Top Stories
Tattoo of new boyfriend’s face goes viral
Victoria student gets lesson in internet celebrity
A University of Victoria student got a midterm lesson on how to become an Internet celebrity after a post on his Facebook wall went viral.
Soon after Austin Knill told his friends that he’d started dating a girl named Sara Hartly, a photo showed up on his wall which showed an extraordinary Valentine’s gift from her—his face inked on her bicep.
The post lit up with comments. Within two days, Knill had received hundreds of Facebook messages. Someone—not Knill, he says—had posted the transcript on sites like Reddit and it had quickly spread as far as Singapore and the U.K.
Teaching an old prof new licks
Psychologist proves that even adults can learn to play guitar
Prof. Gary Marcus (Josh Haner/The New York Times/Redux)
Like a lot of academics in his field, New York University psychology professor Gary Marcus believed the brain acquires certain skills such as language during early critical periods and, after that, the window of opportunity shuts. Children immersed in a new language learn more quickly than adults, according to some studies, but Marcus was beginning to have some doubts about the “critical period” theory.
In his new book, Guitar Zero: the New Musician and the Science of Learning, he decided to test whether an adult with clumsy fingers and no sense of rhythm like himself could pick up the guitar at age 38.
Victim of the Freshman 15? Blame toilet paper.
Common chemical may cause obesity
Photo by followtheseinstructions on Flickr
French fries and pizza might not be the only culprits behind the infamous ‘Freshman 15.’
A new study in PLoS ONE has strengthened the link between bisphenol A (BPA) and weight gain.
It showed that exposure to the chemical results in significantly heightened insulin levels. Over time, increased insulin levels can lead to weight gain and Type 2 diabetes, as the body becomes desensitized to the persistently high concentrations of the hormone.
Modern chemicals with potentially adverse health effects are nothing new—it seems like researchers are warning us about yet another carcinogen every day. But BPA is an especially serious threat for two reasons: it’s nearly everywhere, and even minuscule amounts may impact on your health.
Continue reading Victim of the Freshman 15? Blame toilet paper.
Gunshots at York University
No one injured
Toronto Police announced Monday that they’re investigating gunshots at York University. Police were called to 360 Assiniboine Rd. on Feb. 18 at 6:45 a.m. where a “projectile” had been shot through an apartment door. No one was injured. Police are reviewing security camera footage.
Western hacker apologizes on YouTube
Police will criminally charge Keith Horwood
From keithwilliamh on YouTube
Keith Horwood, a Western University alumnus, admitted to being behind the hacking of the student union’s elections website earlier this week.
Shortly after online voting began Tuesday, students noticed references to Justin Bieber’s haircut, Selena Gomez and the “university erection.”
Horwood will be charged criminally, a campus police official told the Western Gazette.
Police said they had suspected Horwood before he released this video apology on YouTube.
Teens who launched LEGO-man into space talk university
Think they’ll both take engineering? Wrong.
When Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad play with LEGO, they don’t build the usual castles, battleships, or Star Wars X-wings.
The two grade 12 students from Toronto constructed a helium-filled weather balloon and launched a LEGO man holding a Canadian flag into space, more than 24 kilometers up.
The LEGO man’s space adventure was recorded and a GPS device allowed Ho and Muhammad to relocate their plastic astronaut.
In fact, you probably already know this. Their video has more than 2.6 million views on YouTube.
Continue reading Teens who launched LEGO-man into space talk university
At least 41 arrests in Montreal protests
Thousands of students on strike
Photo of Nov. 2011 protest by shahk on Flickr.
Montreal police arrested 37 protesters early Friday morning after they broke into and vandalized a college, the CEGEP du Vieux-Montréal.
“These people may face charges of mischief, assault, and armed aggression against a police officer,” Montreal police spokesperson Daniel Lacoursière told CBC News.
The late-night vandalism came after four arrests and the release of pepper spray on Thursday as protesters blocked access to the Montreal stock exchange and a nearby hotel, reports 680 News.
Thousands of post-secondary students are striking in Quebec. They’re skipping classes in order to protest a tuition hike of $1,625 over five years that begins this fall.
Western University elections sabotaged
Voters asked to choose Justin Bieber’s haircut in “erection”
A hacker at Western University has sabotaged the University Student Council elections by asking voters to pick Justin Bieber’s haircut, suggesting “Selena Gomez is wonderful” and by renaming the process the “University erection,” reports the Western Gazette. It was noticed on Valentine’s Day and online voting was shut down. The vote tallies weren’t hacked, say USC officials, but the two days of polls will be thrown out and a new vote is forthcoming, writes the London Free Press.
It’s time for the Academmys!
Prof. Pettigrew shares his five best university movies ever
From Accepted
It’s awards season again, and amid all the talk of Grammys and Emmys and Oscars, I began to muse about my favourite academically-themed movies. For your consideration, then, I have compiled my nominees for top university movie.
As always, I freely admit that my choices are entirely subjective, but I did give myself two criteria. For one, they had to deal with university-level education, not other levels of schooling (so goodbye, Mr Chips). For another, they had to deal with university instruction in some way, so no movies that are simply set at a university or college (Revenge of the Nerds) and no movies where the professor doesn’t really do much professoring (Indiana Jones). Here, then, is my list.
Want lower tuition? Ask your profs about $97,000 pensions.
Runaway compensation is hurting students
Photo by Tania Liu on Flickr
When students across the country united for the Canadian Federation of Students’ National Day of Action to protest tuition fees on Feb. 1, tiny Brandon University’s student union did their part.
They gathered students, foisted placards and yelled into a megaphone. The message was clear.
Drop fees. Drop fees. Drop fees.
It seems strange then, that last fall when the Brandon University Faculty Association went on strike for the second time in three years, the student union wasn’t so bothered about being asked to pay more for their professors— who make up most of the university’s costs.
Continue reading Want lower tuition? Ask your profs about $97,000 pensions.
Alberta will make student loans easier
Goodbye parental contribution
Aside from promising no tuition, one of the most interesting ideas in the Alberta Liberals’ platform last week was that they would no longer consider parental income when students apply for loans.
In this week’s budget, the Progressive Conservative government beat them too it, with a plan that does away with parental contributions as of Aug. 1. Students will need to contribute a flat rate of just $1,500 to their educations before they’ll be considered eligible for student loans. They’ll no longer be rejected based on savings, part-time job earnings or high parental incomes.
Students have long argued that it’s unfair to deny them loans based on their parents’ incomes. After all, just because your parents earned a certain amount, it doesn’t mean they’ll share it with you.
Parental contributions are required in all provinces because they save governments money. Groups like the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance oppose strict parental contributions. An OUSA study showed that only 51 per cent of students receive money from their parents. How many of the 49 per cent who aren’t getting money from their parents are rejected from student loans because of it?
That’s unknown. What’s known is that many students rejected from loans are forced to work between classes while lower-income peers with loans are able to focus on school work.
The flat contribution wasn’t the only change highlighted this week in Alberta. The PCs are also promising to pay students “completion grants” of up to $2,000 upon graduation.
Economist will suggest scrapping 30 per cent tuition grants
Ontario grapples with deficit
Banking guru Don Drummond will recommend that Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario Liberals scrap the 30 per cent Ontario Tuition Grant that came into effect just last month, reports the Toronto Star. The former TD Bank chief economist will release a 700-page report on Wednesday that will help the Liberals chart a course to paying down Ontario’s $16 billion deficit. The report suggests spending will need to be limited to just $6.3 billion over the next five years or just 0.8 per cent more per year. That’s an enormous task considering that spending has risen from $83.5 billion in 2005-06 to $124 billion last year. The 30 per cent off tuition grant offers roughly 300,000 college and university students a rebate of $730 or $1,600 each. The program costs nearly $500-million per year.
Small schools. Big advantages.
Canada’s northern universities have arrived
The library at Nipissing. By Cole Garside.
From the Maclean’s Student Issue, on sale now.
It’s the time of year when twelfth graders realize that they need to choose a university—and soon. Let the road trips begin.
But if their travels take them to the libraries at the University of Calgary or Guelph, they may stumble over students sitting on the floors. Study space is in short supply.
If they tour residences at Dalhousie or McGill University, they may find themselves in a converted hotel or see bunks stacked in former study spaces. Each school has had room shortages in recent years.
And if the tourists crash classes at Western or Toronto, they may rethink the whole university thing after they see students shouting to professors in 900-seat halls.
Then again, they may just accept the noisy libraries, overstuffed residences and stadium seating. What else would they expect after the population of Canada’s universities grew by 50 per cent in the past 15 years?
Not every campus has been so squeezed. If applicants tour the new library at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ont., they’ll walk past students sprawled on plush benches, deep in concentration under natural light.
If they tour either of Laurentian University’s new residences on its Sudbury, Ont., campus, they’ll find enough space to accommodate not just all first-years who apply, but many second- and third-year students too.
If they check out the pristine classrooms at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) in Prince George, they’ll see most classes have fewer than 25 students.
It’s not that Canada’s small northern campuses haven’t grown too. The difference is these campuses were so small they had plenty of room to grow. A decade ago, they couldn’t afford some basic amenities. But as the big southern schools show their age, Canada’s northern schools have arrived.
“A lot of universities are crowded and suffering from huge deferred maintenance,” says Ken Steele, a post-secondary marketing guru with consultancy Academica Group. “They have a lot of older infrastructure, and students are noticing.”
There is, of course, such a thing as being too new. In 2002, Nipissing was 10 years old and students joked that it was just like a high school; with a population of 1,960 full-time students and a one-building campus of brown brick and lockers, it felt like one. A school that size couldn’t afford much. But as the school approaches 4,000 full-time students, it’s got enough per-student government funding to afford its $25-million library, a new sports facility, and double the amount of lab space that it started with.
Lesley Lovett-Doust, Nipissing’s president, says the institution’s relative youth has also allowed it to leapfrog over its peers. “The old schools are retrofitting old libraries, sending tonnes of books into storage to try to open up their libraries for collaboration,” she says. “We skipped that phase.”
Ashley Ryan, a 2008 science graduate, now works as a lab technologist at Nipissing. “Even in the past four years, I’ve noticed a huge change,” she says. Recently, the school purchased an electron microscope, a huge benefit for Ryan, who took up microscope photography as a hobby. It also helps young students, because Nipissing is small enough that they have access to the equipment.
It’s not just per-student funding that has helped these schools flourish. Philanthropists now see them as a good bet too. Nipissing received a $15-million donation in 2010. Laurentian, which has added $140 million in new buildings since 2005, attracted a $10-million gift for its engineering school in late 2011.
“There aren’t a lot of $10-million-plus donations out there,” says Steele, the marketer. “Ten million dollars added to a smaller institution makes a bigger difference than at a larger institution.”
Dominic Giroux, the president of Laurentian, agrees. Big urban schools pay hefty prices for land. Some, like the University of Ottawa, struggle to find land at all. Giroux has plenty at his disposal. “That’s just one of the advantages of having a 750-acre campus,” he says.
New facilities, in turn, attract new researchers, like Kevin Hutchings, the $500,000 Canada Research Chair in literature, culture and environmental studies at UNBC (pop. 3,700).
When he was offered the job in 2000, he was taken by the physical beauty of the then-six-year-old campus. His peers at McMaster and Western warned him against working at an unproven institution. But now, 18 years after its founding, UNBC is proven: it’s No. 1 in total research dollars among primarily undergraduate schools in the 2011 Maclean’s rankings.
Since Hutchings arrived, he’s watched an interdisciplinary research community bloom.
In 2011, UNBC profs earned $1.9 million more in prestigious new Canada Research Chair funding. Simon Fraser, a school six times larger, added $2.4 million. It’s evidence of how schools like UNBC, Nipissing and Laurentian are the poor cousins no more.
As Ken Steele puts it, “the upstarts now have the advantage.”
McGill occupation ends with new protocol
Five-day protest over student fees for radio station, QPIRG
Photo by shahk on Flickr
A five-day occupation of the James Administration Building at McGill ended Sunday when city police gave the remaining nine protesters five minutes to collect their belongings before they were read an eviction notice and then booted from campus.
Then, the university released a new protocol for “demonstrations, protests and occupations.”
In a release, Provost Anthony Masi noted that McGill is already “embarking on a comprehensive consultation process and dialogue into the ways in which freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and peaceful assembly can be protected as appropriate means of protest and dissent.”
Studying abroad? You’ll want to read this.
Returning can be fraught with bureaucratic hurdles
From the Maclean’s Student Issue, on sale now.
Story by Ian Bethune.
Two years ago, as a 21-year-old fine arts student at York University, I embarked on one of the great times of my life, a third-year overseas exchange at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. I went into this concentrating on the expected hurdles—booking flights, arranging lodging, selecting classes, finding my footing on the other side of the world—and discovered the really hard part took place long before I stepped on the plane. Wandering wide-eyed about Adelaide was nothing compared with the uncoordinated demands of two Byzantine university bureaucracies.
But I survived the existential struggle with the paperwork and thrived on the exchange, an unforgettable experience I’d recommend to anyone. I also developed the laughable idea that going home would be—new Australian phrase I learned—“a piece of piss.” After all, what could be difficult about returning to my home and familiar native land?
Students continue to occupy McGill building
Protesters want radio station and QPIRG fees reinstated
It’s day three of an occupation of the sixth floor of the James Administration building at McGill.
It appears protesters didn’t plan for it to last so long. On Wednesday night, occupiers sent down a bucket on a rope to try and haul up food from supporters below. Security guards cut the rope.
Doug Sweet, Director of Media Relations for McGill, told the Montreal Gazette that, “hauling stuff up by rope to the sixth floor is potentially dangerous,” and could potentially “break windows.”
Students took over the building on Tuesday when about 60 showed up to protest the administration’s decision to not honour a referendum over the continuation of funding for two campus groups. Most protesters were in the lobby of the building and have since left.
The Quebec Public Interest Research Group, a social justice organization, and CKUT, a campus radio station, were funded mainly by student fees. Two-thirds of voters appeared to support continued student funding of QPIRG in the Fall 2011 vote, but the university’s deputy provost for student life and learning, Morton Mendelson, invalidated the question due to confusing wording.
In addition to reinstating student funding to both groups, protesters want Mendelson to be fired or to resign. They’re calling their protest Mendelson’s “surprise resignation party.” Twitter is abuzz about the “party” with the hashtag #6party. A blog claims to offer “communiques from the sixth floor.”
McGill Daily published a letter today from QPIRG that thanks protesters and demands that their funding continue. However, they will not run a question about funding in the upcoming referendum.
CKUT, on the other hand, will not only seek affirmation of funding, but will ask students to make their fee mandatory. If passed, students who don’t support the station will not be able to opt-out.
Public Interest Research Groups have been controversial lately. Conservative students don’t want their student fees funding causes of the left, such as Israel Apartheid Week and anti-capitalism initiatives. Queen’s University students recently voted to stop collecting fees for a PIRG.
Lazaridis donates $21 million to Waterloo
RIM founder’s gifts now total $123 million
The founders of Research In Motion (RIM), the Waterloo, Ont. based produce of BlackBerry products, have fallen. But one of them, Mike Lazaridis, is ready to make a new investment. He and his wife Ophelia pledged $21 million to the University of Waterloo on Wednesday. “History has shown us that a relatively small investment in fundamental research in physics and in science today can lead to huge innovation tomorrow,” Lazaridis said. The money will fund chairs in condensed matter and astrophysics, a new science building and scholarships for mathematics students. The couple have donated $123 million in total, after funding the Institute for Quantum Computing and the soon-to-open Quantum Nano Centre. To get a sense of how big those donations are, consider that only one gift to a Canadian university exceeded $20 million last year, reports Academica.
Marjorie Johnson, top of her class
Celebrating Canada’s 3M Teaching Fellows
Photo by Andrew Tolson
Marjorie Johnson is just one of the ten 3M Teaching Fellows announced in the annual Maclean’s student issue, on sale this week. To see who the other nine winners are, click here.
Story by Gustavo Vieira.
A soothing guitar ballad is piped through the sound system, muffling the chatter of a few dozen second-year kinesiology students; they’re waiting for anatomy class to begin at an auditorium at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont. A slide show reviewing the body parts studied in previous classes plays on a loop: the medial pterygoid, trunks of brachial plexus, the maxillary artery, and so on. Two minutes later, the lights dim; a clip from Grey’s Anatomy appears, depicting a blood-gushing patient being treated by a frazzled young medical resident struggling to contain the bleeding. The students go silent. It’s time for Marjorie Johnson to start her lecture on the intricate anatomy of the human neck. Not before she pulls up a photo of Steve Nash, the Phoenix Suns superstar, his neck’s veins, muscles and nerves bulging beneath his skin as he protects the ball from an opponent at a basketball game. “He’s one of my heroes,” Johnson later confesses, “so they see Steve Nash a lot.”
The Canadian University Survey Consortium’s 2011 results
Survey shows student satisfaction at 25 schools
The annual CUSC survey measures student satisfaction. In 2011, a questionnaire was issued to a random sample of approximately 1,000 undergraduates at each of 25 participating schools. In total, more than 8,500 students responded to questions about everything from academics to support services. Here are the results you’ll want to see if you’re considering one of these schools.
Continue reading The Canadian University Survey Consortium’s 2011 results
Stop calling these students mentally ill
Anxiety and depression need to be reclassified
Photo by Sander van der Wel on Flickr
Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about efforts to improve the services available to students related to their psychological well-being on campuses. University presidents met for a workshop recently, and Queen’s University welcomed a new $1-million chair to study stigma.
Now, I am no mental health professional but I do know a few things about universities and have some experience with anxiety and depression.
If it were up to me, those trying to improve things on Canadian campuses would keep one crucial principle in mind: be careful how you talk about it.
First, let’s call depression and anxiety something other than “mental illness.”
