All Posts Tagged With: "SFU"

Former B.C. solicitor general under investigation for alleged campaign violations

Simon Fraser University is defending hiring former B.C. solicitor general, Kash Heed, to teach a criminology course. RCMP are currently investigating Heed for alleged campaign violations during the 2009 election.

Heed, who is also a former police chief, was hired by the university, on a sessional basis, to teach a course titled Introduction to the Criminal Justice System. A press release issued by the opposition New Democratic Party stated that “irony” is “alive and well” in the province. “This is the same Kash Heed whose campaign team is currently under investigation by the RCMP, whose campaign allegedly violated campaign spending limits and who has gone to court to try to avoid having to comply with Elections BC,” the release read.

Rob Gordon, who heads SFU’s criminology department has pointed out that the investigation was made public a month after Heed’s hiring in November, and that given his practical experience, he is well suited to teach the course. So far no complaints have been reported. “It’s still business as usual as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

Charges have yet to be laid against Heed in the case, but two members of his campaign have been formally charged. Heed has stepped down from cabinet pending the outcome of the investigation.

University teams will be representing Canada when competing down south

Inside the gymnasium, the international lines forming trapezoidal keys on the basketball court are gone, replaced by the familiar rectangle and a pair of three-point arcs. The oddly long and wide lines — by American standards — on the turf football field are being torn apart and replaced by a 100-yard field with 10-yard end zones.

Simon Fraser University is almost ready to become the first Canadian member of the NCAA. It’s just coming 12 months earlier than anyone expected. “We have a unique situation. We are the only Canadian team playing in the United States,” Simon Fraser women’s basketball coach Bruce Langford said. “Therefore we kind of represent Canada, therefore there is a little bit more at stake.”

From the top of Burnaby Mountain, where the Simon Fraser campus sits, the views of the entire Lower Mainland surrounding metropolitan Vancouver are eye-popping: Snowcapped mountains to the north and south, sea to the west, all framed by the towering firs of the Pacific Northwest.

But while the concrete campus at the top of the mountain provide views few can match, it’s the rest of Canadian college athletics that’s closely watching what happens at SFU. When Simon Fraser hosts Western Oregon on Sept. 4 to begin the 2010 football season, the Clan will become the first Canadian team to play against U.S. competitors as a member of the Great Northwest Athletic Conference in NCAA Division II.

It’s part of a reclassification process that started in 2008 when the NCAA voted to accept membership applications from Canadian schools interested in joining Division II.

Simon Fraser, which held joint membership in the Canadian Interuniversity Sport system and the American-based NAIA, was the only school to move forward in the process.

Originally, the move to becoming the first Canadian NCAA member was to take place for the 2011-12 school year. That was before Canada West, SFU’s playing conference within the CIS, evicted the Clan beginning with this upcoming school year. Already in the process of making the procedural changes to become an NCAA member, Simon Fraser’s timetable was dramatically accelerated. Schedules went from full to empty. The NCAA rule book became required reading, as staff was hired earlier than expected to help with the transition.

Simon Fraser will compete in the 2010-11 school year as a provisional NCAA member. “The real rule in Canada is there are no rules,” SFU football coach Dave Johnson said. “NCAA there is a rule for every angle, every thing and we kind of knew that. It’s becoming more familiar with those rules. “There is going to be an educational component that we’re learning by braille a little bit,” he said.

Most dramatic in the speed up was the impact on athletes. The CIS system allowed athletes five years of playing eligibility. But when Canada West kicked Simon Fraser out and the school announced last October it was heading south a year earlier than planned, numerous Simon Fraser athletes found themselves in the final days of their playing careers.

Langford’s women’s basketball program, a two-time defending CIS national champion, suddenly had just four returning players for the 2010-11 season. Johnson’s football team lost 60 players who either had finished four years of play or decided they wanted more than their one remaining year.

Additionally, a number of SFU athletes saw their remaining eligibility cut in half. Many athletes in Canada attend secondary schools following high school. Under the CIS system, those athletes still have five years of eligibility when they arrive at the university. But the NCAA views those years the same as attending a junior college.

“It was vindictive. That’s all I can say. There was no good solid reason why they wouldn’t allow us to go this year,” Simon Fraser athletic director David Murphy said. “But it’s a blessing in disguise because it’s accelerated our ability to be compliant with NCAA rules and the fact GNAC accepted us. I was very disappointed because I knew the people, but in the end it turned out to be very beneficial to us. It did hurt some student-athletes here very badly.”

But ask those at Simon Fraser about the sudden change of plans, and while bitter about the believed slight from Canada West, there is also an air of excitement about the pending move. When the school was constructed in 1965, the administration’s intent was that its athletic programs would play exclusively in the United States. That held true until 1997, when Simon Fraser’s competition in the Pacific Northwest made the move to the NCAA.

They found refuge in the CIS for their football, men’s and women’s basketball programs, volleyball and wrestling. Their remaining programs held joint classification with the CIS and NAIA, giving them a chance to compete in both countries.

But as the costs of competing in the CIS — namely travel across four provinces — continued to rise, Simon Fraser began looking for an outlet for all its programs. Thanks to their rivals across Vancouver at the University of British Columbia, the Clan found their ticket to the NCAA. It was UBC at the forefront of the push to move its athletic programs to the NCAA, triggering the legislation two years ago that opened the door for Canadian schools looking to play in Division II.

Simon Fraser was the only school, so far, to walk through the opening. “What I found in doing my due diligence is there is so much misinformation and disinformation on the NCAA that most people are afraid of it,” Murphy said. “They only know the bowl games, December, January and March Madness. And they look at the amount of schools, all the bad news, they get wrapped up in it and don’t understand it. I had to do a lot of research and especially (at) Division II it’s about balancing life.”

The benefits are numerous for Simon Fraser. The travel costs drop significantly, with teams now able to take buses or short flights for most of their competitions. The recruiting pitch now raises eyebrows among Canadian athletes. While those talented enough to compete at a high, Division I level aren’t going to change their plans, it’s the athlete that might be going south to play for a lower-level Division I or a high Division II program that Simon Fraser wants to target.

The message: stay in your country and get a Canadian education; compete in the United States. “This is a very Canadian school, it has a lot of Canadian traditions, but Canadians want to compete at the highest level. They always have wanted to do that,” men’s basketball coach James Blake said. “And Simon Fraser going NCAA is a representation of what Canadians want to do. They want to compete at the highest level and they are at this school.”

But it’s not just Canadian athletes who are the focus. The school has a strong case for American athletes to look north, with tuition comparable to out-of-state tuition for athletes in the states. The cost becomes an even better deal if the American dollar strengthens against the Looney.

There are still obstacles to overcome for both Simon Fraser and their opponents. The rest of the schools in the GNAC are working to make sure all athletes and coaches have passports or enhanced drivers licenses for the border crossing. On campus, Murphy is working to make sure there is permanent seating for the football stadium. Even Johnson has to make a midseason switch for when the Clan play at rival British Columbia in October — using Canadian football rules.

And there’s educating the public and fans about the differences they will see between the CIS and the NCAA. “I think we can build something special here and we can be the flagship program in the nation,” Johnson said. “I think we can attract the best players from around the country. I’m an American guy but I can tote that Canadian maple leaf and talk about winning one for the country. It matters to our Canadian kids. I do believe we have the unique ingredients to build something special.”

The Canadian Press

going. In my experiences, debates on campus concerning the two national student lobby groups, CASA & CFS, are extremely interesting to campus journalists and politicians, and duller than a Canadian sitcom to everyone else (I’m looking at you, Little Mosque). That being said, I’m estimating campus journalists and politicians make up a disproportionate portion of [...]

going.

In my experiences, debates on campus concerning the two national student lobby groups, CASA & CFS, are extremely interesting to campus journalists and politicians, and duller than a Canadian sitcom to everyone else (I’m looking at you, Little Mosque). That being said, I’m estimating campus journalists and politicians make up a disproportionate portion of my audience, so I’ll bite: A B.C. Supreme Court judge has declined to make a summary judgement of the legal battle between Simon Fraser and the CFS, and has asked them, like two squabbling schoolkids, to settle and make nice out of court.

It’s possible that the two sides will settle. Of course, given the fact that this has already been going for a year with neither side willing to budge, it’s even more possible that this will drag on in legal limbo for some time.

In other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

SFU Pipe Band plays free concert, prepares to defend title at World Championships

On Sunday, the current world champion SFU Pipe Band performed a free outdoor concert at Simon Fraser University. This rehearsal offered the public an opportunity to hear the band before they travel this month to the World Pipe Band Championships in Glasgow, Scotland to defend their title.

Terry Lee, Pipe Major leads the pipe band

Video interviews by Xavier Boderiou, J. Reid Maxwell, and Terry Lee


Xavier Boderiou, a Piper on exchange from France states:
“…when I was 11 or 12 I was listening to SFU Pipe Band’s CDs and they were performing in New York, the CD was called Live at Carnegie Hall, I used to listen to this CD quite alot, so it’s quite a dream for me to join this band today”

Angela Burleigh practices prior to the concert





Drummers perform in unison





Playing bagpipes in the sun

Additional photographs are available on flickr.

College sports earn U.S. universities a lot of money, but arguably distort their mission

A couple of years ago I interview Dr. Carl Wieman, the American Nobel laureaute in physics who moved to the University of British Columbia to set up the Carl Wieman Science Education Initative, a project to improve the quality of undergraduate science teaching at UBC and across North America. Wieman’s interest is in figuring out how to improve teaching ad learning at universities. When we spoke, he surprised me by pointing to U.S. college sports as an obstacle to that mission. Last week, Simon Fraser University announced that it had become the first Canadian university to be admitted to the main U.S. college sports body, the NCAA. As for UBC — the other Canadian university that was seen as a prime candidate for NCAA membership — it recently announced that it is putting its expression of interest on hold for a year.

When I asked Wieman why he chose to come to UBC — he was previously at the University of Colorado, and as Nobel laureate could have landed a position and received funding at any major U.S. university — he mentioned a couple of factors. But the one that surprised me involved the way that for-profit sports are, in his view, distorting the mission of the U.S. university:

Wieman:… One feature I often point out is [UBC’s] football coach gets paid like an assistant professor, not, like, 10 times the university president. People just don’t realize that college athletics at public universities [in the U.S.] has become so dominant that the governing boards, the presidents, are thinking about the success of the football team first and undergraduate education second.
Q: I hadn’t thought about the fact that college sports might have played into your decision.
A It’s really so crazy. You go to a U.S. university and you look at what fraction of the governing board time is spent on athletic stuff as opposed to the rest of the university and, you know, it might be 50 per cent.
Q: And the NCAA recently opened its doors to non-American schools. Some Canadian universities are thinking about joining.
A: And UBC is one of them. I screamed when I found out!

Canada’s largest national student group loses referendum votes, but signals that it may not recognize some results

Students at Simon Fraser University and Cape Breton University, and graduate students at the University of Victoria, last week voted resoundingly to cease membership in the Canadian Federation of Students.

The electoral committee at SFU announced Friday that students voted 66 per cent in favour of cutting ties with Canada’s largest student lobby organization. At Cape Breton, 92 per cent of student voters were reported to have cast their ballots against the CFS. And at the University of Victoria, 58 per cent of graduate students voted against the CFS. Undergrads at Victoria did not take part in the referendum and remain within the CFS.

“This is a clear democratic mandate. There is no way to read these results as anything but a clear indication that SFU wants to leave the Federation,” Simon Fraser Student Society President Derrick Harder told the campus newspaper, the Peak. “Students have excellent bullshit detectors and those were going off like crazy over the past two weeks.”

The votes, however, may not spell the end of the matter. CFS national chairperson Amanda Aziz hinted to the Peak that her organization had concerns about the accuracy and fairness of the process. “Some of the things that I saw were ballots being found outside of the polling locations, people from the no campaign campaigning right beside the polling station[s], in fact, directing people in terms on how they should be voting on each of the questions, polls running out of ballots, [and] ballots being found outside of polling locations,” Aziz said.

Last week, before the results were announced, Aziz told Maclean’s that “the campaign at SFU has been quite positive,” though she did say that she believed that “there is a lot of misinformation being spread by the SFSS (Simon Fraser Students Society) executive that we are unfortunately spending a lot of time having to correct.”

As for the referendum at Cape Breton, Aziz said that the CFS would not recognize its result. “Whatever vote that may have taken place at Cape Breton University would not relieve Cape Breton University Students’ Union of its contractual obligations to the other student unions which comprise the Federation,” Aziz wrote to Maclean’s.

The CFS is not expected to recognize the referendum because it says proper procedures were not followed. The CFS says that it never received notification of CBU’s intention to hold a referendum. CBU claims that notice was served—along with a petition signed by 500 students—six months in advance of the vote as required by CFS bylaws.

CBU’s student government also says that the vote was representative of student sentiment. “We made our quorum and when you look at it there were about 200 more people who voted this election then voted when we joined CFS,” Ian Lindsay, CBU students’ union president, told the Cape Breton Times and Transcript. “Obviously we would have liked more students to vote, but we are happy we had this turnout.”

The Martlet, the student newspaper at UVic, reported that the referendum campaign there was dominated by those supporting the CFS. The CFS side held a barbecue for graduate students and had a visible presence on campus with colourful pamphlets and numerous supporters. The “No” campaign claims it barely had a campaign at all. “We only had one banner, [a website], and one set of buttons. That’s our entire campaign,” said Tayfun Ince, a member of the No campaign and former chair of the Graduate Students’ Society. “We had nothing for material. We didn’t use a single sheet of paper.”

At SFU, both campaigns were highly visible, although the pro-CFS side initially appeared to be stronger. As the vote neared, students seemed to be growing tired of the constant solicitation from both sides. In a letter to the Peak, one student complained about “thousands of imposing posters on every wall and [... people] trying to intercept your every move.”

Meanwhile, the Kwantlen Students Association (KSA), of BC’s Kwantlen University College, claimed victory last week after a BC Supreme Court hearing regarding their upcoming referendum. The CFS sought to delay the vote until the fall. However, the court ordered that the vote, that was originally scheduled at the same time as the SFU and UVic referendums, be delayed until April 8. “In regards to Kwantlen,” Aziz said, “we are satisfied with the outcome of the injunction, and that the judge recognized that the KSA executive had broken the rules.”

The CFS is Canada’s largest student lobby organization. Half a million students at more than 80 universities and colleges are members of the organization. Each student organization that is a member of the CFS pays dues to the national and provincial arms of the organization. According to the most recent available numbers, SFU students paid $400,000 in 2005 to the CFS.

Wrestlers named “athlete of the week”

Wrestlers Miranda Dick of Simon Fraser University and Tyler Marghetis of Concordia University were named Canadian Interuniversity Sport female and male athletes of the week Wednesday.Dick, a fifth-year kinesiology student from Kamloops, B.C., was named CIS outstanding female wrestler of the year after she captured individual gold in the 55-kilogram weight class and led the Clan women to a fourth team title in five years at the CIS championship in Calgary.

Marghetis, a fifth-year mathematics student from Ottawa, returning to the CIS championship after a one-year absence, was crowned at 76 kg for the fourth time. The 25-year-old won his three bouts in Calgary, including the gold-medal final over defending champion Sheldon Francis of McMaster.

-with a report from CP