All Posts Tagged With: "education"

Nine per cent drop in Ontario

Photo by cdsessums on Flickr

The Ontario College of Teachers sounded the alarm bells in 2011 about the gap between the number of graduating teachers and the shrinking number of  jobs available. Their survey of new graduates showed 24 per cent were unemployed and only one-third were employed full-time.

John Milloy, the minister in charge, reacted by taking the unprecedented step of capping the number of first-year education students at 9,058.

This week, new statistics show that students got the message. The Ontario University Application Centre reports that provincial teacher’s colleges received 8.9 per cent fewer applicants in 2012.

Some schools saw huge declines. Nipissing University in North Bay, Ont. got 15.8 per cent fewer applications. Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont. got 21.5 per cent fewer applications.

In fact, the total number of applicants—9,311—is only slightly higher than the new cap. But it’s 72 per cent lower than the number of applicants five years ago—in 2007 when there were 16,042.

It’s not just Ontario where jobs are hard to find. The substitute list in Halfiax’s biggest school board had grown to 1,665 teachers in 2011, according to The Chronicle Herald. Last year just 119 teachers retired from the board. Meanwhile, Nova Scotia added 1,000 new teachers.

On the other side of the country, it’s a similar story. The number of applicants to education at the University of British Columbia fell from 688 in 2007 to 543 in 2011—a 21 per cent drop.

And UBC’s teacher’s college has been upfront with their students about the prospects of getting jobs directly out of school. “In 2010, roughly 2,700 new teachers were certified in British Columbia but only about 1,500 new positions were available,” the school admitted in a recent article online.

Still, UBC suggests there are reasons for grads to be hopeful. Certain specialty areas, like music, French, home economics, physics, math, and vocations like technology and cooking are in demand.

There are also plenty of jobs for adventurous graduates in places like Asia and the Middle East.

But most tellingly, UBC will introduce a mandatory non-traditional teaching practicum in 2012, to make their sure students explore other careers that education degrees might lead to.

What started as demonstration of where meat comes from ended with outraged parents and upset kids

In the town of Ratekau, what started as a fifth-grade demonstration of where meat comes from—and how it was prepared in the days before refrigeration—ended with outraged parents, upset kids, and a denouncement from state officials. As part of a curriculum unit on how people lived in the Stone Age, one parent (a farmer) volunteered to slaughter a rabbit for the class. Teachers voted in favour, but apparently didn’t inform parents or the principal. Some fifth-graders launched a petition to save the rabbit, but teachers seem to have ignored them. “One can’t collect signatures against a math test either,” one told the newspaper Lübecker Nachrichten.

In the end, 50 students voluntarily gathered in the school courtyard. They said goodbye to the rabbit; the farmer then hit it with a hammer, slit its throat, gutted and skinned it, and hung it to drain. It was later grilled and consumed. Parents complained, leading the state’s Education Ministry to denounce the slaughter as “educationally problematic.” “My point wasn’t to show children death,” the farmer told Der Spiegel. “We wanted to demonstrate that killing animals involves taking on responsibility.”

Photo: Getty Images

Will education play a role in the campaign?

According to the Toronto Star, education should be a major feature of an election.

Investing in innovation. The Conservatives did a poor job in their anti-recession stimulus package of building for the future. They could have turned the crisis into an opportunity, but their 2009 budget actually cut funding for scientific research (though they later addressed that mistake by creating more research chairs and luring world-class researchers to Canada). But the steps are still tentative: last year’s federal budget increased Ottawa’s spending on R&D by $200 million — while President Barack Obama was upping U.S. spending by $15 billion.

Canada needs to step up dramatically in this area. Our economy now runs on ideas; more and more of us discover, design and create things. Waterloo’s Research in Motion is the poster child for that kind of innovation, but we need much more. What kind of investment in research and higher education do the parties propose to keep the country competitive for the next generation?

While it is unclear whether education and research will play a central role in a campaign, all three parties have introduced, or hinted, at what their education platforms could look like. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff says he plans to focus on access for students and has, in the past, endorsed centralization by creating a dedicated higher education transfer to the provinces, presumably with conditions similar to the Canada Health Act. We could likely expect something similar from the NDP.

And, if the Tory budget, released earlier this week, really is to double as an election platform, their position is to focus on targeted research for the physical, engineering and technological sciences, while mostly limiting support for students through established programs such as the Canada Student Loans and Grants programs. The Tories have, in the past, promoted developing something similar to a dedicated transfer in higher education, largely through working with the provinces to outline priorities and demanding reporting for how transfers are spent, though they have been slow to follow up.

The federal role in post-secondary education has always been a bit murky. Ottawa is involved in student loans, in part, because it holds jurisdiction over the banking sector, but the provinces still retain responsibility for determining a student’s eligibility for loans. Because of the presumed importance of research to economic development, a large federal role in this area could arguably be justified under the trade and commerce power.

In any case, all three parties advocate a visible role for the federal government in this education and research, with the NDP and the Liberals likely to promise a more robust presence for Ottawa, and the Tories likely to take a more incrementalist approach more in line with the constitutional division of powers.

How government cuts threaten Oxford and Cambridge’s unique teaching style

In 1945, Evelyn Waugh famously depicted Oxford in his classic novel Brideshead Revisited as a place where young people spend their days “twittering and fluttering over the cobbles and up the steps, sightseeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup, eating cucumber sandwiches.” Six-and-a-half decades later, things in the whimsical college town are far less civilized. Oxford University students spent much of the fall term staging angry protests, gathering in town by the hundreds to demonstrate against the government. Meanwhile, at its historic rival Cambridge, a 21/2-hour train ride away, students are equally fired up. After a number of boisterous marches in November, about 1,000 students staged an 11-day occupation of a university building. At issue is Britain’s massive new austerity package, which includes an 80 per cent cut to higher education teaching grants by 2012, and a potential tripling of tuition fees. The protests were “a wake-up call,” says Tom, a Cambridge Ph.D. student and one of the occupation organizers, who spoke with Maclean’s on the condition of anonymity. “The things the government are calling for seem extreme,” he says. “And extremely dangerous to education.”

Protests have taken place across Britain. But students at Oxford and Cambridge are motivated by a more pressing fear: that the new cuts will end the centuries-old reign of the institutions collectively called Oxbridge. Some are afraid the famed Oxbridge “tutorial system” is in jeopardy. Since their conception, Oxford and Cambridge have dismissed the traditional lecture system. Instead, undergrads are taught largely through one-on-one “tutorials” with professors. In between the weekly or fortnightly meetings, students work through massive reading lists, and write papers to later discuss with their tutors. “It makes the best use of bright students,” says David Palfreyman, an Oxford tutor and editor of The Oxford Tutorial. Students at the two schools work harder—10 to 15 hours a week more than average students, he says—“because [they] can’t escape in the tutorial system.” And it teaches them to think more creatively; many papers aren’t formally assessed, so students “can be a bit adventurous.”

It certainly attracts some keeners. David Barclay, an Oxford undergrad and president of the student union, says the tutorial system was one of the things that drew him to Oxford from Scotland, where he grew up. “It’s the best way of teaching,” he says. “One-on-one interaction with the best minds in the world.” At a coffee shop near the history department, Barclay recounts some particularly memorable classes, including one on 20th-century political history taught by a sitting member of Parliament. “Tutorials can be pretty scary,” he grinned. “But I love them.”

But will tutorials—and with them, Oxbridge’s international standing—ride the wave of public cuts? “The tutorial system is absolutely wonderful,” says Phil Baty, deputy editor of the London Times Higher Education World University Rankings. “But it is extremely expensive. And the universities have really struggled to maintain it.”

Currently, university tuition in Britain is capped at $5,150. Since it costs far more to teach students one-on-one, Oxford and Cambridge have relied on teaching funds from the government. As well, says Baty, the schools subsidize the system, likely to the tune of $8,000 to $9,000 a year per student.

But come 2012, almost all of the public money for university teaching will be gone. To address the shortfall, the government will allow universities to raise fees—up to $14,000 in as-of-yet-unspecific “exceptional” circumstances. This amounts to a near tripling of tuition. But administrators say the tuition hikes may not be enough. According to Andrew Hamilton, Oxford’s vice-chancellor, it costs $25,000 a year to teach an undergrad at Oxford. “If we believe strongly that the tutorial system is the best way to nurture maturing minds,” says Hamilton, “we are going to have to find ways of making it more financially sustainable.”

Also hurting Oxbridge is the scrapping in 2009 of the Historic Buildings Fund, which was set up to dole out money to preserve the nation’s prized architecture, but has gone disproportionately to keeping Oxford and Cambridge’s buildings well kept. “With [the cut],” says Barclay, “died any acknowledgment, subtle or unsubtle, about the special nature of Oxford and Cambridge in public life in Britain.”

The irony of the precarious position that Oxbridge now finds itself in thanks to government cuts is not lost on critics. Many point out that 70 per cent of the British cabinet was educated at Oxbridge. Twenty per cent of the cabinet and 35 members of the House of Commons took Oxford’s famed philosophy, politics and economics degree, dubbed “the surest ticket to the top” by the BBC. (Graduates include British Prime Minister David Cameron, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, and former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.)

Of course, the tutorial system isn’t all that keeps Oxbridge afloat. But it helps. Its standing in the Times ranking, Baty says, is boosted by its unmatched student-faculty ratio and intense learning environment. It’s also one of the biggest draws for international students, at a time when Britain’s share is declining. Tim Hands, an Oxford headmaster, recently bemoaned: “There is no doubt that parents are increasingly interested in the prestige of an American university as an alternative to a British one. Now the chief barrier, that of cost, looks as though it may disappear.”

Still, some insist the cuts will actually be a step in the right direction: toward privatization. For years, administrators at the two schools have issued barely masked threats to break free from state control, particularly over the issue of tuition caps. “It is surely a mad world,” Oxford chancellor Lord Chris Patten has remarked, “in which parents and grandparents are prepared to shell out tens of thousands of pounds to put their children through private schools to get them into universities, and then object to paying a tuition fee of more than [$4,500] when they are here.” Even some students are sympathetic. One Oxford graduate student who preferred not to be named was adamant: “If students don’t believe their education is worth more than a few thousand pounds, they should think about what they’re doing at university.”

The crux of the problem, says Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, is that Britain has struck an unhappy marriage between state control and market control of higher education. Until 1998, education in Britain was free. Since then, the state has held tuition artificially low. And yet, Britain’s public spending on higher education ranks near the bottom of OECD countries: 0.7 per cent of GDP in 2007, compared to 3.1 per cent in the U.S. and 2.6 per cent in Canada. The result is that top schools must rely heavily on philanthropic donations to maintain their education standards: a system that may not be sustainable.

The government also limits the number of students that universities can accept—largely because every undergraduate, regardless of family income, is entitled to state-subsidized loans. Those loans, says Claire Callender, professor of higher education at University College London, cost the government around £30 for every £100 borrowed. So, in effect, the government must be prepared for all students—even, Callender says, “the kids of millionaires”—to draw on government aid.

The new system may help correct these long-standing ills. Top schools like Oxbridge, which will likely command the maximum $14,000, might see some financial gain. And though tuition will increase for most, children from the lowest-earning families may actually see theirs go down, as subsidies for the poorest students are expanded.

But for Cambridge’s Tom, this higher education experiment is not worth the risk. “I’m afraid,” he says, “that my discipline, in 10 years’ time, will be little more than a finishing school for the rich.” But how best to decide what’s fair? That debate, wrote the Telegraph’s Neil O’Brien last month, sounds like the kind worthy of a “chin-stroking philosophy tutorial at Oxbridge.”

Some startling revelations about the radical nature of the curriculum being taught

An investigation into more than 40 part-time Muslim schools and clubs in the U.K. has uncovered some startling revelations about the radical nature of the curriculum being taught. Materials obtained by the BBC include textbooks that detail the application of sharia law, such as how to chop off a person’s hands and feet if they are caught stealing, along with whether the best punishment for homosexuals who engage in sexual activities is for them to be stoned, burned or thrown off a cliff. Other materials ask children to list the “reprehensible” traits of Jewish people and note that non-believers will end up in “hellfire” when they die.

This isn’t the first instance of extremist undertakings occurring at schools in the U.K. In 2007, at the prestigious King Fahad Academy in west London, one teacher reported that pupils as young as five were being taught from Arabic textbooks that described Jews as “monkeys” and Christians as “pigs.” And this past August, a Muslim women’s group reported that an increasing number of female students at universities were being recruited by their peers for violent endeavours.

To stop the spread of extremist activities and teachings in academia, the government needs to start enforcing the law, says Douglas Murray, director of the London-based think tank Centre for Social Cohesion. “It is already illegal to teach racist, sectarian and bigoted attitudes in schools. If these were neo-Nazi schools, whether private or not, the government would have sent in the police at the start.”

Yet for decades, such hateful literature was largely ignored by civil society and considered just part of Muslim culture, adds Talal Rajab with the counter-extremism organization Quilliam. “Such ideas therefore went unchallenged, creating a climate where extremism could foster.” To curtail the problem, Rajab believes teachers should be heavily scrutinized to ensure that they are not extremists themselves, then equipped with the necessary training to spot the early signs of radicalization among pupils. Unfortunately, many of the Muslim schools are not funded by the state, which makes them difficult to monitor.

If you’re living on a scurvy diet of raisin bread and Stove Top Stuffing, Maclean’s is here to help

Four 21 year-old University of Toronto undergraduate students are gathered around the table in their Woodsworth College residence’s communal kitchen on a recent Friday night inspecting a bounty of fresh vegetables. “Leeks!” shouts Tingting Zhang, a psychology and neuroscience major who could point out the difference between a ganglia and an axon in her sleep, but takes childlike delight in recognizing the ubiquitous vegetable before her roommates do. Karen Sohn, an economics and psychology major, holds a bunch of thin grass-like spears. “Chives?” It’s more of a question than an answer. Aaron Shapland, who studies Middle Eastern civilization and geographical information systems, takes the easy road and correctly identifies the lone red onion. Meanwhile, the bag of baby arugula stumps Dorin Manase, who studies biology and computer science. In fact, they’re all baffled. “Is that leaves?” asks Tingting. “It tastes like nuts.” In an age when all things gastronomic are featured front and centre in television, movies and blogs, you might think this bunch would be more food-savvy. But as Karen pops a yellow-coloured cherry tomato into her mouth, she confesses, “you couldn’t find four people who make more disgusting food.”

Maclean’s is here to help. We’re armed with three simple recipes, for a soup, pasta and mussels. All require just one pot, minimal ingredients and extremely basic kitchen know-how. Our mission is to get these four students eating better fare than Stove Top Stuffing, pasta topped with ketchup, and Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup poured on top of a microwaved chicken breast, “Chicken à la King”: staple student meals from the 1990s. Surely times have changed.

Click here for budget friendly recipes

Nobu Adilman, actor, writer, and one of the hosts of the Food Network’s Food Jammers, who graduated from Halifax’s Dalhousie in 1995, says, “It’s a matter of having only so many minutes in a day. You’ve got so much s–t flying at you and you don’t want to spend all that time on cooking. So you just eat to soak up the booze.”

Most students juggle full course loads, part-time jobs and extracurricular activities, which doesn’t leave a lot of free time to visit farmers’ markets, let alone plan a week’s worth of meals. Luckily, in downtown Toronto there are other options: “I don’t know if you saw the hotdog vendor across the street, but she’s going to be my best friend next week during exams,” says Aaron as he chops an onion. Dorin, who just finished an exam, ate cereal for his last three meals, while Tingting polished off an entire loaf of raisin bread yesterday: “Breakfast, lunch and dinner, just in my room,” she says. “I didn’t even use a plate because I was cramming: I had two assignments due.”

Click here to watch cooking lesson (video)

Bestselling cookbook author Bonnie Stern, who also runs a Toronto cooking school, has a brighter outlook on students’ eating habits. “They’re much more savvy than they used to be because of the Food Network. They love that feeling of making something—the excitement of it. It’s very cool now.” She ought to know: for the last 15 years her school has offered a university survival class for students leaving home for the first time. “They do have a short attention span so we try to just do one class and then pack it full.” One of the most popular recipes is an Asian-inspired salad dressing, named after her daughter Anna, “who went through all of university without eating a salad.”

Not all university students are clueless come dinnertime. Amanda Garbutt, 22, has been preparing meals since her first year at McGill University in 2006. “I would whip up something in the floor’s kitchen and no one else could even fry an egg.” Soon she was teaching her roommate basic kitchen fundamentals. “We’d buy identical ingredients and split the stove in half and she’d take the left side and I would take the right and we’d make identical meals.” Friends started coming over to watch. “They’d bring wine and it became a social event. And then I came up with BYOI, bring your own ingredients, and I would pick a recipe—a risotto, stew or soup—and assign everyone an ingredient to bring and it would end up being very cost-effective, and we’d all take turns stirring and chopping. It was fun.”

April Engelberg, also 22, met Amanda on their first day at McGill and came up with the idea of filming these sessions. The result was The Hot Plate, a show launched through TV McGill, the University’s student-run television station, in the fall of 2008. Engelberg and Garbutt, who graduated this May, are now developing The Hot Plate’s website, which features about a dozen instructional videos for simple dinners, and their cookbook, which comes out this month.

Like Stern, Engelberg has “noticed a massive trend toward students caring more about cooking. It’s cool to say last night I made risotto, and people are always taking pictures of their food and posting them.” Still, Garbutt says, “Some students go for the McGill pizza down the street. ‘Two bucks? I can do that for breakfast, lunch and dinner until I get scurvy.’ I actually know someone who got scurvy from a pure mac and cheese diet.”

Back in the Maclean’s kitchen, so far scurvy-free, we’ve hit a few snags. Tingting discloses that they don’t have a cheese grater. “I usually use a potato peeler,” she says. There’s also no measuring cup—no measuring device of any sort. More surprising is the absence of a colander from the kitchen of this pasta-loving group. “We use our hands,” says Tingting. “It’s not what you’re supposed to do?” When her three roommates cast steely glares in her direction, she adds, “We wash our hands first.” “Welcome to college,” says Aaron.

After they devour the leek and potato soup, which Tingting says “tastes like it’s from a restaurant,” the pasta is successfully drained, sans colander, and tossed simply with extra virgin olive oil, ricotta salata, cherry tomatoes and basil. “Mmm,” they hum. We do a second version with a handful of the arugula mixed in—a clever way to sneak a salad into a main dish. “I like it,” says Dorin, who’d earlier confessed to usually eating just meat. “I was skeptical. But it’s really good.”

The last recipe for curried coconut mussels, courtesy of Chatelaine, requires the most effort out of our three dishes—that is if you consider ripping out a few beards from the shells laborious. Not only are these bovines cheap (Chatelaine’s food editor, Claire Tansey, says they usually cost about two dollars for 250 grams) but they’re also high in zinc, protein and omega-3 fatty acids. Pair them with a buttered baguette and call it dinner.

The four students gather round two kilos of steaming mussels piled high in a stainless steel bowl; not an ideal serving vessel for hot food, but it worked in a pinch. They all like mussels, but this was their first time making them. It’s also the first meal these roommates have shared since moving in together this September, although you’d be hard-pressed to tell: as they dunk their bread into the sauce and devour dinner, they talk and laugh as though this were a typical evening. “We should definitely do this again next Friday night,” says Aaron. Mission accomplished.

How to be a student locavore

Top tips from Canadian local food movement leaders Sarah Elton, author of Locavore, and Nick Saul, executive director of The Stop, a Toronto-based organization that strives to make healthy food available to everyone through community building, cooking, gardening, and food banks.

Get organized: “Students are great at pushing policy forward and getting their administrations to change,” says Elton, food writer and columnist for CBC Radio’s Here and Now in Toronto. She suggests students push to get “the university to have food procurement protocol that guarantees a certain percentage of food comes from local and sustainable farms.” Which is exactly what Local Food Plus, a non-profit organization committed to creating local sustainable food systems, did when they first teamed up with Aramark food services in 2005: a partnership that resulted in 10 per cent of the food served at U of T’s Aramark venues being certified local and sustainable, a figure they hope to increase to 25 per cent this year.

Buy in bulk: “It’s an affordable way of buying local,” says Elton. “Or buy directly from farmers. If a group of people share a purchase, it can ease the financial burden of a one time pay-out.”

Start or join a co-op: That’s what Elton did in university. “Choose one that focuses on buying local and sustainable food. I was able to buy great food at a price I could afford.”

Ask questions: Nick Saul of The Stop says, “Do a bit of a food audit on campus; that could extend to asking, ‘Why do we have these crappy pop machines?’ Or, ‘Why is the cantina serviced by these big bad companies?’ Doing a bit of muckraking in that sector is really important and can make a big change fast.”

Start a cooking collective or garden: “The food movement is pretty robust,” says Saul, “and I can’t imagine it not finding its way onto campuses, whether that’s more individually expressed through a house on campus where everyone is interested in local, organic, sustainable food and they figure out a cooking collective, or they take over a green space and have collective gardens or individual plots—that could easily make a pretty big mark.”

Two decades after his controversial university study, not much has changed in how students are educated

Canadian universities look strikingly different than they did just 20 years ago. For one thing, there are more students populating the hallways and dorm rooms of virtually every institution: since 1995, full-time enrolment has grown by 57 per cent, according to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC). More than half of today’s faculty members were hired within the last 15 years. Technology has enabled new teaching methods and models. And provincial funding for operating budgets has more than doubled since 1995, the AUCC says, while government research funding has increased almost fourfold. With all this fresh blood, new tools and money, you’d think higher education would have changed a lot. But in some ways, argues Dr. Stuart Smith, a long-time observer of the system who was featured in the first-ever Maclean’s ranking issue almost 20 years ago, things look remarkably the same as they did back then.

A medical doctor and psychiatrist by training, Smith has been a politician, a student, a professor and administrator (he now serves on the board of governors at Humber College). In 1991, he penned a controversial report for the AUCC on the state of Canadian universities—and didn’t spare them from criticism. Here, Smith revisits some of his points, and takes a look at how they stack up today.

TEACHING VS. RESEARCH
“One of the crucial questions is whether universities give their students enough practical education to match all the theories they learn,” Smith told Maclean’s 20 years ago. Today, “I think that remains a question,” says Smith, now 72. One of his most talked-about points in 1991 was that universities weren’t doing a good enough job of actually teaching their students, focusing on more prestigious research instead. “Teaching is seriously undervalued at Canadian universities and nothing less than a total recommitment to it is required,” he wrote then. Today, “it hasn’t changed very much,” he says. To get ahead, academics still prioritize research; “those interested in teaching do so at the peril of their career.”

Concordia University finance professor Arshad Ahmad, president of the Society for Teaching & Learning in Higher Education, agrees. Research remains closely tied to “rewards, promotions, and how you get tenure,” he says. And in a Ph.D. program, “you’re taking one course on teaching.”

“The pendulum went too far in the direction of research, at the expense of teaching,” adds Alastair Summerlee, president of the University of Guelph. “We’re in the process of rebalancing that.”

Summerlee and Ahmad agree that universities have three critical roles: teaching, research, and community service. At Guelph, professors don’t just get ahead based on their list of publications. For the past 15 years or so, they can be promoted based on teaching, research, service (anything from working in the community to serving on a government committee), or a combination. (Professors report on their activities in a dossier.) At McGill University, all tenure-track faculty are required to teach, meaning they can’t hide from students in their labs. Guelph and other universities now have teaching support units or centres for learning and teaching services, which provide teachers with new ideas, workshops and demonstrations.

And teaching itself is increasingly looked at as part of traditional scholarship, Ahmad says. There are now literally hundreds of journals devoted to the topic, and an increasing number of awards for good teachers. The 3M National Teaching Fellowships have been around for 25 years now, and have grown immensely in prestige over that time. “I got [the 3M award] in 1992, and almost nobody had heard of it,” Ahmad says. “Today, it’s a different beast. We have lots of applications, and the teachers are celebrated.” (Summerlee is also a 3M recipient.)

CLASS SIZE
Beyond a publish-or-perish mentality, professors are struggling with a “huge increase in students,” Ahmad says. Smith has noticed it, too: classes are increasingly taught by graduate students or teaching assistants, he says. “They’re putting a TA in front of larger and larger classes.”

At the University of Toronto, “growth has been extraordinary,” says president David Naylor. “We had about 42,000 full-time equivalent students in 1991. Now, we have over 75,000” across three campuses, and class size can reach over 1,000. Still, there are ways to cope. Professors have to increasingly rely on new technologies—a good sound system, big screens—to reach their students. Naylor says that, done correctly, it can work. “We see that some of the big classes here get very strong evaluations when they have the right teacher, the right technology and the right teaching assistants,” he says.

If U of T students will take some huge classes, they should take some smaller ones too, the thinking goes. At the downtown campus, roughly 40 per cent of students starting in the arts and sciences faculty will take a seminar with 28 students or less. Smaller, primarily undergraduate schools continue to tout the small classes they can offer: at Cape Breton University, says president John Harker, “we might have a class of 12 to 20 students. We think that’s valuable.”

More women than ever have university degrees, but men still dominate university leadership

When Elizabeth Cannon showed up for her first day of engineering school in 1979, women made up five per cent of the program. Now, as she takes the reins of the University of Calgary, women make up 23 per cent of the school’s future engineers and more than half of the university’s student population, a trend reflected in schools across Canada.

But as Canadians fret over the feminization of lecture halls and ponder affirmative action for males, they seem to have missed the fact that the number of women sitting in the president’s chairs remains stubbornly low. In the fall of 2000, 12 of the 68 leaders of Canadian universities—18 per cent—were female. A decade later, just 13 of 70—19 per cent—are women. The U.S. saw a similar rise and plateau: in 1986, women made up nine per cent of university and college heads; the number grew to 19 per cent in 1998 before growth stalled again, settling at just 23 per cent today. Female professors are being hired in almost equal numbers to men—45 per cent of new full-time teaching positions were awarded to women in 2008—but the upper ranks are still overwhelmingly male. Just 22 per cent of full-time professors are women, although they make up a majority of education departments and nearly half of arts teachers.

Related: Knocking on the glass ceiling

We asked some female university leaders why the growth in female leadership has slowed to almost nothing—and what can be done to fix it. “The fact that we’re getting more women in the academic ranks will increase the number of women at the top,” says Cannon. “But we can’t rely on demographics alone.”

Martha Piper, who oversaw UBC from 1997 to 2006, was surprised to learn that more women aren’t leading our universities: “Wow. My impression was that more women were being appointed than that,” she says. Piper says if women are going to win the top spots, administrations have to actively encourage them. That means identifying women inside the university during succession planning, encouraging them, and hiring from that pool. “Every time there’s a new president, there are these national search teams,” she explains, “I sit on a couple of corporate boards and they make it their job to figure out who the leaders are and how to develop them. Universities need to start cultivating from within.”

Ramona Lumpkin, who started her term as president of Mount Saint Vincent University this fall, encountered one roadblock in her 33-year career that she suspects is holding other women back. It took her awhile to realize that her less assertive and more collaborative leadership style was equal (if different) to the leadership style of her male colleagues. “Not everyone speaks in the bass range,” she says, referring to her soft voice that can get lost in a room full of men. Lumpkin says it will take some recognition on the part of administrations that women often lead differently, in order for them to feel comfortable leading male-heavy groups.

Piper says being a mother kept her from moving up sooner. She was encouraged to apply for a vice-president’s position at the University of Alberta around 1990, but she decided to focus on parenting instead, and wonders how many women give up on advance­ment entirely, due to family pressures. “Probably 80-plus per cent of women decide somewhere mid-career whether they want to throw their hat in the ring to be a head, a dean, or whatever,” says Piper. “You have to ask what they need at that stage of life.”

Sandra Acker, a sociologist with the University of Toronto (who was an associate dean once herself) studies how women succeed and fail in academic administration. In her recent paper, “Gendered games in academic leadership,” Acker profiled four female academic administrators chosen from 31 interviewees. While she notes that not every academic is a mother, she wrote, “the most striking similarity is the way that all four women talked about family and relationship issues affecting their choices.” Indeed, one of the women she studied said it was impossible to live up to the expectations of being both a manager and a mother when her boss was working 85-hour weeks. “I work a lot, but didn’t want to be there on a Friday night at nine o’clock. I have a family,” she told Acker. The man’s family was in another city, allowing him to work late nights and weekends.

Piper believes that universities should recognize that mothers are often the ones driving kids to music lessons and helping with their homework. “We look so much at maternity leave, which is important, but early teenagehood is just as demanding and we don’t have good supports at that period of time,” she explains. Some female academics may need after-school programs for their children, especially considering that highly mobile academics rarely have extended family members living nearby who can babysit, she says.

As Elizabeth Cannon decides how to shape her school’s future, she’s already thought about how to nurture women along the way. “We’ve tried on campus to increase access to quality daycare, to give [mom] academics peace of mind. Being supportive of women who have returned from maternity leave matters too,” says Cannon. “But really, it’s not just tangible things you can do,” she says. “It’s also the culture that you build.”

Photo: Elizabeth Cannon runs the University of Calgary; Ramona Lumpkin (right) runs Mount Saint Vincent

And on their curriculums, as universities Glee-fully cater to song-and-dance wannabes

Thank the Gleeks. First, the fans of the hit TV show Glee made singing and dancing programs cool in high schools everywhere. Now, just as the high-schoolers on Glee will wind up going to the same college, Glee-mania is migrating to real-life universities.

According to Jazz Times magazine, American universities have “noted a sharp rise in student interest and enrolment” in choral and music programs, and some have created new groups to meet the Glee-fuelled demand. Ditto in Canada. Earlier this year, after two students at Carleton University started the school’s first glee club, one of the founders, Emile Scheffel, told the school paper the Charlatan that, “I got, like, 47 comments from people wanting to join in the first two hours.” It could be only a matter of time before Glee mania becomes as ubiquitous in school as it is on TV.

Students and teachers alike say that they’re noticing a Glee-inspired impact on the popularity of that type of performance. James Medeiros, a graduate student in music literature and performance at the University of Western Ontario, says that the show is changing the old perception of musical theatre as “old-fashioned, too over-the-top and generally uncool,” and “making it far more popular” among the younger generation.

“Shows like Glee have made the style accessible.” Mark Sussman, assistant professor at Concordia University, adds that “it has an impact on students’ perception of the culture of the theatre department.”

The show’s power is even felt at universities that never associated themselves with show tunes. Cynthia Ashperger, director of the acting program at Ryerson University, was told by one of the music instructors that more and more students “seem to be singing and dancing. Our focus isn’t on musical theatre, but still he’s getting a lot of students in the music department who can sing and dance really well, and he attributes it to the TV show.” James Crooks, director of the singing program at Bishop’s University in Quebec, notes that the university choir, once dominated by women, “last year had approximately 140 people and of those, about 55 or 60 were guys. So something is going on.”

Glee is just the latest in a string of shows that make performing seem like a viable career choice. Charlene Kulbaba, at the University of Winnipeg’s School of Contemporary Dancers, says there’s been a dramatic rise in enrolment, and that when they ask students why they signed up, “nearly all of them have said it is because of the show So You Think You Can Dance.”

But there’s something special about Glee, because it makes students want to do every possible kind of performance. In the drama department, Ashperger explains, instead of specialization, “the acting students are singing. Dancing not as much, but some of them are.”

This interest in multidisciplinary performing isn’t good news for every theatre department. Gwen Dobie, who teaches theatre at York University, noticed that at their first-year orientation, “quite a few of our students asked me if we have a musical theatre program,” and the problem is that “it isn’t in fact what we specialize in.”

But Glee is helping to paint a picture that’s truer to the demands of modern theatre. For one thing, the show is about people who have to be strong in all aspects of performance, and this may be pretty much the way things are today: “No longer can you just be one thing—singer, dancer or actor,” says George Randolph of Randolph Academy in Toronto. “You’ve got to be excellent in one area and have potential in the other two.”

“Our job is to help kids get into the professional theatre and get them jobs,” adds Kayla Gordon, who has taught acting and musical theatre at the University of Winnipeg, and so it’s helpful that TV is opening up new interests for students “who wouldn’t normally have taken a singing class.”

Glee, then, could be part of a growing trend toward combining theatre disciplines into one. Of course, students may be surprised when they discover, as Medeiros says, that you can’t “be handed the sheet music to a song and perfectly sight-read it while executing flawless and unrehearsed choreography.” But that may just be the first thing drama departments will have to teach the new recruits.