 20 examples spelled out. Overall, hazing is defined as “any activity expected of someone joining a group (or to maintain full status in a group) that humiliates, degrades or risks emotional and/or physical harm, regardless of the person’s willingness to participate,” reports The Aquinian student newspaper.*
The death of Andrew Bartlett is not the first incident to prompt questions about whether university discipline rules should reach off campus. Following allegations of hazing at the University of Alberta chapter of Delta Kappa Epilson fraternity at their off-campus location, the university suspended the fraternity for five years, disallowing DKE from using university services or associating itself with the U of A. Despite calls for a harsher punishment, there was little else the university could do to discipline the chapter under the U of A’s code of student behavior.
Another incident that stirred up debate on university discipline was the Stanley Cup rioting in Vancouver. Some wanted the University of British Columbia to punish those found guilty of taking part in looting. A spokesperson for the UBC told campus paper The Ubyssey that they would be letting the police and the courts determine discipline for any students involved in the looting.
Like STU, UBC made the right choice there too.It’s reasonable for universities to try to protect their students’ safety and their own reputations, but universities are no substitute for good parenting and good decisions on the part of students. Their duty only goes so far.
*This story has been updated from an earlier version that failed to attribute details of the draft code to The Aquinian, a student newspaper at St. Thomas University. Maclean’s On Campus regrets the error.
Classes must be held on campus: McGill
Prof. moved class to living room to avoid picket lines
A McGill University professor who moved her Islamic studies class to her living room to avoid crossing the picket lines of striking workers has been told to get back to campus or lose her pay.
Prof. Michelle Hartman said she was told by Christopher Manfredi, the Arts Dean, that she can’t do her job properly off campus. “I told him I’m moving it back under protest,” she told the Montreal Gazette. She wanted to avoid campus as a symbol of solidarity with the strikers.
Provost Anthony Masi wrote to all professors on Tuesday to clarify the school’s position: “A professor’s right not to cross a picket line does not confer any right to move classes away from campus,” he wrote. Students had complained of inconvenient off-campus classes, he said.
McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA) employees have been striking since Sept. 1. MUNACA has asked McGill for a 3 per cent wage increase each year for three years, plus a wage scale where employees reach maximum pay in six years. Negotiations continue.
CFS grades Ontario leaders
Who gets the highest marks?
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The Canadian Federation of Students has released a report card for each of the four party leaders who hope to be premier of Ontario after the Oct. 6 election. They graded them on tuition fees, funding, research and student debt.
The CFS has long lobbied for lower tuition fees. Here’s how the parties were graded on that measure: The Liberals and Progressive Conservatives got Fs for tuition, because “the Liberals have increased fees by up to 59% since 2006,” and because “the PCs have not made any commitments to regulate, freeze or reduce tuition fees,” writes the CFS. They gave the New Democrats a B, because “the NDP has promised to freeze college, undergraduate and graduate tuition fees if elected.” The Greens got a C+ for their plan is to freeze tuition fees and then allow them to grow with the rate of inflation.
Overall, they gave the Liberals a C+, the PCs a D, the New Democrats a B+ and the Greens a B-.
It’s worth noting that students care about more than just education issues. In a poll for the Historica-Dominion institute before the federal election in April, students were asked to rank their top concerns. Only 18 per cent put “paying for my post-secondary education” in their top-three list. Health care, military and economic conerns were all ranked significantly higher by those polled.
