All Posts Tagged With: "UBC"

But they’ll keep Whistler Lodge, for now

Results are in from the 2012 elections at the University of British Columbia’s Alma Mater Society.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the chance to reduce the Student Spaces Fund fee from $16.13 to $12.25, students voted nearly four to one in the favour of the reduction, reports The Ubyssey.

A more controversial measure, selling off three pieces of the AMS’s art collection, passed easily—72 per cent voted in favour, 14 per cent were opposed and 14 per cent skipped the question.

Continue reading UBC students will sell valuable art

Roughly 530 affected

Roughly 530 students at the University of British Columbia were billed two or three times for housing, tuition or other fees in December due to a glitch in the school’s electronic funds transfer system. More than $2.1 million was mistakenly scooped from accounts, UBC officials told The Ubyssey. Payments made between Dec. 23 and 28 were processed multiple times by a third-party company called BeanStream. UBC says duplicate payments will be credited back to student’s accounts and BeanStream will reimburse students for insufficient funds charges and overdraft fees.

Cause of death T.B.D.

A Bangladeshi newspaper reports that Hassan Syed, the who man allegedly beat, bit and blinded his wife, University of British Columbia (UBC) master’s student Rumana Manzur, has died. Golam Haider, deputy inspector general of prisons, told bdnews24.com that Syed had been brought to a hospital prison cell Nov. 23 because he was mentally unstable. He then suffered cardiac failure on Dec. 5. Asked about suicide as a potential cause, Haider said that an autopsy has not yet been completed. Manzur’s aunt told The Toronto Star that her niece is aware of the death, but unable to speak publicly about it. The UBC community reacted to the news of Manzur’s June attack by raising $58,000 in the first month after it, which helped bring the victim and her child to Vancouver. Surgeries in Canada to restore her sight were unsuccessful, but the fundraising hasn’t stopped. UBC’s Muslim Students’ Association raised a further $6,000 for Manzur at an Iftar during Ramadan.

Husband arrested in Bangladesh

A University of British Columbia master’s student has been blinded during an attack while visiting her family in Bangladesh and her nose has been partially bitten off. The violence was allegedly committed by her husband, Hassan Syeed, who was arrested June 15.

“He has made my world dark. I can’t see my daughter,” she told reporters in a Dhaka hospital, according to the newspaper The Daily Star.

UBC president Stephen Toope wrote a statement about the community’s sadness at the incident. “This tragic occasion is a poignant marker of the need to work to protect the fundamental human right of all women to pursue education,” he said.

Manzur was pursing her master’s degree in political science at UBC while her family remained in Dhaka. Reports suggest her husband accused her of cheating before the attack. There will be a rally in support of her in Vancouver on Sunday, reports the Globe and Mail.

Nearby condo dwellers fear “ghosts”

A plan to build a hospice on the University of British Columbia campus is slated for approval in June, despite opposition from neighbouring condo-dwellers, who are worried about “bad luck” and “ghosts.”

They have protested the prospective 15-bed palliative since January because of culturally-specific fears. “Eighty per cent of the residents in this building are Asian, and 100 per cent of them are very upset,” said condo spokeswoman Janet Fan, at the time. “In Chinese culture, we are against having dying people in your backyard.”

While the project was initially delayed, a May 25 staff report recommends facility approval, to be finalized sometime next month.

I hope we will see construction sometime thereafter. This particular spin on ‘residents vs. new building’ can’t help but elicit hyperbole. You can dress is up with culturally sensitive language and subtle empathetic nods, but the issue will still be that a group of million-dollar condo owners don’t want to dying people soiling their 10th floor panoramic views. Physically or spiritually, it’s all the same.

But there are several reasons why UBC should not yield to demands to move the hospice. For one, the hospice does not pose any real, tangible threat to its neighbours. Data commissioned by UBC showed that property values of homes in nearby communities have increased since hospices have opened in the area. And unlike similar situations of community resistance—say, when a halfway house is proposed in a neighbourhood—the threat of physical danger is not present in this case. Bad luck can’t slash your tires.

But what about emotional turmoil? Surely some devout residents will experience anxiety and stress living next to a place where people are dying. Indeed, that’s unfortunate. But it’s no reason to change course. Institutions such as universities—as well as cities, provinces, and democratic countries as a whole—cannot allow religious belief to dictate policy. If someone legally purchases land and, for example, wants to open a LGBT community centre on that land, should she be prohibited based on its proximity to a church opposed to the LGBT lifestyle? Can a person prevent an interracial couple from moving in next door because he feels uneasy? Of course not. It would be unacceptable to force change in those cases, so it’s unacceptable to force change here.

The phrase ‘buyer beware’ is cliché for a reason. We too often forget that we can’t control who moves in next door. UBC has been shopping for a place for this hospice for years and it has done it’s best to balance different stakeholder’s concerns. I hope it gets built without anymore delays.

Photo courtesy of fauxto_digit on Flickr.

Student says slide would be more eco-friendly

The University of British Columbia’s student union is studying the feasibility of a slide to connect up to five floors of their new Student Union Building. Mike Silley, VP of administration for the Alma Mater Society (AMS) says that the goal is not only to make the building more fun, but also to make it more eco-friendly. “Each elevator costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement and that doesn’t even include the energy costs of running it,” Silley told the Ubyssey newspaper, saying the slide would reduce the need for elevators. He also says it would draw tourists to student-owned business. “They could come to the Museum of Anthropology [on campus] and then they say hey there’s a slide in the Student Union Building. Let’s take our kids to check it out. Meantime [they] have some Pie R Squared Pizza,” he says. Other examples of buildings with slides for adults include the Google headquarters in California and the Corus Entertainment building in Toronto.

Candidate has never lived in the riding and won’t arrive there until after exams are over

It happens in every federal election. As one of the mainstream parties, you’ve got 308 ridings to fill, some of which are in places you haven’t won since the days of Diefenbaker, and there is no experienced candidate stepping up to the plate. But you need someone to represent you, if only so your opponents can’t accuse you of not being able to recruit candidates coast to coast.

Enter the gullible student.

They are more sacrificial lambs then the wave of the future, young loyalists willing to volunteer five weeks for a bit of fame, a lot of experience, advancement within the party—and absolutely no chance of winning.

There are a few of them running for the major parties this year. In Cariboo-Prince George, 22-year-old Jon Van Barneveld is running for the NDP after years of volunteering as a youth for the party. In Edmonton-Strathcona, 20-year-old Matthew Sinclair is running for the Liberals after years of much the same thing.

Though at least they live in their ridings. Perhaps the most tokenistic of token candidates in this election, at least for the main national parties, is Kyle Warwick, the Liberal candidate for Skeena-Bulkley Valley. It comprises the entire northwestern quarter of British Columbia and is the seventh largest riding in Canada.

Warwick is a UBC Political Science student who, as geography might hint at, does not live in Skeena-Bulkey Valley, and never has. According to an article by The Northern View, “Warwick says he will be touring the riding and talking to voters in the different communities sometime after April 20th.” I’m going to go out on a limb, guess his final exam is on the 20th, and wish him well on his 12-day tour of a riding of 323,720 square kilometres.

In the 2008 election, the Liberals only managed 1,916 votes here (their third lowest total in Canada), good for 5.5 per cent, so when previously nominated candidate and local mayor Sharon Hartwell dropped out last week, it stands to reason that the riding association turned their attention to simply finding a warm body.

Yet if you can’t find anyone with real qualifications or connection to your riding though, what’s the point of fielding a candidate at all? It’s one thing to find a student with no hope of winning. But a student who isn’t from your own riding? Whose only electoral achievements have been at the student council level?

Warwick is passionate about politics and cares deeply for the Liberal Party. It’s a wonderful opportunity for him. What it says about the party he represents is a different matter.

Joining American league would bring higher quality sports, permit full-ride scholarships.

At many institutions the decision on whether their sports teams would join the NCAA would set the campus buzzing.

At UBC? Students care about as much as they do about the football team—which is to say, there’s athletes who care, friends of athletes, about a hundred sport nuts . . . and that’s about it.

Despite this, the university is beginning what it promises is the final round of consultations to decide whether to join NCAA Division II, or stay in the Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS), of which it is a founding member.

UBC had held prior consultations about joining NCAA in 2008 and 2009, but they were inconclusive. The administration then spent the next year attempting to work with the CIS to change rules around scholarships (UBC would like to offer full-ride ones) and conference tiering (UBC plays too many games against small schools they blow out), to no avail.

Of course, for most schools, the NCAA isn’t appealing. According to UBC officials, only Alberta, McGill and Ryerson have expressed interest—though none of those schools have said so publicly. Simon Fraser joined last year, but they were founded with the intent of competing against American schools, and only joined the CIS in 2000 after too many of their US rivals joined the NCAA, which banned international schools until 2008.

Even if you’re philosophically fine with full-time scholarships for athletes (as a growing number of schools, frustrated with the athletic brain drain, are), the travel costs combined with the scholarships make joining the NCAA prohibitively expensive for universities. But UBC’s athletic department, which has wanted to move to the NCAA for many years, is close enough to the border and has teams in sports that the CIS doesn’t even offer, including baseball and golf. In others like field hockey and swimming, there’s simply not enough competition within Canada. When it comes to the CIS, UBC is a big fish in a comparatively small pond.

That’s not to say it’s a slam dunk for UBC to join. Far from it. In the 2008/09 consultations, 52 per cent of respondents polled in a survey were against moving to the NCAA, despite a concerted attempt by the athletic department to get as many of their athletes as possible to fill out the survey. Though there are no plans for any clear “vote” this time around, UBC will end this final consultation making a decision one way or another—the deadline for application to Division II is June 1st.

By 11:30am building deemed safe and exams continued on schedule

Students had to be evacuated from a University of British Columbia building Tuesday morning after a fire broke out on the roof. The fire was accidentally started by a worker using an acetylene torch. Although the flames were confined to the roof of the Henry Angus Building, smoke billowed below where students were writing exams. The fire alarm had been disabled to avoid it going off unnecessarily due to the nature of the work. Students were evacuated at 10am through “manual building monitoring,” that the university says is an “accepted practice.” By 11:30am, students were permitted to reenter the building and exams continued on schedule.

When you’re competing nationally and internationally for prestige and donors, who has time to disclose pesky statistics?

Yesterday, I talked (slash-blogged) about UBC’s openness in choosing a new Dean of Education, calling it a model of transparency. Of course, in any large institution transparency only goes so far. If there’s a net loss in disclosing information, chances are it’s not going to happen.

For example, look at UBC’s action (or lack thereof) in releasing information about animal testing done on campus. Thus far, the university has stalled in responding to Freedom of Information requests filed by Stop UBC Animal Research (STOP). Why?

“Under our regulatory system, we would need the permission of the researchers to reveal the information,” said VP Research John Hepburn to The Ubyssey (disclosure: it’s the paper I’m editor of). “We’re never going to get that permission.”

UBC argues that because the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC), the regulatory body that oversees animal testing, doesn’t require individual universities to disclose specific information, they’re not obligated to. Furthermore, they would require the researchers themselves to sign off on disclosing what they do.

This is a bit of a dodge though. If they really wanted to, UBC could release general numbers regarding research activity, as is required in the United States under the Animal Welfare Act. But what would be the point? There is no evidence the university is doing more or less research on animals than other research-intensive institutions in Canada. Yet having the information out there, while other Canadian universities stay silent, would simply put UBC at a competitive disadvantage—for researchers and for reputation.

It’s something Hepburn himself hints at. “[If you] release information without the medical context—in other words, if you ask a member of the public, ‘If I am going to do the following thing to a monkey, or to a cat or to a mouse, what do you think?’—the natural response would be that sounds like something that’s not very nice to do to that animal,” he said. Which is true. People don’t like hearing about what happens to animals, regardless of the possible long-term benefits, and regardless of the regulations in place. There’s a reason it’s kept private.

But hang on. Shouldn’t public universities act in the best interest of, well, the public? Large Canadian universities may be provincially funded and operated, but they compete nationally (and sometimes, internationally) for students, prestige, and donors. The incentive system is skewed towards acting like a private corporation would.

So while the debate in Vancouver on animal testing will go on, this isn’t a UBC issue—it’s a federal regulation one.