All Posts Tagged With: "Cape Breton University"

Red Bull, Frankenstorm, Pippa, STEM & Toronto Fashion

Alex of Gothenburg/Flickr

1. A Korean student at Cape Breton University is expected to be deported today after an outburst involving threats to a residence adviser. The decision is despite arguments from his lawyer that the incident was the result of drinking too many caffeinated Red Bull energy drinks, reports CBC News. Red Bull may yet give this guy wings—in the form of an airplane back to Asia.

2. For the first time, the fossils of feathered dinosaurs have been found in the Americas—dug up in the Alberta badlands by a Canadian team, reports Maclean’s science scribe Kate Lunau. The bones are from the same ostrich-like dinosaurs that famously appeared in Jurassic Park.

3. Frankenstorm, a.k.a. Hurricane Sandy, could merge with another weather system just in time to do serious damage to Eastern Canada and the U.S. on or before Halloween. Scared yet?

Continue reading What students are talking about today (October 26th edition)

Murderous felines, sexy engineers, burning buses…

Sukanto Debnath/Flickr

Here we give you the 10 stories that Canadian students are talking about today. Like us on Facebook for your daily fix.

1. Nearly one in three U.S. cats is a stone-cold killer, according to the University of Georgia, which spied on more than 60 felines with video cameras. Their favorite victims are lizards, snakes and frogs, followed by small mammals (poor chipmunks!), insects and worms (uh, gross), and finally, birds. Considering the gravity of this news, is it too soon to ask if claw control is the answer?

Continue reading 10 stories students are talking about today

Pettigrew weighs in

Photo by Menno van der Horst on Flickr

With final exams on the way and final grades right behind them, students across the country are wondering where they stand. How much was that mid-term worth? Can I still hand it that essay?

Oh, and what about my attendance grade?

Anyone who’s taught a university course has struggled with the question of attendance grades. The arguments against giving marks for simply showing up are clear. University students are supposed to be adults, and it’s up to them to decide whether they want to be in class or not. Besides, grades should reflect the actual work done in the course: just being there doesn’t mean you’ve learned anything. And giving an attendance grade means taking attendance in each class, and that is boring and time consuming.

Continue reading Should profs give points for showing up?

Pettigrew: The apathy only adds to the excitement

A political poster from CBU

It’s easy to get down on university student elections. They almost seem designed to encourage apathy. After all, the winners typically hold office for only a year, too short a time to make much meaningful change before the next administration takes over.

And even when student leaders are in office, they are generally powerless to effect the changes students really want—particularly lower tuitions which are firmly controlled by senior administration, boards of governors, and provincial governments.

Add to this the fact that most university voters are only going to be around for a short time—not long enough to get much benefit out of any changes that are made—and you have a perfect storm of voter apathy.

Canadian voters in general lament that voter turnout is down near 60 per cent. That number seems huge compared to most student elections like the 11 per cent that’s apparently common at The University of Manitoba.

But low turnout shouldn’t lead us to dismiss student elections altogether, because the very things that make them less than exciting for student voters make them fun for outside observers like me.

Continue reading If only all elections were like student elections

In my opinion, they’re paid well enough already.

Photo by ggbaker on Panoramio

More than 1,000 students at Brandon University have signed a petition asking for their tuition money back because of a faculty strike that caused classes to be cancelled since Oct. 12.

But the Brandon University Student’s Union (BUSU), which has collected the signatures, doesn’t blame the professors—who are striking for the second time in three years—for their three weeks of missed classes. BUSU supports the picketing profs. They agree they’re underpaid.

But are Brandon’s professors really underpaid? More importantly—are professors underpaid in general? It’s a question students and taxpayers should ask—they’re the ones who pay the bills.

Continue reading How much should professors make?

Fees are up 4.3 per cent this fall: Statistics Canada

Photo courtesy of kenteegardin of www.seniorliving.org on Flickr

There tends to be a lot of talk this time of year about how high tuition fees have become. This year, the debate has been especially loud, because it is an election issue in more than one province.

And that was before Statistics Canada revealed today that tuition is up 4.3 per cent over last year to an average of $5,366 for undergraduates. Inflation is estimated at 2.7 per cent, which means tuition costs are growing faster than most prices.

The obvious problem with high fees is that no one likes to pay them. And when the issue is raised by politicians, it’s usually raised in terms of access:  the economically disadvantaged won’t or can’t seek higher education if the price tag is too high. Research has suggested that children from lower-income families are less likely to go to university than richer students, but why that’s the case is a complex mix of social and economic factors, actual cost being just one, according to this study by Statistics Canada. As conservative commentators have noted, even now where tuition is highest, participation rates remain relatively high even among low-income students.

Continue reading Why the tuition problem is worse than you think

Saying goodbye can be tricky at this time of year.

Cape Breton may be the last place in the country where people unabashedly wish you a Merry Christmas at this time of year. Not Happy Holidays, I mean, but actual, full-throated, unironic, “Merry Christmas.”

I hear it a lot at the university because December exams (Christmas exams as we say at CBU, though they do not feel like a gift to the students or the faculty) because the end of the examination period quite clearly marks the last time we will see each other, at least until January, depending on the course. After ten years, it still makes me a bit uncomfortable.

When I was a student in Ontario, I made a point of not saying “Merry Christmas” to my professors because I usually did not know them well enough to presume that they did celebrate Christmas, and I did not want to cause offense. So I usually said, “have a good holiday” which worked for people celebrating Hannukah or Christmas or whatever, but could also be taken to meant the time off between semesters.

My students seem to have no such compunctions, and every time I hear them say “Merry Christmas,” I wonder if they have considered whether I might be, for instance, Jewish. And if I were, wouldn’t “Merry Christmas” be a bit insensitive? I’m pretty sure that they don’t think about that, and if they did, I’m pretty sure they would reply that they wouldn’t be offended by “Happy Hanukkah.” But that’s only because most of us here in Cape Breton are Christians or (like me) descended from those who were. “Happy Hanukkah” doesn’t bother us, because we have never felt marginalized by the domination of Hanukkah in December, or by the domination (and oppression) of Christian culture in general. I wonder how my Jewish colleagues feel about this.

And this is to say nothing of other groups who do not celebrate Christmas such as Muslims, and, perhaps surprisingly, some Christians. As it happens, I do celebrate Christmas as a winter festival, but it makes me uncomfortable when students assume that I do, because I feel like they are making me part of that in-group where it is assumed that everyone has the same values and traditions.

What should you say to your prof as you leave the exam room? Something friendly. “Have a nice break,” or “see you next semester,” or steal my “good holiday” line.

Just not “Merry Christmas.”

Taking a side should come after careful consideration, not instead of it.

The CBU maintenance workers’ strike is less than a day old, and a new villain in the dispute has already emerged in the Facebook statusphere: faculty. Not the strikers for walking out, not the administration for refusing  the requested pay raise, but faculty for not being supportive enough. Why? Because the workers want a 2.9 per cent increase in pay, the same percentage increase that faculty got in their 2009 agreement. How can fat-cat profs pocket their loot (not that cats have pockets, but you get the point) and not support their brothers in arms who want only the same deal?

Underlying this question is the idea that unions should necessarily support one another. It’s called solidarity. Or, as a senior faculty association member put it to me, “the principle of solidarity.” Solidarity says that since the maintenance workers are a union and we are a union, we must necessarily be on their side. Whatever their position, whatever the employer’s position, the principle holds: unions are always right.

This plays well in Cape Breton, where a lifelong Caper once told me “Everybody hates their boss: it’s the pit mentality,” but I’m not buying a ticket to this show. Why not? Because solidarity means not evaluating the particular case on its merits. It means closing one’s mind and taking sides without critically appraising the evidence. That kind of thinking is dangerous in general, and it is anathema to a university. The whole point of my job as a professor is to encourage independent thinking, to get students to question authority and to take a position based on evidence. To side with one side or another only because they are on our side flies in the face of every principle of sound intellectual discourse.

Case in point: the maintenance workers want a 2.9 per cent bump, arguing that if the university can pay faculty more, they can pay others more. Fair enough. But there are reasonable counter-arguments. The most obvious is this: CBU faculty justified that raise based on a comparison with other small Nova Scotia universities. Would it not follow, then, that fair compensation for other CBU employees would be based on what others doing similar jobs at similar institutions make? Are our guys paid less than the guys at Acadia or SMU? I don’t know and I don’t know if anyone has checked, but I would want to know before I took a stand one way or the other.

For all I know, they deserve more than 2.9 per cent. Similarly, the CBUFA signed its agreement when the university was still in the middle of a three-year funding agreement with the province. Now a new agreement is being worked on and all indications are that money will be tighter very soon. So one might reasonably argue that the situation of the two unions is simply not the same. I have it on good authority that other maintenance workers at the university have already settled for what this union has refused; should the other maintenance workers be out fighting for their coworkers to be paid more than they are? That’s a tough question. And that is to say nothing of an even tougher question: are maintenance workers as important to the university as faculty?

None of this is to say that the strikers are wrong. Only that I don’t know if they are or not. Perhaps others could effectively counter my concerns, but that is just my point. If I am  going to take a position at all, I would need to know the facts and think them through, and ask questions and hear answers. Sadly, that kind of thing doesn’t happen much in the context of labour disputes. Lines are drawn, sides are taken, and sneers are leveled at those who question the unquestionable principle of solidarity.

My best argument for tenure? This awesome blog.

The recent faculty unrest at Western and Carleton has turned in large measure around disagreements over the tenure system at those universities, and whenever tenure comes up, the comments from some corners are predictable. Why, people ask, should professors, unlike any other group of employees, get unbreakable contracts for life?

Leaving aside the fact that firing people at the drop of a hat is probably rarer in the non-academic world than people let on, and ignoring the fact that tenure is not an absolute guarantee of infinite employment, there are at least a couple of very good reasons to justify tenure, and they have been well-rehearsed elsewhere. Unlike most workers, university faculty members have to spend at least nine, usually many more years training for their job, and so tenure provides a counterbalance to all that lost income and pension earnings. Some professors don’t land a tenure-track gig til they are in their forties, while high school teachers of a similar age are already planning for retirement.

But the most important and compelling reason is that tenure is part of the academy’s guarantee of academic freedom. This might sound strange to you if your  job is, more or less, completing the tasks that you are given, and either liking it or pretending to. But scholarship demands that professors be free to explore ideas where ever they may lead. Good research cannot be done if the researcher’s first concern is for justifying her position. Moreover, scholars must be confident that pursuing a particular line of research will not result in threats of dismissal because the boss, or the CEO, or the clients, or the government find it offensive, or awkward, or out of line with the thinking of whoever’s feelings they care about.

Though my own research is not especially controversial, my status as a tenured professor allows me to do things that I would not otherwise do. A while back it occurred to me that it would be interesting to write a book about Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, to try to get to the bottom of many of the things that had long troubled me about the play. But then, I thought, what if I do all the work and there is no book to be written? Well, I replied to myself, that’s what tenure is for. As it turns out, it seems like there is a book to be written, and I’m writing it. If I were not tenured, I probably wouldn’t be.

Would you like another instance of what the world would be lacking without tenure? You’re reading it right now. This blog would not exist were I not tenured because it would be too much hassle and too little fun if I had to make sure that nothing in it was going to get me called onto the carpet the next day. In the time I’ve been writing in this space, I have attacked my own professional association, called the sanctity of military service into question, raised concerns about the dominant approach to Native Canadians at universities (including a critique of what goes on at my own university), spoken out against the value of traditional religion, and admitted to laughing at students. This has earned me a fair bit of opprobrium from the public, but no administrator has ever written to me asking me to apologize or “clarify” my position. No one at my august institution has ever suggested I look elsewhere for a job.

They wouldn’t even try. I have tenure.

The O’Neill Report needs to go in a drawer right now.

Nova Scotians have lots to be proud of: stunning natural vistas, rich cultural heritage, and a network of universities that, considering the population, is unmatched in Canada.

That last one is under attack, and the first blast of the trumpet was sounded on Friday.

Tim O’Neill’s long-awaited report on Nova Scotia’s university system is out, and rather than offering ways to sustain or enhance one of the province’s social and economic advantages, it reaches for the same old hammer of economists and managers alike: cut, cut, cut.

O’Neill couches his recommendations in conditional phrases and other weasel words, but the pattern quickly becomes clear: never mind the long term consequences, let’s save money where we can right now. Indeed, that principle, long term pain for short term gain, is specifically invoked in his discussion of the idea of a University of Halifax system, an idea that other experts cite as the best opportunity to really save:

While the concept of a University of Halifax is both more logical and more appealing than that of a University of Nova Scotia, it is too large a consolidation effort to contemplate, at least in the current environment. For a government faced with having to impose fiscal restraint, the transition costs for a merger of six institutions would be far too high to seriously contemplate.

A solution that is logical and effective? Never mind that — there’s an election in a few years.

Though the report pretends its recommended changes are modest, they, could, if fully implemented, and adjusting for the bureaucratese in which the document is written,  include:

1.Merge the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design with Dalhousie

2. Merge the Nova Scotia Agricultural College with Dal and lower funding accordingly.

3. Merge Mount Saint Vincent University with Dal or St Mary’s

4. Make Cape Breton University a technical/transfer college

5. Move Universite Sainte Anne to Halifax

6. Drastically increase tuitions

Modest changes? Hardly. O’Neill’s report would see six institutions change dramatically and affect every single student in the province.

Many of these changes involve mergers which would, one hopes, see most programs remain in tact. The exception is that of Cape Breton University. As a Cape Breton native, O’Neill surely knows that returning higher education on the island to the bad old days of a technical school and a transfer college would be met with fierce opposition, so he pretends not to say it even as he proposes it:

With respect to how to reduce its offerings, CBU could consider eliminating whole programs. An alternative approach would be to eliminate four-year degrees in those areas where it may determine it has more limited capacity to compete. Instead, the first two years of the programs would be offered and arrangements made with other universities to accept the students who have completed these two years into the balance of a four-year degree program. However, this is not a proposal that CBU turn back the clock to its former status as a two-year institution or a junior college. It would still offer degrees, but in a more limited number of areas.

This is classic Orwellian Newspeak. O’Neill  proposes canceling programs, turning programs into 2-year transfer options, and then washes his hands by claiming he does not want to “turn back the clock.” But of course, a college with limited degree options and transfer programs was exactly what Cape Breton had in the early 1970s before the formation of what was then UCCB. So O’Neill doesn’t want to turn back the clock; he just wants to go back in time.

Remember that CBU already offers a limited number of offerings as it is: many programs available as 4-year degrees elsewhere (Physics, Classics, Geography, French, Engineering to name just a few) are not available at CBU. To pretend that CBU could continue to call itself a university with significant program reductions at this point is disingenuous. At best, it would survive as a polytechnic school, though O’Neill probably avoids that word, since something similar was proposed for New Brunswick a few years ago and had to be abandoned after being met with public outrage. If O’Neill is seriously maintaining that there should be no genuine university to serve Nova Scotia’s second largest population centre, which he certainly is, he should say so plainly.

These recommendations are particularly egregious since O’Neill is proposing drastically reducing access to university programs in Nova Scotia while at the same time arguing that they should cost students much more. And this after Nova Scotians have already had their taxes raised, taxes that I thought were to help pay for things like education. And what consultant proposed that tax hike? The very same Tim O’Neill.

What we need are thinkers who understand how important universities are to a province and make policy suggestions accordingly. We need more views like this:

Nova Scotia benefits from a strong university system that delivers quality teaching to its students along with research that enhances the environment for innovation. Universities also improve the economic, social and cultural life of the communities in which they operate. [We need] to identify policy options which ensure the long-term viability of the university sector.

And what enlightened observer said that? That’s the very same Tim O’Neill, before he wrote the report. Apparently O’Neill has a strange idea about what “long term” means and what “viability” means. Of course, he didn’t say long term viability for everyone.

It’s worth noting that the government’s own release on the report ignores the biggest potential changes such as eviscerating CBU. One hopes that this is because they know they are non-starters. Put another way, at some point, Nova Scotia’s NDP are going to have to start acting like New Democrats.

To be sure, my own view is that of one person and is necessarily biased. But if bias is the issue, why is so much weight being placed on the necessarily biased view of one bank executive?

I maintain that smart public policy means investing in the long term and playing to one’s strengths. The Nova Scotia university system is one of the province’s strong points. It should be understood as an indispensable component of future prosperity, not a series of bank accounts to be tidied up or emptied. That approach is nothing to be proud of.