Archive for Dale Kirby

The surest way to drum up interest in a porn movie on campus is to ban it

As reported by Time Magazine:

Silly politicians. Don’t they know the surest way to drum up interest in a porn movie on campus is to ban it? When a state senator threatened to strip funding from the University of Maryland over its plans to show a XXX-rated film in the student center, school officials nixed the event. But fired-up students responded on Monday by holding a free-speech demonstration that drew media coverage from as far away as Thailand and Australia.

The brouhaha is the result of a marketing strategy by porn company Digital Playground, which last summer started offering complimentary copies of Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge (a hardcore homage to Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, animated skeleton pirates and all) to students on 100 college campuses. Many schools have already screened the film in venues ranging from a dorm room at Southern Connecticut State University to an 850-student audience in December at UCLA, where the film’s stars responded to questions and criticism about the porn industry.

Airplane from Thunder Bay, Ont. was chased across three states before landing on a rural Missouri highway

As reported by Canwest News Service:

An Ontario student pilot was charged with violating U.S. immigration law after a small airplane flying from a Thunder Bay, Ont., airport was chased by U.S. fighter jets across three states before landing on a rural Missouri highway Monday evening, state highway police said early Tuesday morning.

A Cessna 172 Skyhawk from a Thunder Bay flight school landed at about 9:45 ET on U.S. Highway 60, about 40 kilometres northwest of Poplar Bluff, said Maj. Brian Martin, from the North American Aerospace Defense Command. It was shadowed by two U.S. fighter jets who were trying to force the Cessna down.

Moreland said the airplane was not stolen, which reduced the severity of the charge. The RCMP contacted U.S. authorities to say Leon had access to the airplane at Confederation College Aviation Centre where he was a student pilot.

The following address was given by journalist, author and documentary-maker Brendan O’Malley to the recent UN General Assembly Thematic Debate on Education in Emergencies. O’Malley is the author of Education under Attack, a UNESCO study on targeted political and military violence against education staff, students, teachers, union and government officials and institutions: The 2007 Unesco [...]

The following address was given by journalist, author and documentary-maker Brendan O’Malley to the recent UN General Assembly Thematic Debate on Education in Emergencies. O’Malley is the author of Education under Attack, a UNESCO study on targeted political and military violence against education staff, students, teachers, union and government officials and institutions:

The 2007 Unesco study, Education Under Attack, was the first global investigation to document the targeting of political and military attacks against students, teachers, education officials and education trade unionists. The sobering finding was that there had been an alarming increase in such attacks in the previous three years.

The types of attack include the burning and bombing of schools, occupation by armed forces, murder, torture, abductions, rape, recruitment of child soldiers, and the threat of any of these.

The worst hit countries in the past decade include Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian Autonomous Territory, Nepal, Pakistan and Thailand. There are emerging threats in DR Congo, Niger, Pakistan, Somalia and Zimbabwe.

In the past five years, we have seen hundreds of teachers and teacher trade unionists deliberately murdered in Afghanistan, Thailand and Colombia. Nearly 300 academics were assassinated in Iraq – in fact there have been a reported 31,000 attacks on education institutions in that country in this period.

And at the turn of this year we saw the well-documented destruction of UN schools in Gaza.
This is both a human rights issue and an Education for All issue. The right to education in safety was enshrined in the expanded commentary of the Dakar Framework for Action issue by the World Education Forum.

Paragraph 58 declares that: “Schools should be respected and protected as sanctuaries and zones of peace.” Yet in the areas worst affected by attacks on education, the impact on Education for All has been devastating.

There is the loss of life, the destruction of buildings and materials, the closure of schools by hundreds at a time, sometimes for a week sometimes, as in Niger, for two years.

There is the flight of staff – last year, 300 teachers asked to leave one province affected by assassinations in the far south of Thailand – and the difficulty of recruitment which slowly degrades the quality of teaching offered.

There is the impact on pupil attendance as parents fear to send their child to school. Even if pupils do go back, fear will inhibit their learning.

And then there is the immeasurable psychological impact of the brutality, as many teachers are shot in front of their pupils by assassins, some even beheaded. One was raped and her body hung up outside her school in Iraq for a number of days.

Afghan children have witnessed acid thrown in their friends’ faces for daring to attend classes. How will the trauma of these experiences affect their wellbeing and learning?

So what should we do? The time is right to push for recognition and respect for the Dakar pledge to treat schools as safe sanctuaries and zones of peace. This requires better protection for teachers and students in law and in practice. It means ensuring that schools work for peace not against it, and it requires political and financial commitment to global monitoring and ending impunity.

From The Globe and Mail’s Elizabeth Church: As the last grim signs of winter fade from Canadian campuses, the spring rite of cutting classes is taking on a whole new meaning. Course calendars across the country are under the microscope as universities, trying to do more with less, are taking a hard look at programs [...]

From The Globe and Mail’s Elizabeth Church:

As the last grim signs of winter fade from Canadian campuses, the spring rite of cutting classes is taking on a whole new meaning.

Course calendars across the country are under the microscope as universities, trying to do more with less, are taking a hard look at programs and class sizes. The end result will likely be fewer choices for undergraduates and larger classes in September – another symptom of the financial squeeze on higher education.

The new measures are sparking a wave of protests on-line and on campus from students and academics worried that the elimination of programs will narrow the scope of teaching and research, and diminish the quality of education.

Student leaders fear tuition hikes in the coming years, and new measures such as the University of Toronto’s plan for flat fees for full-time arts and science students regardless of course load.

Starting this fall, universities could raise tuition by an average of $400 per student

Manitoba should strive to maintain lower-than-average post-secondary education fees and have the best student assistance in Canada as the province slowly lifts a tuition freeze, a commission recommended Thursday. The commission, which looked at how a gradual increase in tuition will affect accessibility to education, concluded students should help pay for their post-secondary studies, but fee increases should be modest.

The province’s NDP government froze tuition for almost a decade before lifting the ban last year in response to universities who said they needed the cash. Starting in the fall, universities will be able to raise tuition by an average of $400 a student.

The government established the commission last summer to make recommendations on how to keep post-secondary education accessible while thawing tuition fees.

Commissioner Ben Levin said Manitoba should set its sights well above the national average when it comes to participation rates, tuition fees and student assistance.

“Improving the situation is urgent,” Levin said in his report released Thursday. “Manitoba needs more post-secondary graduates, a change that will require government action.”

The province should be less focused on reducing tuition and concentrate more on ensuring the students who need help get it, Levin said.

“Students ought to pay a share of the cost of their post-secondary education,” the report stated. “The main reason is that individuals reap large benefits from this education; there is no justification for this personal benefit to be subsidized completely given the many other pressures on public expenditure.”

About 60 per cent of Manitoba students don’t have to borrow money to pay for their education, the report added. Most students who do borrow are able to repay the debts, it concluded.

They are graduate students who grade assignments, conduct research, work in laboratories and do a range of other essential academic work, and they are one of the few remaining groups of non-unionized workers at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Over the next two days (April 1-2), graduate research and teaching assistants at Memorial will be voting [...]

They are graduate students who grade assignments, conduct research, work in laboratories and do a range of other essential academic work, and they are one of the few remaining groups of non-unionized workers at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Over the next two days (April 1-2), graduate research and teaching assistants at Memorial will be voting on the question of union certification for a second time. A similar unionization drive and vote was held in 2005. Back then, the Teaching Assistants Union at Memorial University of Newfoundland (TAUMAN) came up four votes short of forming their first union.

If the graduate assistants are successful this week, they will become the 13th certified bargaining unit at Memorial University. There are currently seven locals of the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Public and Private Employees (NAPE locals 1804, 1809, 7405, 7801, 7803, 7804, 7850), three locals of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE locals 1615, 3336, 4554), as well as the faculty union (MUNFA) and the recently certified lecturers’ union (LUMUN).

I should also mention that, on top of these certified bargaining units, we have four separately incorporated student unions: the Memorial University of Newfoundland Students’ Union, the Grenfell College Student Union, the Marine Institute Students’ Union, and the Graduate Students’ Union.

From CTV News: The time has come for scientific journals to dump the academic jargon and replace it with clear language the general population can understand, contends an editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Dr. Noni MacDonald and Globe and Mail health reporter André Picard argue that with the Internet, the general public, politicians [...]

From CTV News:

The time has come for scientific journals to dump the academic jargon and replace it with clear language the general population can understand, contends an editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Dr. Noni MacDonald and Globe and Mail health reporter André Picard argue that with the Internet, the general public, politicians and news media are now reading the journals and studies that used to be reserved for academics. Websites such as CTV.ca regularly provide links to studies on medical journal websites so readers can assess the data themselves.

But because the language in those studies is often so confusing, many are misinterpreting what they read.

Jeffery Simpson picks up the subject of access to university in his Globe and Mail column today. He makes the following observation about university tuition fees and access: Some governments have tried to ease the financial path to university by keeping fees low, ostensibly to improve access. (Quebec’s are the lowest in North America, but [...]

Jeffery Simpson picks up the subject of access to university in his Globe and Mail column today. He makes the following observation about university tuition fees and access:

Some governments have tried to ease the financial path to university by keeping fees low, ostensibly to improve access. (Quebec’s are the lowest in North America, but there’s no evidence of higher participation rates.) Study after study has rebuffed that theory, in that higher fees are actually not much, if any, deterrent – not when compared with a host of other factors. But, politically, keeping fees down has often been attractive, although they’ve been rising above inflation in recent years to make up for the reduction in government funding.

Newfoundland and Labrador eliminates interest on the provincial portion of student loans

The government of Newfoundland and Labrador has released its 2009 Budget. The budget, which has a $750 million deficit, makes a number of changes to student financial assistance that, according to the minister of education, provide for the “best student aid package in the country”. Spending initiatives that will impact the student pocketbook include:

• a continuation of the tuition fee freeze at Memorial University of Newfoundland and the College of the North Atlantic;
• an increase in up-front, non-repayable, needs-based grants from $70 to $80 per week of study; and
• the elimination of interest on the provincial portion of student loans.

The current issue of International Higher Education Quarterly, published by the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, includes a piece by Jane Knight, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, on the ins and outs of joint-, double-, and combined-degree programs. Dr. Knight raises a number of important questions about these types [...]

The current issue of International Higher Education Quarterly, published by the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, includes a piece by Jane Knight, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, on the ins and outs of joint-, double-, and combined-degree programs. Dr. Knight raises a number of important questions about these types of programs:

For many academics and policymakers, double- and joint degree programs are welcomed as a natural extension of exchange and mobility. For others, they are perceived as a troublesome development leading to double counting of academic work and the thin edge of academic fraud. A broad range of reactions exist because of the diversity of these program models, the involvement of different types of institutions, the uncertainty related to quality assurance and qualifications, and the ethics used in designing the academic workload or new competencies required for the granting of a joint, double, multiple, or combined degree.