All Posts Tagged With: "Simon Fraser University"

Andrew Petter to take the reins in Sept.

The new president of Simon Fraser University is no stranger to the academic world. Andrew Petter, former dean of the University of Victoria law school and a former attorney general of B.C., takes over as SFU president on Sept. 1. Petter was selected following an international search.

The 56-year-old says his first goal for the Burnaby, B.C.-based institution will be to build on its “diversity and combination of strengths as one of Canada’s leading universities.” As well as serving as professor and dean in the law faculty at UVic, Petter was a two-term New Democrat MLA, from 1991 to 2001. He held several powerful cabinet posts ranging from minister of finance to attorney general, minister of health and minister of aboriginal affairs.

The Canadian Press

League will give their students a unique opportunity, says school’s athletic director

Simon Fraser University will begin play in the NCAA Division II in the fall of 2010, one year earlier than originally planned, in a move that will save the school money while offering athletes a unique opportunity, athletic director David Murphy said Tuesday.

“We have the ability to provide a great Canadian education and we can also combine that with an NCAA athletic experience,” Murphy told a news conference. “No one else can do that.”

SFU is the first non-U.S. member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The school’s varsity teams will become the 10th member of the NCAA’s Division II Great Northwest Athletic Conference.

For all OnCampus coverage of the SFU/NCAA saga, click here.

Richard Hannan, the conference’s commissioner, said SFU was a logical choice.

The conference has institutions in five states, including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

“They are a prestigious, quality institution, academically and athletically, ” said Hannan. “Geographically they are a great location for us.

“We needed another member. We need to get to 10, then hopefully we can get to 12.”

SFU currently has 19 teams competing in the small-college National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics in the U.S. and Canadian Interuniversity Sports.

Murphy said joining the NCAA will save SFU money in travel and membership fees. It costs about $500 to belong to the NCAA, while CIS fees are “quite a bit more,” he said. “The savings in memberships will be over $40,000.”

SFU currently plays in the CIS’s Canada West conference, where they sometimes must travel as far as Winipeg for games – a trip of about 1,870 kilometers by air.

Another major difference is the NCAA pays to travel to any championship. In the CIS and NAIA, individual schools pay the travel costs. Under CIS rules, scholarships can only cover tuition and school fees. An NCAA scholarship covers tuition, room and board, which could give SFU an edge when recruiting athletes.

Originally, SFU had planned to compete in the CIS next season and move on the NCAA in 2011-12.

Group finds 100,000 artifacts, including gold and silver, from between 1200 and 600 BC

He doesn’t like to be compared to Indiana Jones, but a University of Toronto archeologist and his team have made an exciting find at a dig in southeastern Turkey that he expects will shed new light on a “dark age” in history.

And like the movie character played by Harrison Ford, he insists the treasure won’t be sold but belongs in a museum.

Timothy Harrison and his staff of 40, who include students from the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, have uncovered artifacts dating back to the Iron Age at an ancient temple near the Syrian border.

Estimating they have dug up 100,000 artifacts at the site – everything from gold and silver to jewelry to animal bones – Harrison is most excited about a cache of cuneiform tablets dating back to the period between 1200 and 600 BC.

“We think that these tablets actually have significant historical information in them that we don’t have available anywhere else,” Harrison said in an interview from the dig site at Reyhanli, Turkey.

“We may begin to fill in political history, some of the local kingdoms, maybe more understanding about how the Assyrians were administrating and ruling and controlling their empire.”

The professor of near eastern archeology said little is known about the “dark age,” a 300-year transitional time period between the collapse of the Bronze Age and the rise of the Iron Age, but it was thought to be a violent period when little writing was done. But the tablets he and his team have found may challenge that assumption, he suggested.

“Our excavation, we believe, is finding information to fill some of that gap,” he said.

Harrison doesn’t know yet what the tablets say, noting they are complex documents and are in a fragile state, and some are broken.

One tablet took nine hours to carefully extract from the site. The script on it is tiny, and it will take time to provide the translation, he said. Other tablets are less fragile and he expects preliminary translations will be completed on those in the next few weeks. The longest document is like a book.

“It’s full of thousands of signs. It’ll be a long document… But we think it may be part of some kind of a temple archive or documents that were dealing with the maintenance of the cult rituals that took place in this temple,” he said.

Classes sit empty as students and faculty join together to protest cuts

Many classes sat empty during lunch hour at Simon Fraser University today.

Students and faculty made a lunch date to join together in protest of provincial funding cuts implemented last year by the British Columbia government lead by Premier Gordon Campbell.

The protest has received the support of the University’s senate which passed an academic amnesty motion in January encouraging faculty to accommodate students planning to attend the protest. (I’m told that many professors have cancelled classes.)

Last spring, in a classic case of smoke-and-mirrors, the Campbell government announced a ‘re-prioritization’ of higher education funding. According to the government, they were moving from universities into high demand college programs in health care and the skilled trades.

Once the spotlights were off, it was quickly realized that the government was actually cutting both colleges and universities while playing a shell game..

The cutbacks were a major factor in the president of the University of Northern British Columbia decision to resign and return to the United States.

Most concerning for British Columbia universities is that these cuts occurred prior to the economic slowdown at a time when the government balance sheets could have afforded the funds necessary to provide stable funding to universities. If universities were so low on the government’s priority list when it had money; what is going to happen now that the government is facing a major budget shortfall?

This is an election year, it is quite possible that a strong showing on Burnaby mountain may get the attention of Premier Campbell in Victoria.

Then again, Campbell has kept Minister of Advanced Education Murray Coell on the job despite the attention he’s receiving from us pundits.

Some student leaders have compared supporting anti-abortion student clubs to supporting white supremacists. Really?

Last month, the Ontario branch of the Canadian Federation of Students voted to sanction the denial of student space to anti-abortion (pro-life, anti-choice, or whatever) groups. The motion reads that “member (unions) that refuse to allow anti-choice organizations access to their resources and space be supported.”

Though this particular motion grew out of a controversy sparked by the Lakehead University Students’ Union denial of student space to a pro-life group, such controversies have sprung up across the country, and the banning of anti-abortion groups is not exclusive to CFS schools.

I will not go into this history today (though I may at some future point) except to say that this is nothing short of an attack on the university as a place for the free exchange of ideas. Even Heather Kere, a Ryerson Students’ Union executive who hasn’t exactly distinguished herself as a moderate, tried to amend the CFS motion so that it would only apply to anti-abortion groups that harassed students. An even-handed and grounded amendment that was promptly rejected.

And why did they reject it? Well, Shelley Melanson, CFS national women’s representative, told the Eyeopener, “You wouldn’t take public money to put in an organization that moves to take away people’s rights; you wouldn’t fund the KKK.”

Similarly, Sandy Hudson, CFS-Ontario women’s rep, also thinks anti-abortion groups are comparable to fascists. As the University of Western Ontario Gazette reported: “When asked whether Ryerson students should be exposed to both sides of the abortion issue, Hudson said allowing an anti-choice group would be like allowing a white supremacist group on campus.”

There you have it: if you do not agree with the CFS position on abortion you are no better than a member of the Klu Klux Klan or a white supremacist.

Apart from the sheer intellectual laziness of dismissing opponents as hate-mongering, totalitarian buffoons, the CFS just might be revealing its own intolerant tendencies. Let’s see who else might qualify as a white supremacist because of their position on abortion? Well Catholics come to mind. So do Hindus. And religious Jews and Muslims. (Full disclosure: I am a lapsed Catholic.)

Certainly Melanson and Hudson, speaking on behalf of the CFS, do not mean to equate religious groups, including minority religious groups, with the KKK and white supremacists (or maybe they do; I’m not a mind reader). But it is hard not to come to the conclusion that Melanson and Hudson envision kooks like James Keestra, Ernst Zundel, and David Andrews at the next meeting of the Interfaith Coalition.

What about the population in general? According to a 2006 Environics poll, 31 per cent of Canadians believe that the law should protect life “at conception.” Are nearly one-third of Canadians comparable to KKK members too?

Another third of Canadians believe the law should intervene at “some time during pregnancy,” meaning that after a certain gestation period abortion should be prohibited. This is also the position of many doctors. The Canadian Medical Association defines abortion as “the active termination of a pregnancy before fetal viability” (emphasis mine). The CMA does, however, recognize that late term abortions may be performed “under exceptional circumstances.”

Unless you’ve been living in some nether world for the past 20 years, you’ll know that Canada is the only country in the Western world to offer no legal regulation on abortive practices whatsoever. This, of course, includes those Scandinavian countries that the Canadian left has developed such a fetish for.

While the Supreme Court ruled the pre-existing law that criminalized abortion unconstitutional except under very narrow circumstances, it did not rule that no law could be permitted. In fact, the Court commented that a regulatory law might just be a good idea. Writing for the majority in the 1988 Morgentaler case, Justice Bertha Wilson wrote, “The value to be placed on the fetus as potential life is directly related to the stage of its development during gestation . . . The precise point in the development of the fetus at which the state’s interest in its protection becomes ‘compelling’ should be left to the informed judgment of the legislature.” Such a law was passed by the Mulroney government, but died on the Senate floor.

So do the CFS’s principal spokespeople on women’s issues only equate those who want absolute restriction on abortion with white supremacists? Or does the characterization extend to those who would regulate it? Would banning student groups that promote the position that the law should step in to prevent second and third trimester abortions also be sanctioned by the CFS? Clarification on just who is and who isn’t no better than a white supremacist is in order, I think.

The question of “how late is too late?” is a divisive and uncomfortable one among abortion rights activists. As National Post columnist Jonathan Kay put it late last month in reference to a symposium at the University of Toronto to mark the 20th anniversary of the Morgentaler ruling:

“Within their own minds, [abortion activists] do wrestle with these important moral questions — as any intelligent person must. But when in public, they censor themselves. Locked in what they feel to be a tribal culture war against pro-lifers, the pro-choice camp allows itself no nuance. This is essentially the reason Canada has no abortion law: Any stirring of legislative action arouses such tribal war fury among pro-choicers as to send politicians scurrying.”

The abortion issue is clearly not settled in the minds of Canadians, but thankfully we have student leaders to sort it out for us, and representatives of the CFS to deem that the third of us, and perhaps the two-thirds of us, that disagree with them are analogous to procurers of hate propaganda.

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In any event, if you are a student, particularly one at an Ontario university, who disagrees with the CFS Ontario position on abortion, you should ask your local representative if that means you are no better than a white supremacist or a member of the Klu Klux Klan.

Better yet, contact the sources directly:

Shelly Melanson, email: pres@cusaonline.com phone: 613.520.2600 ext.1603

Sandy Hudson, email: vpequity@utsu.ca phone: 416-978-4911 ext. 237

Canada’s largest student lobby group the Canadian Federation of Students has brought in lawyers to fight the latest battle in an on-going controversy that erupted when an email detailing campaign plans was mistakenly distributed to reps from all students’ unions in BC

Canada’s largest student lobby group the Canadian Federation of Students has brought in lawyers to fight the latest battle in an on-going controversy that erupted when an email detailing campaign plans was mistakenly distributed to all BC members early last week. The Kwantlen Student Association, which was one of the first students’ unions to make the campaign plans public, said in a news release that they have received a letter from the CFS’ lawyer demanding a public apology.

The controversy first came to light February 4 when the email was mistakenly sent to each member students’ union in British Columbia. It included a detailed plan to campaign in the upcoming defederation campaign at Simon Fraser University. SFU, Kwantlen, and graduate students at the University of Victoria are going to the polls this spring to decide whether to remain members of the CFS. The document includes details about campaign tactics and volunteers from other students’ unions (many in Ontario) that would be presumably flown in. Some of the volunteers listed are not students, but fulltime staffers of other organizations including the NDP.

Student leaders across the country have raised concerns about where the funding to fly students to BC would come from and whether the extensive campaign is an appropriate way to spend funding. The Kwantlen Student Association also pointed out that the document proves that the CFS does attempt to place CFS-friendly people in permanent staff positions at students’ unions, a practice that has been widely criticized. "This document is our ‘smoking gun’ on the lengths the CFS will go to just to maintain membership," said Laura Anderson, Kwantlen chairperson.

However, many students and students’ unions mentioned in the document have denied knowledge of the plan. CFS national chairperson Amanda Aziz told the Canadian University Press that the plan was authored by the BC chapter of the CFS and that the national organization was not responsible for it. She also denied that there are plans to fly volunteers to BC for the campaign but would not speculate whether such flights would be subsidized by the organization.

The letter from CFS lawyers to the Kwantlen Student Association demands a public apology for a press release written when the plan was first mistakenly distributed. The letter states that the plans were not indeed authored by the CFS, as stated in the press release. Rather, they were authored by CFS-BC.