Archive for Erin Millar
The women’s studies debate goes on
Is there still a place for women’s studies in universities?
The National Post continued its dialogue about whether women studies departments should continue to exist on university campuses today by publishing a letter to the editor written by Penni Stewart of the Canadian Association of University Teachers and Katherine Giroux-Bougard of the Canadian Federation of Students. Stewart and Giroux-Bougard countered last week’s doozy of an editorial piece, in which the Post’s editorial board argued that Radical feminism at the core of these programs has reaped havoc on families, labour law, court systems, constitutional freedoms and “even the ordinary relations between men and women.”
Predictably, the editorial sparked a chorus of anger from all corners of the internet. Read my coverage and opinion (yes, it is clearly an opinion) here.
Thankfully, today’s paper included Stewart and Giroux-Bougard’s refreshing response. They argue (rightly, in my view) that women studies programs are “essential to an equitable society” and that they have evolved over the last 40 years to reflect the current state of inequality between men and women. Sure, we’ve come a long way, but there’s much work and study to be done:
In the world imagined by the editorial board, women and men are treated equally, and feminism has fundamentally undermined individual rights, the court system and Canadian society. Women’s Studies programs have destroyed the traditional family and radically reshaped constitutional freedoms.
On the planet the rest of us live on, women continue to earn significantly less than men for performing the same work, are underrepresented at every level of government, are more likely to live in poverty and are at a significantly higher risk of violence and abuse. Despite progress in recent decades, women still hit a glass ceiling that maintains the upper echelons of business, government and society as a male domain.
Here here.
The National Post editorial board hates women’s studies
The Post’s “sexist drivel”—as one commenter called it—makes the case for why women studies will live on
Is the editorial board at the National Post made up of a bunch of sexist, “ill-informed jackasses”? That is what is being argued from the sidelines of social media—blogs, Twitter, Facebook, [insert latest online soapbox here].
The chorus of anger is in response to Tuesday’s editorial in the Post called “Women Studies is Still With Us.” The column begins by outlining the news element: there have been reports that women studies programs are disappearing from Canadian campuses, they say. This is presumably a retort to the Toronto Star columnist Catherine Porter’s lament that Queen’s University is changing the name of their women studies program to “gender studies.”
The Post goes on to play the skeptic, but accomplishes sounding more like a self-proclaimed conspiracy theorist revealing what was on the front page of yesterday’s paper: “We would wave good-bye without shedding a tear, but we are pretty sure these angry, divisive and dubious programs are simply being renamed to make them appear less controversial.”
Uh… duh. As Maclean’s OnCampus reported last weekend, and Porter herself acknowledges, no one is claiming these classes and programs are gone, only that the name is changing. Porter is annoyed, apparently because of her nostalgic attachment to the resulting “empowerment” of seeing the word “woman” in the course calendar of her university days (which is sentimental nonsense, if you ask me). OnCampus’ Robyn Urback argues more rationally when she notes that the change to “gender studies” reflects the contemporary study of women’s role in society. “To properly understand the role of women in society you have to understand the role of men,” she writes. Furthermore, by depoliticizing the program by removing the word “women” surely the subject of study can move on to a more nuanced study of gender in society.
So, does the change make things less controversial? Probably. Moving the subject of women studies away from its traditional “man-hating” subject matter–if you will–you’d think would please the Post. But, nope, the editorial board sees the change as a manipulative way of masking women studies academics’ true intentions: to crush all things good in our society.
The Post then argues that women studies programs are downright evil. (I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.) Radical feminism at the core of these programs, they write, has wreaked havoc on families, labour law, court systems, constitutional freedoms and “even the ordinary relations between men and women.” According to the Post, women studies programs are responsible for the entirety of what feminism got wrong: they are to blame for ill-advised affirmative action in hiring, for convincing young women that all men are victimizers, for divorced men who find themselves unfairly blocked access to their children, for systematic unfairness in the Supreme Court, for increasing taxes with frivolous programs like universal child-care (because child-care is a women’s issue, right? sigh), and for insisting that men shouldn’t try to write novels from a woman’s perspective. These crazy women studies professors have gone so far as to argue that “all heterosexual sex is oppression because its ‘penetrative nature’ amounts to ‘occupation.’” And the result of all of these sins? “Executives, judges and university students must now sit through mandatory diversity training.” Boo hoo.
Although the Post doesn’t go to the trouble of letting the reader know when and at which university these sins were committed nor who said the things they quote in their editorial, I don’t doubt that each of these transgressions occurred at some point in history on some university campus. Nevertheless, it’s a cheap shot to seek out the most extreme of feminist arguments to make the case for why women studies should be extinct. Any movement will have its extremists—in this case, those who argue that sex is, by definition, “occupation”—and a rational person would look past those and listen to the majority in the middle.
Although I’m female, I don’t call myself a feminist; I believe that most of the work on that front is done and I feel alienated by extremists who continue to decry the inherent chauvinism at the basis of our society. Nevertheless, if women studies are to blame for all of the bad that resulted from feminism, as the Post would have you believe, then we should also applaud them for feminism’s accomplishments, which far outnumber the downsides. No progress in society happens without some steps backwards.
Even if equality has come a far way in our society, there continues to be a role for women’s studies, if not in leading the feminist movement, then in the study of its history. Only an ignorant person would look at our country and see perfect equality and access to achievement, and only in paying tribute to the inequalities of the past will we remember how far we’ve come and why it is important.
Unfortunately, the Post’s editorial accomplishes the opposite of its intention. Instead of making a compelling argument for why women studies programs should be a thing of the past, it only demonstrates why they are essential to our future.
CFS-BC loses legal battle over barring Kwantlen rep from board
Decision could have consequences for BC societies
The Canadian Federation of Students British Columbia chapter lost a legal fight this week when they were ordered to ratify a representative from the Kwantlen Student Association on their board. Since May 2008, CFS-BC has refused to recognize the KSA representative as a voting member of the board, even though each member student union is supposed to have a vote according to CFS bylaws.
Justice Brown ruled Wednesday that CFS-BC was in violation of the Society Act and their own bylaws by not admitting the KSA’s representative, Derek Robertson, who was twice voted to the position by Kwantlen students. The KSA applauded the decision. “I’m happy to see that the court has upheld the rights of individual student societies, and their students, to elect their own representation,” said Steven Lee, KSA chairperson, in a release. “This ruling makes the CFS-BC more accountable, democratic, and open to more than one point of view.”
However, Shamus Reid, chairperson of CFS-BC, warned that the ruling could have grave consequences for societies in BC. CFS-BC was concerned that Robertson “could not represent their interests,” Reid explained in an email to Maclean’s. “The BC Society Act provides that directors of a society are legally responsible for protecting the society from harm,” he added. “Despite this legal responsibility, Madame Justice Brown’s ruling denies directors the legal power to do so.” The KSA claims that CFS-BC directors are worried that Robertson would be disloyal to the CFS.
The KSA has long been in conflict with the CFS over a variety of issues, and last year held a defederation campaign to end the union’s membership in the organization. The referendum failed. Leading up to and during the the referendum, the two organizations were in and out of court.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated.
Cracking down on private colleges?
The problem of unregulated colleges in Canada is widespread and elusive
The woman who answers the phone (in Cantonese) at the America Institute of Technology seems confused when I ask, in English, when classes start. “Who are you?” she asks. I tell her that I’m calling for a friend. “We’re not a school,” she replies. “We’re immigration consultants.” Now I’m surprised. The institute’s website, where I found this phone number, advertises one- and two-year diplomas in computer science and hospitality. Tuition ranges in the thousands. But, she insists, she’s never heard of the American Institute of Technology (AIT). She says her firm Yi-Jia Immigration Consultants Ltd. helps people (often from Hong Kong, she says) immigrate to Canada.
When I call again a week later (these phone calls occurred last year), whoever answers the phone is much less confused. “You want to register for classes?” she asks when I say I’m calling about AIT. She forwards me to another woman who says her name is Adelle, but won’t reveal her last name after I say that I am a journalist. She confirms that AIT catered to international students. She says it was associated with Yi-Jia Immigration but hasn’t offered classes since last year. “Do you realize the website is still advertising classes with the same address and phone number as your firm?” I ask. “That must be a mistake,” she says.
The America Institute of Technology is just one example of a unique Canadian gift to higher education: the barely-regulated private college. Some, like AIT, target overseas students, offering them a chance to get into Canada — but for a price, and often under dubious pretenses. Others promise diplomas and degrees to Canadian students that the school is not legally able to offer. They prey mostly off low-income people who may be unemployed and looking for new opportunities during hard economic times.
In a Toronto Star investigation published in September, undercover reporters enrolled in two unregistered schools; one reporter was promised a job as a security guard at Pearson Airport if he paid $262 for a one-day training course. The job never materialized. Another reporter enrolled in a two-week, $480 course and earned a diploma as a personal health care worker by watching DVD videos and reading Wikipedia handouts.
What’s so bad about these schools? For Canadian students, illegal colleges are taking advantage of people’s desire to better themselves and their economic circumstances by charging high fees in exchange for useless credentials and a disingenuous promise of employment. Schools that cater to foreign students are a whole different ballgame. They are not only duping students but also the federal government (which grants student visas) and the public (who trust that students entering Canada on visas are coming here to study at a legitimate institution).
Closed for debate
Pro-life student clubs are being shut out across the country
It was standing room only at the University of Victoria on Oct. 21, when anti-abortion activist Stephanie Gray visited from Calgary to debate distinguished medical ethicist Eike-Henner Kluge. Gray and Kluge duked it out twice that day, to accommodate those who couldn’t fit into the 200-seat room for round one. Not one to disappoint, Gray, who is executive director of the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, employed the tactics that make her so controversial: she compared abortion to the Holocaust and showed a video of an abortion.
Yet compared to some of the activism on Canadian campuses, the debate was mild, the audience civil, even polite. Periodically, when Gray began speaking, a group of students would hold up signs sporting slogans like “My body is not up for debate.” And there were scattered heckles when she accused pro-choicers of believing that “a woman has the right to directly and intentionally dismember and decapitate and disembowel her child.” But she wasn’t accosted, yelled at, or in any way prevented from speaking her mind. Nevertheless, the debate and other events organized by UVic’s pro-life club, called Youth Protecting Youth (YPY), are shaping up to be the basis of a legal battle over free speech that could change the way student unions and even universities operate.
The spat began in October 2008 when the university’s students’ society refused to give YPY the same meagre funding all UVic student clubs receive. Clubs approved by a committee are entitled to $232 each year and such perks as banner supplies and free room bookings. Upon review in 2009, the committee approved YPY. But the students’ society board stepped in and once again revoked the funding. In an Oct. 5 meeting, the society’s directors accused YPY of “harassing” female students (although they mentioned no specifics). Director Tracey Ho summed up the society’s position by saying, “No one should debate my rights over my own body.”
Ho’s sentiment is particularly troubling when it is put into force at universities, which should be bastions of intellectual freedom and open debate, says John Dixon, director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. So when YPY approached the association to complain of discrimination, it was happy to help. “This is a freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of opinion, freedom of expression case,” Dixon says.
The UVic students’ society, on the other hand, maintains that events such as the Gray-Kluge debate go beyond the limits of free expression. “Freedom of speech of course can happen, but not when it’s harassing or oppressing other people,” says Veronica Harrison, the society’s chairperson. Dixon’s response: “There used to be people who would run up to women outside abortion clinics with video cameras and say: ‘We’re going to show your priests, mothers, teachers, classmates.’ That’s harassment. I don’t see how you can be harassed by somebody giving a speech—if you don’t want to hear it, don’t go.”
From idea to reality
Your school project might earn you more than a good grade
Parker Mitchell was uninspired. An engineering student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Mitchell had spent his last undergraduate co-op term improving door hinges for a 1998 Saturn automobile. That’s a fine task for an engineer, and yet he felt something was missing.
For his final-year project, he went looking for a more fulfilling topic—and he found it in some notes belonging to his professor’s late colleague, an engineer originally from India. The notes described the challenges of water and sanitation in India, and the statistics shocked Mitchell: one billion Indians live without access to clean water; 2.5 billion people worldwide live without adequate sanitation. So, for his project, he decided to create a household device that could provide enough clean water for a family of four and would cost less than $15. He had no idea at the time that it would eventually lead him and his classmate, George Roter, to veer from their expected career paths and found Engineers Without Borders—an organization that over the past decade has helped bring better agricultural technology to an estimated 10,000 farmers in developing countries around the world.
The fact is, plenty of real-world, practical ideas that go on to spawn successful careers often get their start in the ivory towers of academe. The classic school-project-turned-success story, narrated by business professors the world over, is FedEx—a company conceived in a Yale University economics paper. As the tale goes, FedEx founder Fred Smith received a failing grade for the project but, hoping to prove his prof wrong, went on to launch what is now one of the largest package delivery companies in the world. There’s as much fiction as fact in that story, of course—Smith has said he earned a “gentlemanly C”—but it neatly captures a dream shared by many university students: the brilliant concept (and therefore pupil) spurned by a professor but welcomed by the wide world as a success.
The FedEx route is rarely direct, of course. Mitchell, for instance, realized early on that a low-cost water filter would never solve India’s water problems. “I learned that technical solutions are only one small part of what is needed,” he says. Myriad factors in India meant that his filter would never be used for its intended purpose. But the experience changed his perspective on engineering as a profession. Could engineers put their skills to work by solving the problems facing poverty-stricken parts of the world? With that question in mind, Mitchell and Roter set off to learn about the organizational, cultural and social elements that would allow them to apply engineer-like problem-solving to the challenge of lessening world poverty. Now, Mitchell still sounds surprised that he ended up the co-CEO of a prominent NGO. “If someone had asked to put bets on people most likely in 10 years to be leading something, my name would have been in the bottom third of the list of everyone in my class,” he laughs.
Like Mitchell, Melissa Kluger had no idea where her education would take her when she started law school at the University of Toronto. After she completed an undergraduate arts degree at Queen’s University, Kluger enrolled in law in 1998 because she loved the university environment and “was looking for an excuse to stay in school.”
At U of T, she was surprised to discover that no publication existed for law students. So—as she had done at Queen’s, where she started a student creative writing magazine—she jumped at the chance to create a new student publication. “It was a time when there were a lot of opinions and emotion, and students needed a forum to talk,” she recalls. “Students were winning competitions, publishing papers, winning sports events—the kinds of things a community is built on. I felt compelled to fill this gap for our student community and our legal community.”
Is five for you?
The good and the bad about taking an extra year to get a degree
Imagine: you are in the last semester of your undergraduate degree. You studied hard. You worked two jobs in the summer. You are tens of thousands of dollars in debt. You can’t wait to finally pick up that degree and begin the next stage of your life. But when you turn in your application for graduation, you are—surprise!—missing one course and will have to come back next year.
It’s every senior student’s nightmare, and it’s more common than you might think. Sometimes by accident and sometimes by design, an increasing number of students are taking longer than four years to finish four-year degrees. Statistics Canada reports that half of all 22-year-olds were still in school in 2001, compared to a quarter in 1971. Many students are choosing to take longer to work, take time off, or simply avoid going crazy from a full course load; but even for those who want to get out in four, there are many pitfalls to dodge.
Ann Tierney, vice-provost for students at the University of Calgary, says that the key to staying on the four-year track is academic advising: you’ve got to get an adviser as soon as you get to university. “For some students,” says Tierney, “the first time they see an adviser is in a reactive way, when they’re going into their last year.” General arts and science students are most affected by the problem because they have so much choice. No matter how conscientious the student, the university system is difficult to navigate and making a small mistake that can add a semester can happen to anyone. “Sometimes students feel they do not need any help and then realize late in their program that they should have sought the advice of an adviser earlier,” says Tierney.
The nasty fourth-year surprise that happens to many would-be graduates is precisely the reason Calgary last year created its “graduation guarantee” program. Tierney says the program, which promises to pick up the tab for any courses a student is forced to take after the four-year mark, was conceived in response to undergraduates and advisers who complained that course scheduling conflicts sometimes prevented students from graduating in four years. Advisers, says Tierney, “were reporting how frustrating it is meeting with a student going into their last year and having that student realize they hadn’t taken the prerequisite needed to take the fourth-year course that was only offered in the first semester.”
One of the most common reasons students stretch out their undergraduate degrees is indecision. Olwen Cowan, who is set to graduate in spring 2010 with an education degree from the University of British Columbia, entered university as an English major, then switched to political science, then to sociology before going back to English and, finally, education. She spent five years earning her bachelor’s degree, but when she left high school, Cowan didn’t know what interested her or what she excelled at. “It wasn’t until I went to college,” she says, “that I discovered so many different ideas and beautiful writers. It was mind-blowing.”
I <3 My Teacher
If affairs between faculty and students are wrong, why do they often seem so right?
He was a handsome thirtysomething post-secondary teacher and a musician. I was an undergraduate music student some 10 years his junior, enchanted by his charm and impressed with his musical success. I had never taken one of his classes. But when we bumped into each other in the tight-knit music department where I was working toward a bachelor’s degree, even his most casual acknowledgment caused my heart to pound. During that spring semester, after long hours practising jazz phrases, I regularly dragged my girlfriends to a bar where he performed. His playing was confident and fluid. As I listened, the other patrons and musicians dissolved from the room; he seemed to be performing only for me. I imagined that our eyes, full of lust, were locked as he made perfect, seductive music. My crush was complete.
The gaze I felt upon me as I danced in the crowd of club-goers was not only in my imagination. He had first noticed me the previous summer at a party, after I’d just returned from backpacking in Thailand, tanned and overflowing with stories about elephants and Buddhist monks. Toward the end of the academic year, I showed up alone at one of his gigs and hung around afterwards chatting with the other musicians as they cleared the stage. He offered me a ride home, then invited me for a drink the next evening. And thus our romance began.
That the teacher of my affections—whom I will call Peter for this article—was a faculty member at my school did not discourage me from acting on my attraction. I did not feel that my adoration was being taken advantage of. I considered myself an adult capable of making judgments about my love life. Never did it occur to me that I might be a victim of sexual harassment. Yet now, years later, I realize that in the eyes of administrators and harassment advisers at many universities, my experience would be exactly that—the exploitation of a young female student and an abuse of the trust put in professors.
Student-teacher love has been around since Socrates, but the general consensus now is that teaching must be platonic to be respectable. So should my university have protected me from a relationship that was exploitative by definition? Or, as some scholars argue, does prohibiting the erotic from entering the classroom actually make pedagogy worse?
Bernard is a cheap, arrogant English professor and failed novelist who neglects his more successful writer wife, scoffs at “philistines” and has sex with his vivacious student Lili. His character in the movie The Squid and the Whale is the archetype of the pop culture professor: snobbish, bitter and middle-aged, seething with unrealized ambition and kicking against the dullness of suburban life, he preys on students to get the recognition he no longer commands from peers or family.
Why has this stereotype found such a secure place in the popular imagination? William Deresiewicz, a former English professor at Yale University, considers the question in The American Scholar in a controversial 2007 paper called “Love on campus.” He writes that the concept of “universities as dens of vice, where creepy middle-aged men lie in wait for nubile young women,” arose as women became increasingly visible on campus—first when co-ed colleges became common, then as women asserted their sexuality in the 1960s. The feminist crusade against sexual harassment in the 1980s made universities especially sensitive to faculty conduct since they were among the public institutions most responsive to feminism.
Get free money
Big changes to grant and loan programs could brighten your financial future
You may have got a surprise in the mail this year. Upon opening that fateful letter that told you how much student loan funding you will receive, you might have found yourself the recipient of a non-repayable grant that you never asked for. If the free money seemed to good to be true, fear not: the brand new Canada Student Grant program kicked off in August 2009, and it means you’ll receive extra dough you don’t have to pay back later.
The 2009 fall semester brought big changes to federal student aid—including the new grant program, the scrapping of the Millennium Scholarship Foundation (the previous source of national bursaries and scholarships), and a new Repayment Assistance program to help student loan borrowers who are having trouble repaying their debts after graduation. If you’re one of the 350,000 students who borrow from the government each year, these changes affect you.
Since Aug. 1, when students apply for a national student loan, they are automatically considered for a grant as well. Full-time students deemed to be from low-income families receive an extra $250 per month; those from middle-income families receive an extra $100 per month, paid out at the beginning of each semester. (Information about family income levels, as well as the new grant and loan-repayment schemes, is available at canlearn.ca.)
According to Katherine Giroux-Bougard, national chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students, an important distinction between the previous bursary program and the new grant program is that grant funding is determined according to family income rather than “need” (expenses minus resources). So no matter whether students have savings from their summer job or borrowed money from an uncle, they will get the grant as long as their family’s income is low enough.
Take this example: student A is from a low-income family and, after subtracting his meagre savings from his total university costs, he needs $3,500. He will receive $2,000 in grants and $1,500 in student loans. Student B is also from a low-income family and, having sold her car and worked her butt off during the summer, she needs only $1,400. She will receive a $2,000 grant and won’t have to take out student loans. If students qualify, they get the grant—simple as that.
So you want to be a doctor
Brutal requirements, years of school, long hours—and a guaranteed job
For other professions, including engineer, architect, ad man, teacher or marine biologist, pick up Maclean’s 19th annual rankings issue, available on newsstands now.
What you’ll do
Physicians can be found in any number of health care facilities, from small family practices to high-pressure emergency rooms to research labs. One role that rarely finds its way into television shows like House and ER is that of the doctor as small-business owner: general practitioners spend their time not only seeing patients but also building their practice, managing staff and paying bills.
Is it for you?
Aside from having to be able to stand the sight of blood, doctors need to be empathetic and excellent listeners. Thoughtfully observing patients and picking up on subtle signals is essential to an accurate diagnosis, and all medical schools emphasize the need for strong interpersonal skills. Students considering medicine should also be detail-oriented, analytical, very strong academically—and willing to stay in school for years.
What you need to get in
In order to get into medical school, you have to be an exceptional student. While most schools set their minimum average in the B range, intense competition has pushed entering averages skyward. The University of British Columbia allows applicants with averages above 70 per cent to apply, but its entering class last year had an average of 83 per cent. McGill recommends applicants have a 3.5 GPA (between a B+ and an A-) to be considered competitive. The mean GPA of those accepted at the University of Alberta was 3.8. To apply at most schools, applicants must also write the MCAT exam, complete prerequisite undergraduate courses, submit reference letters and write an essay. The lucky ones who get through the first cut will be invited to an interview.
Schools to consider
There are 17 medical schools in Canada. Most limit the number of out-of-province students, so you’ll have the best shot by applying in your own province. Some schools emphasize academics more than others, so research which school’s application process will best complement your strengths and weaknesses.
Next: What you’ll study
Let’s all play doctor
Do you have what it takes to get through the Multiple Mini Interview?
In the late 1990s, medical faculty at McMaster University in Hamilton were growing increasingly frustrated with the interviews used to evaluate medical school applicants. Even the most conscientious interviewers, it seemed, were biased, and there was often no correlation between the interview process and the subsequent performance of students. “The way we were admitting students was approaching being unethical,” explains Jack Rosenfeld, a professor emeritus in pathology and molecular medicine at McMaster. “The interview process was letting in people who should not have gotten in and excluding people who should have.”
So Rosenfeld and his colleagues proposed a radical new system called the Multiple Mini Interview (MMI). Instead of rattling off prepared responses to typical interview questions, applicants would have to work through 10 to 12 eight-minute stations where they’d respond to carefully scripted actors, tackle ethical dilemmas or try to solve hands-on problems—all under the watchful eyes of a group of interviewers.
The MMI was a success: a 2004 study published in the journal Medical Education found that it succeeded in diluting the effects of interviewer bias and provided valuable insights into an applicant’s abilities. A 2007 follow-up study found significant correlations between MMI results and later performance on clinical clerkships and national licensing exams.
Now, five years after McMaster implemented the MMI—in the face of aggressive resistance from the health care establishment—12 of Canada’s 17 medical schools have adopted the practice. In fact, the MMI that McMaster pioneered has spread to universities in England, Australia and New Zealand.
How applicants are judged remains a closely guarded secret. Medical schools provide little information on how to prepare, and at most universities anyone taking the MMI is required to sign a confidentiality agreement. Med schools are serious about keeping the mystery in how the MMI works; one applicant who snuck into a training session for judges (specific questions were not discussed) was banned from applying for seven years.
Happily, Maclean’s is under no such restrictions. We spoke to medical school faculty, successful and unsuccessful applicants, and people who served as MMI judges to find out what happens during the interview process—and what kind of person med schools are looking for.
Next: How to prepare
The roads to law school
Think you know what makes a lawyer? These law students might change your mind
Not all law students have been preparing for a legal career since realizing their dream as a kid. And not all are bluebloods for whom higher education is a given. In fact, for many, pursuing a law degree is a step up, or a way out—from humble circumstances, a troubled neighbourhood, or a bad job.
Meet three Canadians who overcame significant obstacles to go to law school, surprising those around them—and sometimes even themselves.
Michael Prestwich
University of Alberta
The son of a warehouse worker and a stay-at-home mom, Michael Prestwich as a teenager had no ambitions to go to university. “All I knew about university was it’s where you went to become a teacher and it was really expensive,” he recalls. So in 1989, when Prestwich—by then the father of three daughters and a custodian for the local school district in his northern B.C. hometown of Williams Lake—started taking distance education courses from the University of Waterloo, he had to explain the point of learning about a subject as esoteric as philosophy instead of something more concrete, like, say, welding. “This is for me,” he remembers telling people who asked what he hoped to get out of his studies. “I need to have this degree, and that’s a good enough reason for me.”
It took him more than 15 years to figure out what to do with his education. After taking a few years off from studying, he hit the books again in 1999, took one course at a time and got his philosophy degree in 2006. Diploma in hand, he googled, “What can you do with a philosophy degree?” The Internet answered: “law school.” It was a revelation for Prestwich. “Wow, I could be a lawyer? It was a light-bulb moment.”
Many law schools have special application processes for mature students who may have proved themselves through work experience rather than academics. But Prestwich realized quickly that his experience as a custodian and casual labourer wasn’t going to offer any advantage, so he applied as a regular student. He remembers the day he received his acceptance letter with crystal clarity. “Career wise, I was as dead-end as it gets,” he says. “With the letter, I realized that there is life beyond this. It was pretty wonderful.”
In 2007, at the age of 43, Prestwich moved into residence in Edmonton and entered law school at the University of Alberta—the same year his youngest daughter started university.
Want to be a lawyer? Go down under
If you don’t make the cut in Canada, Bond University wants you
It was 3 a.m. as Warren Beil tried to toss a garbage bag into a dumpster and it burst over his head. At that moment, the Vancouver kitchen manager decided that it was time to explore other career opportunities. “I don’t want to be a chef,” he said to himself. “I think I’m going to go to law school.” It was December 2003, and he had already missed application deadlines at every Canadian university. Yet just a week later Beil, then 23, was on his way to Bond University, a law school in Australia that actively targets and recruits Canadian students.
Five years later, Beil — now completing his articling at a Vancouver law firm — is one of a growing number of future lawyers who are going abroad for their legal education. In 2007, 562 foreign-trained graduates applied to the National Committee on Accreditation, requesting the right to practice in Canada, up from 225 in 1999. If current trends continue, that number could grow by 200 applicants in as few as three years, according to Vern Krishna, a University of Ottawa law professor and former Treasurer of the Law Society of Upper Canada.
Bond is, by far, Canada’s most popular overseas law program. Since its founding in 1987, Australia’s first private university has geared its law program to attract Canadians. More than 140 are currently enrolled—making Bond’s population of Canadian law students almost as large as that of the University of Calgary’s faculty of law. Students meet fellow Canadians through the Canadian Law Students Association and study with visiting profs from the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Manitoba, and the University of Western Ontario. They can even study Canadian constitutional law (Canadian corporate law courses are in the works, too) and get credit from the University of Manitoba. To top it off, it all takes place on a campus in the suburbs of Gold Coast, Queensland, a lush paradise that is a hybrid between Miami Beach and Waikiki.
Victoria Heron, a manager with student recruitment agency AustraLearn, says there are three primary reasons students choose Bond: to get through law school faster (a law degree at Bond takes only two years, not three), to gain international experience—and because they weren’t accepted at a Canadian law school. Eric Colvin, a Bond professor and former dean who used to teach at the University of Saskatchewan, says that two-thirds of graduates return to Canada to practice law and most have no problem finding jobs and articling positions. “The students say that they are able to get employment,” he says. “The fact that they have got their law degree from somewhere like Australia makes them somewhat exotic and interesting creatures and law firms are very willing to see what they’ve got to offer.”
Beil thinks his global outlook gave him an edge when applying for articling positions. “A lot of the Canadian law grads have never worked. They have never done anything,” he says. “In this market, employers just want to see something different. I got out there and saw the world and it makes me way more interesting.” But among his peers at the University of Toronto where he later completed a second law degree, Beil had to fight Bond’s stigma as Last Chance U. “The appearance of Bond to a lot of people in Canada is that the school will let anybody under the sun in,” he says. “People say, ‘You went to Bond because you couldn’t get in anywhere else. You’re not as smart as the rest of us.’ It’s simply not true.”
University of British Columbia-Okanagan – The Cafeteria
Students seem happy enough — perhaps because the next-closest grub is at the Kelowna airport
Considering the entire serving section of this cafeteria could fit into some walk-in closets, UBC-Okanagan’s main dining hall offers a passable variety of chow. In addition to the expected burgers and fries, we had the choice of pizza, semi-made-to-order pasta or stir-fry, the featured entree (turkey dinner was on), pre-made sandwiches and sushi, or a small but fresh-looking salad bar complete with organic alternatives. The students crammed into the compact kitchen during the dinner hour seemed happy enough with the options—perhaps because the closest grub to the isolated campus is at the Kelowna airport.
We steered clear of the shining pre-made sushi after noting an Ontario address on the label and instead ordered small servings of pasta and turkey, which both turned out substantial. The gravy-smothered turkey ($6.99) was good enough, and came with nondescript steamed veggies and surprisingly palatable scalloped potatoes. The tasteless ground beef in my pasta—pre-boiled rotini with rosé sauce for $4.89—seemed like an odd choice in an otherwise acceptable dish. Extra points for real parmesan.
After waiting about 20 minutes while a cook slowly wiped dirty pans and refilled containers with pre-cooked chicken, we were finally presented with a shrimp stir-fry; halal chicken is also available. The red Thai sauce turned out to be the highlight of the dish ($6.99), with its rubbery shrimp and uncooked broccoli and cabbage.
Feasting on a slice of four-cheese pizza ($3.99), I was overcome with a sensation of familiarity. The bready crust and greasy cheese evoked memories of cafeteria meals past. And looking around, I realized that we were all taking in an archetypal dining experience that is reproduced at schools across the continent, by cafeteria conglomerates such as Aramark. The sole selection that lent UBC-O’s offerings distinction was fresh fruit advertised as being from presumably local Gamble Farms, a shout-out to the campus’s Okanagan Valley locale.
Uninspired—but does the job.
Resumé Builders
How to land that dream job by making the most of your time outside the classroom
When she applied for her first job after graduating with an M.B.A., Keturah Leonforde almost erased her volunteer work as a choir director from her resumé. It seemed unrelated to any of the jobs she wanted. But after she scored a gig at a top accounting firm, she was surprised to find out that she owed the position, at least in part, to what she thought irrelevant.
“It was your volunteer experience that set you apart,” Leonforde recalled her new boss explaining. “On paper, your experience was quite comparable and competitive with everyone else, but that volunteer experience was far above and beyond.”
Now she is back at her alma mater, Wilfrid Laurier University—but this time on the other side of the job application game, advising students in her role as a career consultant for graduate and professional programs. And Leonforde, who is also a former recruiter, says that her experience shows that non-academic activities can be as important as academic studies in preparing students for the work world.
“Grades and diplomas are the price of admission these days,” she said. “What [employers are] really concerned about beyond that is: what have you done outside of the classroom?”
During orientation week and frosh week, new students are bombarded with scores of extracurricular options. At the University of Toronto, for instance, you can fill after-school hours with experiences from the Comic Book Club to the Bangladeshi Students’ Association. Many large universities have hundreds of groups and even the smallest schools offer recreation and sports teams, arts groups, student media, faith-based clubs, student government and activist groups, academic clubs, and many, many more.
With all these options and the time limitations of being a student, how can you pick something that will be both enjoyable and time well-spent?
Maurice Fernandas, a senior recruitment manager at Ceridian Canada, says that participation in just about any extracurricular activity can demonstrate whether an applicant is disciplined and has strong time management skills. “Rather than asking, ‘How are your time management skills?’ and hoping the student doesn’t lie to me, I tend to look at where they graduated in their class and what else they did during that time. Were you part of the student union? Were you a varsity athlete? What clubs did you belong to? Did you have a part-time job?”
The obvious choice for students wanting to boost their resumé is an activity related to their career interests.
Student Loans 101
They can be a wise investment. Discover how to get the most out of them.
If you’re a first-year Canadian college or university student, you’re probably not old enough to buy a drink. If you’re under 18, you can’t vote. You can’t get your own credit card. But as early as age 16, you can sign your name to a contract that offers thousands of dollars up front, and, if you read the fine print, promises years’ and even decades’ worth of financial obligations after graduation. It’s called a student loan. Forty per cent of full-time post-secondary students receive government student loans each year. Many don’t understand what they’re getting into—or how, if they’re not careful, they can end up with crippling, life-altering debts.
See also: Student Finance 101
Here’s the big picture: according to the most recent data, 350,000 students borrowed an average of $5,631 in federal loans during the 2005-2006 academic year, a jump of 17 per cent from the year before. The average newly minted bachelor’s degree-holder graduates with over $20,000 in government student loan debt, which will take her 9½ years to pay off.
For many students, attending college or university wouldn’t be possible without student loans. The Canada Student Loan Program (CSLP) offers funding to students whose expenses exceed their resources. In most provinces, when you apply for a CSLP loan, you’ll also automatically be applying for a provincial loan. There are limits on how much you can receive and under what conditions—and the system is designed to supplement your own finances, not cover the entire cost of your education.
The maximum annual amount you can receive varies by province, institution and program; the lifetime maximum limits student loan funding to 340 weeks of study up to $50,000 unless you are a doctoral student or have a permanent disability. In most cases, you will be eligible for a maximum of 60 per cent of what is called your “assessed need” from the Canada Student Loan Program; you may also be eligible for additional funds in provincial loans. To determine your assessed need the CSLP calculates the cost of your tuition, books, housing, food, and other expenses and then subtracts your resources, including savings, assets, part-time work income, parental income, and awards. You can estimate your assessed need with the online calculator at canlearn.ca.
If you’re expecting a loan, have a backup plan. Many students get a nasty surprise when they discover that they won’t be receiving as much funding as they’d hoped for. This can happen for a variety of reasons. For instance, whether or not your parents are helping to support you, parental income matters when applying during the first four years of study. Some students get caught in the middle-class gap: their parents don’t earn enough to help pay for school, but they do earn enough to reduce the size of CSLP loan.
Depending on your financial situation, you may want to consider other forms of debt. Many students get both government loans and a student line of credit from a bank. Lines of credit (LOC) are more flexible than student loans since you can borrow only what you need, when you need it. If your parents co-sign the LOC (which they will likely be required to do), the interest rate on an LOC may be lower than on your student loan.
Noble Quest
The new university that wants to change everything
This is definitely not your typical first-year course. Instead of being packed into a lecture hall along with several hundred strangers, these 20 students are lounging around an oval table in a brand-new classroom and laughing almost hysterically. It’s still September, but their familiarity is already apparent. The room quiets as a generously bearded, scholarly-looking man introduces today’s topic: the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. But instead of lecturing on the finer points of the seminal document himself, David Helfand, a visiting professor from Columbia University, directs the students to present their assigned discussion points, intervening from time to time to keep the conversation moving forward with the occasional question or gentle correction.
The conversation doesn’t need much prodding. Soon the students are jumping in with questions of their own, most of which are surprisingly thoughtful and relevant for a group only three weeks into their academic careers. “What’s the point of all those countries ratifying it if it’s not legally binding?” one young woman asks. Another student: “If we’re all supposedly equal, why give special privileges to disabled or First Nations people?” Another, unembarrassed by her youthful ignorance, admits, “Man, I never even knew what ‘whereas’ meant before yesterday!”
Helfand is a leading astrophysicist and chair of the department of astronomy at Columbia, and yet here he is, teaching a first-year class on human rights at Quest University, a little-known school up a mountain in Squamish, B.C. This class—and everything else at the barely year-old university—is far from ordinary. The student body is tiny. The focus is entirely on undergraduates. Tuition is $24,500 a year. Professors teach exclusively, and do not do research. To emphasize the point, they aren’t even called professors but rather “tutors.” And students don’t take individual courses as at other universities, but instead study in intense, 3½-week-long interdisciplinary modules known as “blocks.” Today’s class is part of the year’s first block, focused on the relationship between humans and nature, covering topics as varied as Jared Diamond’s Collapse, the philosopher Rousseau and the science of rivers. Although Helfand admits that he was initially skeptical of the unorthodox approach, he says it’s been a remarkable success. “So far, every subject works just brilliantly. The level of engagement is something I’ve never witnessed in 30 years of teaching university.”
Quest is Canada’s first non-profit, secular, private university—and its approach is arguably the most radical experiment in Canadian higher education since the great university expansion and transformation of the 1960s. And yet despite the promise in evidence in the classroom, this is an experiment that is not going well. Students aren’t flocking to the place. Enrolment is far below expectations. The university’s leadership has been a revolving door, its mission at times confused. The school’s financial health may be shaky. What does such a rocky start for Canada’s most ambitious and publicized higher education revolution say about the state of undergraduate education in Canada?
Quest is the brainchild of David Strangway, one of Canada’s most experienced academic administrators and a former president of the University of British Columbia. When Strangway retired from UBC in 1997, after 12 years at the helm, he had no intention of settling down to a quiet life in his hometown, the retirement haven of Kelowna. Then aged 62, he had bigger plans. He would build a university according to his idea of what undergraduate education should be: it would avoid graduate studies and research, and it would be private. The model would be the liberal arts colleges of the U.S. northeast, such as Vermont’s Middlebury College. In Strangway’s view, most Canadian universities no longer focus on undergraduates, but have instead become graduate research establishments that also teach undergraduate students.
Welcome to our newest blog!
Welcome to our brand new “In the Classroom” blog, where you can read a diverse group of professors discuss their experiences teaching and attempting to improve undergraduate education.
Welcome to our brand new “In the Classroom” blog, where you can read a diverse group of professors discuss their experiences teaching and attempting to improve undergraduate education.
Windsor admin turns to local media in labour dispute
University administration takes out full page ad to present its position to community
The faculty and library worker’s strike at the University of Windsor has taken a nasty turn this week as the administration of the university turned to the public to win support for their position. This culminated in a full-page ad that was published in local media Wednesday.
The advertisement argues that the strike is about money and reveals details about current faculty pay and the university’s offer. The ad says that currently professors make $132,493 on average, which would be bumped to an average of $150,046 in three years under the university’s offer. According to the memo (which you can view below), the university’s offer would mean for a 14 per cent raise over three years.
The strike has kept 12,000 students out of class since September 17. Hundreds of students showed up at a board of governors meeting Wednesday to demand an end to the strike.
The University of Windsor Faculty Association said that it would not negotiate through the media. Brian Brown, president of the union, told the Windsor Star that the administration has not responded to their requests to get back to the negotiating table. A union statement released yesterday also said that the advertisement misrepresented the dispute and that there are many other issues to negotiate aside from salary.
“It is public money and people have a right to know what efforts we are making to get the negotiations going,” university president Alan Wildeman said, arguing that the university was right in publishing the contract offer.
Below is the University of Windsor advertisement (as published on the university website).
You can read the union’s response HERE.
Kwantlen student union staffer gets death threat
Letter demands Desmond Rodenbour halt union’s lawsuit against past directors
The dispute over allegations of fraud at the Kwantlen Student Association took a nasty turn when a staff person got a death threat in the mail.
Desmond Rodenbour, KSA general manager, received the typed note at his home address on Friday. It warns that if Rodenbour doesn’t “take a stip back [sic]“ that “police well find another foot from Fraser river [sic],” the note reads. The note gives a deadline of ten days, presumably for Rodenbour to stop a lawsuit launched by the student association against four former executives.
The KSA commenced a lawsuit last month against Takhar and four of his former cronies. The Writ of Summons filed with the B.C. Supreme Court alleges that Aaron Singh Takhar, three other former student politicians, and AST Ventures (notice a pattern?) made $140,000 in unsupported payments and entered into $820,000 of unapproved, high risk loans between May 2005 and October 2006.
In an email, Rodenbour wrote, “My family and I are pretty scared but, of course, people of conscience can’t possibly yield to this type of intimidation.” He noted that the stopping the lawsuit is not his decision but that of the KSA.
“This threat just clarifies how morally bankrupt and desperate the people are who were behind the original scandal, and who now – through threat and intimidation – are seeking to get themselves out of the hole they dug,” he said.
The recent lawsuit is just the latest of Takhar’s legal troubles. In May 2007, he was charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking after he and two friends traveling near Vanderhoof, B.C. in two vehicles were pulled over for a routine check. Although Takhar stopped his car, his friends’ SUV — rented in Takhar’s name, according to police, and containing 170 pot plants — fled police and plunged into the Nechako River, killing Daljit Sandhu. According to a forensic audit, Sandhu had received $8,000 in undocumented payments from the KSA. Then in February, Pritpal Singh Virk — who was the second person in the doomed SUV — died in hospital after being shot on a Vancouver street.
