Coleman on Campus

Andre Marin, Ombudsman of Ontario, released a report on the Ontario government’s handling of private career colleges and he held back nothing calling the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities “incompetent.”

Marin uploaded video of his news conference at Queen’s Park today which provides a good summary of the report.

A couple of things jump out at me that raise serious questions related to the Ministry, my thoughts after the video.

1) The complete lack of empathy and ability to think outside of the box to assist the victims of the Ministry’s “incompetence.” The Ministry hires intelligent people, so why do they lose this intelligence when they walk into the MTCU?

2) The complete unwillingness to protect students and fulfill the oversight role of the Ministry. This is not a problem limited to private colleges. We see this Ministry and Minister turning a blind eye to illegal fees at public colleges and universities. I often ask why the Minister’s title includes universities when he doesn’t seem to do anything beyond ribbon cuttings related to them.

3) The Ministry hired the owner of the illegal college after it went belly up. The Ministry was more than willing to assist her, but has done nothing for the students.

4) The most disturbing, for me at least, part of this fiasco is the initial criticism of the Ombudsman by Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities John Milloy. The fact that he criticized the Ombudsman prior to reading the report from Marin is a serious mistake of judgment. Milloy is one of the most intelligent and educated Ministers in the Ontario government. The time is long overdue for him to start showing better judgment and acting as Minister instead of a glorified ribbon-cutter.

The Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities is lurching from slamming report to slamming report. Last year, it was the Auditor General. This year, it is the Ombudsman and Marin is not done investigating the domain of the Ministry.

The Canadian Federation of Students – British Columbia has won its case against transportation company Translink’s advertising restrictions.

This ruling could have implications beyond Translink. The Supreme Court has ruled the Charter of Rights and Freedoms applies to “arms-length” government agencies.

Supreme Court ruling online: http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/news_release/2009/09-07-10.3/09-07-10.3.html

The implications for this could potentially extend to universities. Publicly funded universities like to consider themselves to be “private bodies” and except from provisions of the Charter.

It’s only a matter of time before someone challenges an university’s restrictions and argues the Charter applies to universities.

I look forward to the day when people enjoy the same protections of their freedoms from university officials as they receive from government officials.

The Canadian Federation of Students has voted down another attempt to reform the CFS that would have been a push in right direction, and encouraged the federation to be the fair democratic grassroots organization it claims to be.

The motion, voted on at the group’s semi-annual general meeting, would have imposed the same spending limit on the CFS side as is imposed on the non-CFS side of a membership referendum.

Here’s a quote from the new York Federation of Students president on page 5 of The Fulcrum’s summer edition:

“As far as we’re concerned, in any referendum situation the No side
has an [inherent] advantage because they can break the rules as much as they want without any type of consequence,” said York Federation of Students President Krisna Saravanamuttu, who voted against the motion.

I have a question for Saravanamuttu: Why is this justification for not creating a rule to create fairness between opposing sides in a referendum? If the problem is that the rule isn’t being followed, does this mean we should not have rules in the first place?

Kudos to the graduate students at Concordia for voting in favour of the motion. The CFS has great potential in theory but has sold its soul in favour of power and money, but thankfully, there are some left that still see what could be.

This is the question being raised as Toronto area students’ union consider a request from the president of the University of Toronto Students’ Union to assist in covering the legal costs of Angela Regnier, who participated in the blockade of a major Toronto highway on Mother’s Day.

Regnier was protesting the Sri Lankan government’s offensives against the Tamil Tigers, which resulted in civilians being caught in the middle. On May 10, Tamil protesters marched onto Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway and shut down this vital artery of the city’s transit grid. The protesters placed women and children in front of themselves in order to prevent police from ending their blockade.

Three people were charged with mischief and “interference with property” including Angela Regnier. Regnier works as Executive Director of the University of Toronto Students’ Union, a position she took soon after ending her terms as National Deputy Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students.

The University of Toronto – Mississauga student newspaper The Medium reports UTSU president Sandy Hudson has requested other student unions to assist Regnier in covering her legal costs stemming from her decision to participate in the blockade.

UTSU president Hudson claims the donations are to “support the constitutional rights of individuals to demonstrate peacefully and participate in civil disobedience.”

The University of Toronto – Mississauga Students Union voted to give $1,000 to Regnier’s legal costs.

The question I ask, should students be funding the legal defense of Regnier in this case?

It depends if she was at the blockade officially representing the University of Toronto Students’ Union engaged in an act of “civil disobedience” authorized by the students of the University of Toronto. If she was there as Executive Director of UTSU, the answer is yes; the students of the University of Toronto should be footing the bill. If Regnier was there as a private citizen, I do not see it has the responsibility of students to pay her fees.

What do you think?

I’m giving props to the UVic Martlet for getting linked by the world’s leading higher education publication, The Chronicle of Higher Education with their coverage of SFU’s new FD grade.

Inside Higher Ed, one of two high quality higher education publications in the United States, reported last week on a “new” trend in the Prairies along the United States/Canada border: the granting of domestic/in-state tuition rates to students crossing the border.

First, some context. In the United States, most students crossing state borders are charged significantly higher tuition fees than students staying within their own state borders. While the United States federal government has more influence and provides significantly more direction to universities in exchange for public funds, the “provincial” boundaries in the United States are significantly stronger compared to those in Canada.

The concept that a student from Ontario would be treated any differently than a student from British Columbia at a B.C. university seems absurd to us, but this is taken for granted every day in the United States.

With the exception of Quebec and Nova Scotia, provincial governments don’t care where you come from. As long as you’re from Canada they will charge you the same rates as “in-province” students. (Quebec charges out-of-province students on-par with the average tuition rate in Canada. Nova Scotia charges out-of-province students the highest domestic rate in the country.)

This makes the decision by some United States institutions to grant “in-state” tuition rates to students from nearby states and provinces significant. They are going against the conventions of the American higher education system. While Americans love to play out their national patriotism, they are truly a union of individual states with all the higher education border barriers one would expect of a sovereign nation-state.

In terms of many Canadian students taking up the offer, that remains to be seen. While students can bring Canada Student Loans with them, some provinces do not grant loans to students paying their tuition fees to a foreign institution.

A bunch of us higher ed types on Twitter are debating a standard hashtag for tweets related to Canadian higher education. Feel free to join the discussion.

Right now, I’m favouring #cdnPSE.

Also, I’m nearly completion on a few thoughts I hope to post late tonight. I have to finish some work for my summer job this afternoon before I can return to writing. And, yes, I will offer my thoughts on overseas campuses very soon for those of you emailing me on the topic.

Titus is back: http://www.studentunion.ca/

When I started blogging in 2005, there were only a handful of people involved in campus politics who communicated publicly on the Internet.

Today, this is not the case. This weekend marks a real milestone in student politics; the first real-time open group conversation debate related to a national student lobbying organization meeting.

(Note: People have “tweeted” at previous meetings, this is the first time a real-time large scale discussion has occurred live on Twitter.)

The Canadian Alliance of Student Associations is meeting in Calgary this week. Many of the student politicians are using Twitter to communicate their thoughts. One of the them, Blake Fredrick of the University of British Columbia Alma Mater Society is not a fan of CASA and is making it known on his Twitter feed: www.twitter.com/Blake_Frederick

Frederick has started a discussion with his comments, a discussion which is best followed using the twitter search engine here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Blake_Frederick

You can follow all tweets related to the CASA meeting here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=#casacon

York University students are finally done their academic year with exams finally ending yesterday.

[...More]