All Posts Tagged With: "Laurentian University"

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.”

Three killed in crash

Three Laurentian University students died and a fourth was sent to hospital after a collision on a cold Highway 17 near Hagar, Ont. on Tuesday, reports CBC News. Renfrew, Ont. teenagers Keegan Melville, Zabrina Rekowski and Hillary Afelskie died when their Ford minivan collided head on with a Jeep carrying two senior citizens. One passenger, Emily Olmstead, is in hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Police are investigating but they say weather likely wasn’t a factor.

Pledges millions for new campus

The City of Barrie approved a preliminary motion Monday to ask Ontario’s government for the province’s next university campus, reports the Barrie Examiner. City council will also commit $14-million toward a new campus of Laurentian University that would cost roughly $60-million to build. Laurentian itself has committed $14-million. The proposed campus would house 3,000 students and open in 2020. Barrie is estimated to have grown by one-third in the past decade to 135,000 people according to the City, with 191,000 in the Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) in 2010, according to Statistics Canada. That makes it the biggest CMA in Ontario, by far, without a university. The Ontario Liberals promised three new campuses during the October election campaign. Ontario will need to add between 50,000 and 104,000 new undergraduates seats by 2025 to meet the growing demand for degrees, according to the new book Academic Reform.

Men are attracted to obstetrics, so why not midwifery?

When Otis Kryzanauskas was four years old, he didn’t want to be an astronaut, a police officer or a firefighter.

After witnessing his younger brother’s birth at home — and cutting the cord — he decided he would one day be a midwife.

Next spring, he’ll be the first male graduate of the Bachelor of Midwifery program at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.

Kryzanauskas, who has participated in almost 100 births already, believes that he may be the first male midwife to graduate anywhere in Canada — ever.

Why are there so few men in this fast-growing field?

Midwives provide primary care to women and their babies during pregnancy, labour, birth and the postpartum period. According to the Canadian Women’s Health Network, midwives spend an average of 20 to 30 minutes more per appointment with their patients than other medical professionals do. That could explain why demand for midwifery services is increasing. Rare two decades ago, over the course of 2010, there were 14,000 midwife-attended births in Canada.

Continue reading Meet McMaster’s first male midwife

Learning at these three schools happens outside the lecture hall

Concordia University

Like Rodney Dangerfield and rolling in the mud, Concordia University has a tendency to be underappreciated. Long considered the red-headed stepchild of Montreal’s two English universities, it is often lost in the ivy-tinged shadow of McGill. Many wear their alma mater’s scruffier-than-thou reputation on their sleeve. “Concordia is to McGill what the United Church is to Catholicism,” says one-time contemporary dance major Amy Blackmore. Still, the university has consistently found itself on the wrong end of Maclean’s rankings.

But while the numbers may show the 30,000-student university has certain challenges, they obscure many of the innovative aspects of a Concordia education that attract people like Amy Blackmore. Case in point: the faculty of fine arts, based in the glass-and-steel confines of the university’s new Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex. By design, the roughly 3,700 fine arts students live and work in one of Montreal’s busiest strips—from which students and faculty alike draw inspiration. “There’s no sense of there being an ivory tower here,” says Chris Salter, a computer design professor. “There are no closed-off spaces. There’s more of what I’d call seepage.”

“Seepage” is an odd yet apt description of the department’s philosophy. Students who choose fine arts won’t simply learn their chosen craft; more often than not, they’ll learn how to put it to use once they graduate. The department of design and computation arts doesn’t simply teach the esoteric aspects of the craft, but the practical as well. “In any given week I’ll be teaching the academic, such as media theory, to the hard-core technical, like digital audio design,” says Salter. The department offers a double major in computer science and computation arts, the only one of its kind in North America.

If there is a technological pièce de résistance in the department, it’s the Hexagram Institute. Established in 2001, it is the conglomeration of 16 so-called “new media labs” devoted solely to what the university calls “new processes, creative communities and innovative works or prototypes.” Translation: students get to dream up and make really, really cool stuff.

D. Andrew Stewart, a Concordia graduate, is using Matralab (one of the Hexagram’s spaces) to hone the T-Stick, a length of plumbing tube stuffed with electronics and layered with a touch-sensitive surface. The tube reacts to movement and touch, and when hooked up to a computer it can be manipulated to make custom sounds (a flute, maybe, or a sample of Stewart yelling something quasi-obscene). “It’s all open source,” Stewart says, “meaning you could build one yourself with instructions from the Internet. The gyroscope in it is from a Nintendo Wii controller.”

Matralab director Sandeep Bhagwati, who is also one of nine Canada Research Chairs in fine arts, says Stewart’s T-Stick is typical of the department’s beyond-the-box, interdisciplinary approach to art and performance. Indeed, it’s what attracted him to Concordia. “I have a very structured background as an orchestra director and composition professor,” Bhagwati says. “I really don’t like the divides. I needed input from people who were not musicians.”

Music therapy is another example of the department’s mix of theory and practicality. Music majors typically had three choices once they graduate: teaching, performing or gut-wrenching unemployment. You might say that Concordia’s music therapy program is a welcome fourth option. One of only two master’s-level programs in the country, music therapy students spend three days a week during the 12-month period (a total of 1,200 hours) working at various prenatal, health and palliative care centres, as well as women’s shelters and special education facilities around Montreal.

For professor P. K. Langshaw, interaction with the community at large goes both ways. In 2001, Langshaw began an ad hoc outreach program between her students and those of Dans La Rue, a resource centre for street kids featuring an alternative school. The reason: Langshaw, whose many specialties include computer art design, wanted to demystify the subject for DLR students. Her instinct has legs: today, DLR students can take classes at Concordia, earning the equivalent of six credits for producing university-level works. “For a lot of DLR kids, digital self-expression isn’t something that’s necessarily in their realm,” Langshaw says. “But here they are treated the same as any Concordia student.” It’s a fitting partnership: Concordia itself is dans la rue—and proud to be far away from the ivory towers of certain other universities.

- Martin Patriquin

But province is right to stick to their funding formula

The Sault Star editorial Tuesday says that Laurentian University is losing $1 million a year in provincial funding for graduate students due to the distribution of those students not fitting a provincial funding formula.

LU was funded to admit 25 new PhD students and 95 new master’s students starting this, 2007/08, year. Instead, LU admitted 55 new PhD students and only 35 new master’s students. LU requested the province allow them to switch funding intended for new master’s students to instead fund the 30 PhD students.

The province said no, the formula is the formula.

The Sault Star says this is a problem and the formula needs to change.

I disagree.

While I normally would not support a rigid funding formula, the circumstances of this year lead me to.

The spring of 2007 saw the “double cohort” graduate from four-year degree programs. This increased demand for graduate programs and recruited an increase in Master’s program spaces. The province increased the funding of master’s programs to respond to this demand. The reality is that the funding has a policy purpose.

The purpose was to create the new of graduate study spaces available for students completing their undergraduate degrees last year. The province cannot provide money to achieve a set purpose and then allow universities to change that purpose. It does not matter how similar that purpose may seem. To allow LU to divert funds intended for “double cohort” graduate students to other, in this case PhD, students would be to allow universities to ignore public policy direction at will.

Let’s be clear, I don’t believe LU went out and acted in bad faith. To the contrary, I believe they admitted each qualified master’s applicant they had. They then decided to admit more PhD students in the hope that the funding would come anyway. They took a chance, one which didn’t work for them.

I’ve emailed the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities for comment and will update when I receive a reply.