All Posts Tagged With: "Fanshawe College"
Crime and the new punishment for university students
Dalhousie takes kinder approach if students are arrested
(Photo: Peter Dench/Getty Images)
From Macleans.ca
University offers most students their first real taste of freedom from home and family, including the freedom to do stupid and illegal things. Even good students can become drunken criminals.
This year, Dalhousie University unveiled a restorative justice program for students charged with relatively minor criminal offences. The university hopes to address crime without large fines or the prospect of a criminal record. It is Canada’s most ambitious effort by a university to get involved in criminal justice for its students. Other schools seem less keen to follow. Should universities act when students commit crimes off campus?
Continue reading Crime and the new punishment for university students
Battling the binge
Inside the war against risky drinking on campus
Mark Peterson/Redux
From the 2013 Maclean’s University Rankings
When outraged members of Pi Kappa Alpha at the University of Tennessee called a news conference in September to protest the suspension of their fraternity due to allegations of strange and excessive alcohol abuse, two words sprang to mind: Animal House. The news conference, immortalized on YouTube, is so unintentionally bizarre that it could be mistaken for an outtake from the subversive 1978 frat-boy comedy that launched a million toga parties and countless hangovers. The press conference—featuring a bow-tied, dead-serious Southern lawyer backed by an angelic legion of fraternity members in their Sunday suits—was called to refute allegations that one of their own, 20-year-old Alexander P. Broughton, had indulged in “butt-chugging” massive quantities of wine. While there was no denying that Broughton was hospitalized with alcohol poisoning after a night of fraternity drinking games, the idea of an alcohol enema is “repulsive” to Broughton, his lawyer said. “He is a straight man.”
The perils of drinking on Canadian campuses
A timeline of injuries, deaths, scandals and crackdowns
Graphic by Jessie Willms. Text by Josh Dehaas.
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Police warn pot smokers
Drug laws will be enforced on 4/20
Photo by JosephAdams on Flickr
April 20 (or “4/20″) is an annual holy day for marijuana smokers. It’s also a day that’s conveniently close to the end of exams at many Canadian universities, making campuses a natural gathering spot for pot-fueled celebrations.
In many cases, police ignore the illegal substances—it’s not as though pot smoking is likely to lead to riots. But this year, police in one Canadian university town, London, Ont., are reminding people that possession of any quantity of marijuana is illegal. “The London Police Service will enforce the law on this date as they would throughout the year,” they said in a release.
London, Ont. mulls new police powers
May import “nuisance party” bylaw
Photo by Brian Lane Winfield Moore on Flickr
Following the St. Patrick’s Day riot near Fanshawe College, The City of London, Ont. is considering importing a U.S. bylaw that allows police to break up “nuisance parties” in private homes.
City Solicitor James Barber told Metro News he will present the case for such a law to council. College towns East Lansing, Mich., Athens, Ohio and Bowling Green, Ohio already have such laws.
The Bowling Green law was unsuccessfully challenged in court on the grounds that it inhibits free assembly, among other things. That legal question may, in fact, be the reason such bylaws aren’t already common.
Fanshawe College suspends eight
St. Patrick’s Day riot occurred in college student enclave
Still from video by BetaJester on YouTube
After the St. Patrick’s Day riots in London, Ont. caused an estimated $100,000 damage and led to at least 13 arrests, the president of nearby Fanshawe College announced this morning that his school has begun its own investigation into student conduct.
Fanshawe has already temporarily suspended eight students who are believed to have been involved, president Howard Rundle told reporters on Monday. Fanshawe’s Code of Conduct allows for academic penalties when off-campus actions might impact the health and safety of others.
“This is unacceptable. It will not be tolerated. It will not be excused. And we will not have those people as students of this college,” Rundle said.
More than 100 thefts near U. of Western Ontario
Police warn students
Dennis Rivest by MyFanshawe on YouTube
Students in London, Ont. are being warned by police to secure their doors, windows, and patio doors due to an increased number of break-and-enters near student housing. Western News reports that more than 100 have occurred near the University of Western Ontario in recent months.
London Police officer Dennis Rivest held a press conference at Fanshawe College recently to offer more information. He called the thefts “crimes of opportunity” and believes that thieves may be walking from residence to residence, looking for easy ways to break in and steal electronics. He says students should not only secure their residences better, but should record serial numbers for computers, cameras, TVs and tablets.
Literacy is finally being addressed
More than frustrating profs, literacy rates affect some students’ ability to graduate
Colleges in Ontario are finally taking literacy seriously. Far from simply complaining that some students are entering college and university with low writing and reading skills, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario teamed up with Fanshawe College to see how this was impacting students.
Some students, they found, are “at risk of not completing their programs, due to deficits in language proficiency.”
In a knowledge-based, increasingly technically-oriented job market, these students aren’t completing their education not because they lack the intelligence, but because they lack the language skills of their peers.
And it’s not an uncommon problem. According to research by Canada’s National Adult Literacy Database, more than one in five Canadians has very low literacy skills. These people, though, are most likely to be older than 55 years or don’t speak French or English as their first language.
From a post-secondary education perspective, that largely means second career students and international students are most likely to see English literacy as their primary barrier to education.
“College-level [literacy] includes the ability to communicate in a clear, organized manner and with supporting evidence and examples,” study co-author Roger Fisher told Interrobang.
But depending on where these students go to school, the level of support varies widely. The HEQCO report states:
“Twenty-nine per cent of colleges relied solely on support services such as learning centres; 25 per cent on for-credit remedial, upgrading or foundations “transcript” courses that do not count toward program completion; 29 per cent on for-credit modified communications courses that do count toward degree completion; and 17 per cent relied on a combination of transcript and modified courses.”
HEQCO should be commended for their conclusions, which call for “a consistent approach to address the language needs of all students enrolled in Ontario’s colleges.”
That consistent approach, they suggest, is a mandatory literacy test to all incoming students. The bottom 10-15 per cent would be asked to take remedial classes to help them catch up to their peers. The tests would have no bearing on overall admittance, since they would be administered only after the students had been offered a position at the college.
These remedial classes, though, would ideally serve to put everyone on the same footing before anyone loses their balance. It’s a noble effort, and colleges across Ontario should be clamoring to take part in the growing program.
“As a follow-up to this project, HEQCO has recently commissioned a group of five Ontario colleges, led by Mohawk College, to evaluate whether their remedial courses improve the development of language skills and overall student outcomes,” the study concluded.
Those five should be applauded for their efforts to help students in every way possible.
Town beats gown
Supreme court rules against Oshawa students
It’s after midnight on a Friday in November and two people are sitting on the porch of a house in a college town in Pennsylvania, waiting. They don’t have to wait long. After five minutes a group of loud drunk students stumble by, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are passing bedroom windows long after most people’s bedtime. Five minutes later another group passes, and a student throws a pizza plate onto a front lawn. A little later, at the sound of a noisy crash, our observers rush to the back alley and find two students dropkicking metal trashcans.
The observers have just returned to the porch when a loud scraping begins coming from the alley, a sound which one observer—who lives in the house—immediately identifies as someone dragging a street sign. Sure enough, upon investigation, they discover two men with a seven-foot stop sign. When they return to the front yard, three young women are crouched in a bush, their skirts hiked up, peeing. From the moment the two people began their observation to when they chased the pissing students away, only 35 minutes have passed.
To most people living in most neighbourhoods, this scene probably seems exceptional. Radio producers Sarah Koenig, who lives in the house, and Ira Glass, recorded and broadcast their encounters with drunken students on the show This American Life (which happens to be my favourite podcast), which took place in a town called State College where Pennsylvania State University is located. And while Penn State was voted America’s number one party school this year in online surveys conducted by the Princeton Review, residents living near university campuses from Kamloops to Antigonish deal with similar late night philandering and “town-and-gown” conflicts, a term coined by academics. These conflicts have been plaguing communities all over the world as long as universities have existed—one of the earliest documented when a three-day riot broke out in Oxford in 1355 over a dispute about beer, and left 62 people dead.
Canada, of course, has its fair share of town-and-gown conflicts. Perhaps the most famous party school north of the 49th is Queen’s University, where in 2005 the annual homecoming party turned into a full-scale riot; outnumbered police were pelted with beer bottles, a car was flipped and set on fire and there was extensive vandalism. This year, the homecoming party was cancelled.
College presidents: gaining on their more highly paid university peers
The pay of college executives still trails that of universities, but they’re catching up
Colleges are often unfairly seen as the second tier of the higher education universe—and, as we noted last year, that extends to the compensation of college administrators, who have long been paid substantially less than their university peers
So did anything change in 2008? Yes. Ontario’s Sunshine List salary disclosure was released today, and the tally of Ontario college employees earning more than $100,000 (the threshold for inclusion on the list) is, as always, much shorter than the count for universities. However, the number of college senior administrators earning more than $200,000 has grown by nearly two-thirds, and several highly paid college heads are taking home university-president-sized paychecks.
The highest paid college president in Ontario is Frederick Miner of Seneca College. With a salary of $406,000 and taxable benefits worth $5,000, his compensation is enough to put him squarely in the upper tier of university administrators. Miner’s salary is more than that paid to the president of the largest university in the country, David Naylor of the University of Toronto. (The latter’s salary was $380,000).
Conestoga College president John Tibbits was paid $387,000. That’s more than the president of neighbouring Wilfrid Laurier University. (The president of the other university just down the road, the University of Waterloo was however paid about $101,000 more).
The presidents of five other Ontario colleges — Humber, Sheridan, George Brown, Mohawk and Algonquin — earned over $300,000. Their pay is below that awarded the presidents of large Ontario universities, but in line with the compensation given to presidents of smaller Ontario universities. For example, Dennis Mock, president of Nipissing University, Ontario’s second-smallest public university, was paid $271,000. Bonnie Patterson, president of Brock, last year received total compensation of $338,000.
The pay gap between colleges and universities appears to be larger in Western Canada. According to BC public sector salary disclosure, as compiled by the Vancouver Sun, there were 182 employees of the BC university and college system earning more than $200,000. (Data is for either 2006-07 or 2007-08). Of those 182 highly paid individuals, only two were from the college or institute system: the acting and outgoing presidents of BCIT. (What’s more, hardly any of the 182 members of the over $200K club came from the former university college system; almost all worked at one of the province’s four traditional universities, in particular UBC).
London police exonerated in orientation week melee
Violent confrontation left first-year student with fractured face
According to Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, two London Police Service officers did not commit a criminal offence in their arrest of a Fanshawe College student during orientation week last September.
Also read: Police brutality in London?
SIU investigating after 18-year-old student seriously injured by police
The first-year student was intoxicated in a public place with a can of beer in his hand when officers exercised their legal authority under the Liquor Licence Act to arrest the teenager because he refused to identify himself,” says SIU Director Ian Scott.
“He fought with both officers, who meted out a series of punches and knee strikes in order to subdue and take him into custody.”
On Sept. 6, 2008, at approximately 3 a.m., the unidentified 18-year-old student suffered a fractured orbital bone under his left eye during the confrontation.
Once it became apparent that serious injury had occurred, the police informed the SIU of the incident. The student was treated for the injury at a hospital and later released.
“Given the nature of this volatile and dynamic situation, the force used by the subject officers was not excessive under the circumstances,” says Scott.
The SIU generally investigates cases of serious injuries and deaths involving Ontario police.
The unit says that during its investigation, they interviewed five police officers and 15 civilian witnesses, the majority of whom were students, and reviewed the London Police Service’s use-of-force policy, communications tapes and incident report. They also say they reviewed police and private security video footage of the scene, in addition to A-Channel News footage of the rowdy orientation week.
London to make housing bylaw city-wide
Fanshawe’s hands are tied
Today, the London Free Press ran an article explaining why Fanshawe College cannot act directly against students who misbehave off-campus. As everyone knows, I completely disagree with any attempt to extend “codes of conduct” against students to off-campus activities. It’s bad enough we lose our civil rights when we step on a post-secondary campus; we [...]
Today, the London Free Press ran an article explaining why Fanshawe College cannot act directly against students who misbehave off-campus.
As everyone knows, I completely disagree with any attempt to extend “codes of conduct” against students to off-campus activities.
It’s bad enough we lose our civil rights when we step on a post-secondary campus; we shouldn’t lose the protections entitled to us as citizens elsewhere because we’ve decided to pursue higher education.
The article talks about Fanshawe officials “doing the next-best thing: They’ve stretched their code-of-conduct rules so that if a student’s off-campus behaviour is deemed to pose a potential threat to those on campus, they can expel that student.”
The next line states that two students have already been suspended.
One detail that needs to be clarified: those two students are suspended for actions on campus. They are presently facing charges related to an alleged sexual assault.
Fanshawe’s statements about these suspensions have been intentionally vague; it seems they want people to have the impression that the college is acting against off-campus behaviour. They have not.
Nor should they; there are laws on the books to deal with the continuing incidents around the college. If the students are engaging in criminal behaviour, they should be arrested for that behaviour. They should not get any lighter or tougher treatment based on their student status.
Fanshawe should be clear in this regard: the college is responsible for students when they are on-campus; society is responsible for citizens when they are off-campus.
