All Posts Tagged With: "University of Prince Edward Island"

What students are talking about today (March 1st)

Flanagan on CBC's Power and Politics

1.  Tom Flanagan, a soon-to-be former professor at the University of Calgary and a noted conservative strategist, has been lambasted for questioning the illegality of viewing child porn, which he originally did in an interview with The Manitoban in 2009 and again when asked about it at a lecture in Lethbridge on Wednesday. Practically every politician who ever worked with the guy was tripping over another to distance himself or herself from the comments on Thursday. Part of what he said was this: “I certainly have no sympathy for child molester, but I do have some grave doubts about putting people in jail for their taste in pictures.” On Thurday he apologized, but the damage was done. Still, one brave student columnist, Travis Gordon of The Cadre at the University of Prince Edward Island, wants people to calm down a bit and consider Flanagan’s academic freedom. “My question is this: Why was a professor retired for voicing an unpopular opinion in an academic setting?  Further, why did students not challenge Flanagan’s thinking intelligently?  Why instead did they boo him and call him disgusting? Has academic discourse in Canada rescinded into simple, guttural responses?”

Continue reading Tom Flanagan, a gross art project & #Lebowskipalooza

What students are talking about today (February 1st)

Kirti Poddar/Flickr

1. Nothing gets students more riled up than when you try to curb unhealthy binge drinking. The University of Ottawa proposed banning shots and limiting beer pitchers to groups of three people or more, but is reconsidering after a backlash from students. Anne-Marie Roy, spokesperson of the Student Federation at the University, told CBC News that the bars they run on campus are safe for students and that such restrictions would hurt revenues. (Not to mention the fact that students would probably just go somewhere else if they wanted shots or pitchers anyway.) Speaking of drinking, a new study shows that too much alcohol leads to Type 2 diabetes in rats. Just saying.

2. The federal Liberal leadership candidates are touring campuses. Justin Trudeau spoke at Brandon University in Manitoba on Thursday where he talked about broadening the party’s support and creating jobs. Marc Garneau was at the University of Prince Edward Island earlier this week where he told The Cadre he would help solve joblessness through a tax credit to employers who hire young people and capital gains exemptions for angel investors who invest in a start-ups.

3. At Queen’s University, where recent deaths caused a rethink of mental health services, The Journal reports that accessing Health, Counselling and Disability Services is difficult for people on certain schedules like those in the School of Nursing who work long days. The regular hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Thursday and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday. However, HCDS director Mike Condra has stepped up, saying that while evening and weekend appointments weren’t popular when offered in the past, students are welcome to call to try and arrange alternative appointments.

4. A pair of former students who tried and failed to sue the University of Toronto for $80-million for giving them failing grades can try again reports the National Post. Houman Mortazavi and Mojgan Yousefi, a married couple, had enrolled as doctoral students in the university’s Department of Economics in 2007, but repeatedly left Canada and flew back to Iran to visit an ailing relative during the semester. After much back and forth, the university issued them failing grades.

5. The University of Saskatchewan’s Faculty of Medicine’s council has voted in favour of changing the entrance requirements for medicine to make every applicant complete a four year degree before applying, reports CTV. The school currently accepts some students with as little as two years of study, but the faculty director of admission says students take advantage of the system by taking many easy introductory level courses in those first two years to boost their marks.

Freshman 15, politics in the classroom & anger at OCAD U.

yurilong/Flickr

1. Yesterday there was a flash sale from Chartwells at the University of Prince Edward Island during which poutine was 50 per cent off for a few hours. Cadre reporter Josh Coles took on the breaking news assignment: “This poutine was weighty. Heavy. Thick.  I would compare its weight to that of a litre of chocolate milk,” he wrote.

2. The poutine and chocolate milk diet seems like evidence for that legendary Freshman 15 weight gain, but another study suggests the weight gain isn’t really 15 pounds. Researchers from Auburn University in Alabama showed that the Freshman 15 is really more like the Four-Year 12. After four years at the college, students in the study had gained an average of 11.7 pounds.

3. Homecoming will likely make a homecoming next year at Queen’s University after students finally behaved in public with just 12 arrests over the weekend compared to 124 in 2008. In an email sent Monday to the Queen’s community, Principal Daniel Woolf wrote that he’s working with “various members of our community, including alumni, to plan for the potential safe return of fall reunions in 2013.” The University Council asked Woolf to reinstate the tradition, which was barred after many years of alcohol-related arrests. See The Perils of Drinking on Canadian Campuses for more.

Continue reading What students are talking about today (Sept. 18 edition)

Prof. Fiona Walton employs more than just empathy

Walton, 3M National Teaching Fellowship recipient (Photo by Kerri Wheatley)

“People aren’t fond of saying Aboriginal Education is going well,” says the University of Prince Edward Island’s Fiona Walton, “but there are many many pockets where marvelous things are happening.”

Walton’s CV is too long to recount, but there’s one central theme. This 3M National Teaching Fellowship recipient is dedicated to building leaders in Indigenous Education by focusing on doing more of the things that are going right.

Walton has taught students from many backgrounds in the Bachelor of Education Specialization in Indigenous Education at the University of Prince Edward Island, which she helped develop after years teaching in the Arctic. More recently, she’s guided the curriculum of the groundbreaking Master of Education Leadership in Nunavut.

Continue reading What’s going right in Indigenous Education

Recruiters didn’t show

Here’s more evidence that newly-minted teachers face a rough job market. The University of Prince Edward Island cancelled their education job fair this year due to lack of interest from recruiters, reports CBC News. But there is hope, they note, if students willing to travel to Nunavut. (Yes, seriously!) Last week we noted that the University of Manitoba’s teaching job fair attracted no local school boards, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police showed up, suggesting that while teachers aren’t in high demand in schools right now, their skills continue to be valued by other employers.

Prof. Pettigrew ranks our campus cartoonists

#2. Caveman Agent by Evan Eshelman

One fond memory of my undergraduate days is of reading the comics in the student newspaper. They lacked the artistry of professional comics in the big dailies but they had a certain joie de vivre that came with, presumably, not getting paid very much (if anything at all).

Since then I have followed university comics mainly when they get involved in controversies, as when the UPEI student newspaper was confiscated by university officials after it published the notorious Danish Mohammed cartoons, or when a community college ran a comic in which Barack Obama looked a bit like a monkey, or when the Saskatchewan student paper ran a comic, reportedly by mistake, showing Jesus in, shall we say, a sexually compromising position.

But browsing student news sites the other day, I became curious as to the state of university comics, so I went looking and found that the tradition was alive and well, and even better than I remember. In fact, I was so impressed that I am inspired to provide my entirely subjective, online-only list of the top five university comics in Canada. Here are my picks.

5. The Daily Snooze, by Jacob Samuel, Simon Fraser

Samuel provides us with quite charming one-off panel cartoons, of the sort one finds in The New Yorker—and provides fewer head scratchers than that redoubtable mag.

4. Ski Ninjas, by Kyle Lees,  Lakehead

Ski Ninjas feels like it could have been called Little Orphan Anime. I admire the strong lines and the simple off-beat humour, as in this strip where the joke is essentially that “booze” is a funny word. Which it is.

3. Too Fancy Gents, by Mike Hayes and Amani Elrofaie*, Western

Too Fancy Gents gives us the dialogue of two Oscar Wilde-esque fellows called Monocle and Bowler (perversely, Monocle wears a bowler, and Bowler wears a monocle). Typically our gents (who really are too fancy) sound awfully posh but quickly veer off into accounts of their sexual escapades or drug-fuelled misadventures.

2. Caveman Agent, by Evan Eshelman, York

I must admit, I don’t think I always understand Eshelman’s Caveman Agent (which feels a bit like Ziggy if Gary Larson had drawn it, with a dash of Krazy Kat for flavour), but the drawing is fantastic and the artist manages to catch his main character (is Cavemen his name?) in oddly human moments, as in this panel where he tries to keep his dinosaur from being traumatized.

This one makes me slightly regret my one-winner-per-university rule, though, since York provides several other worthy candidates, including Adventuresome by Keith Maclean, and the very clever Sent from the Moon, by Alison Wight. Let’s call those very honourable mentions.

1. Glamour Pig, by Katherine Johnson, Dalhousie

Glamour Pig is a largely text-based comic with admittedly sketchy drawing, but has just the sort of skewed viewpoint that gives us a new perspective on life (as in one comic where Johnson lists some of the downsides of eye glasses: “Impossibility of repair should damage occur in post-apocalyptic future.”). This is the kind of comic that makes you feel like you have a cool new friend.

If I have missed any worthy candidates, please feel free to link to them below. Meantime, campus cartoon artists: don’t stop now!

*We initially failed to give credit to Amani Elrofaiem, the illustrator behind Too Fancy Gents. We regret the error. Additionally we initially listed Ski Ninjas as Sky Ninjas. This post was updated Jan. 14, 2011.

Students currently need to meet with the VP Finance to see details

Photo by Jenna Marie Wakani.

The University of Prince Edward Island Student Union says it will continue to keep the details of its budgets “for members only.” In other words, these pie charts with no figures attached are all that will remain posted on their website—the place where the public would normally expect to find details.

This comes after students demanded at a meeting last week that the union make their plans for spending easier to find, reports The Cadre.

That meeting resulted from a Facebook post that made the rounds. It said: “$700 of your dollars will go to the UPEISU over four years. Do you think that the SU budget should be accessible to the students and be able to see how they’re spending your money? Post this if you are concerned…”

Continue reading Student union still won’t publish its budget

Mandatory retirement against human rights law

The University of Prince Edward Island was recently ordered to reinstate three employees who were forced to retire under a mandatory retirement policy that was found in contravention of the Human Rights Act. Mandatory retirement was once common in Canadian universities, but it has been largely phased out through a combination of provincial legislation and university amendments to their own retirement provisions. UPEI was one of the last institutions to have such a policy.

Psychology professor Thomy Nillson, sociology professor Richard Willis and receiving clerk Yogi Fell will be returning to work complete with back pay minus retirement benefits already paid out. The UPEI Human Rights Commission ruled in favour of the three employees, who were forced to retire between 2005 and 2007, back in February but only recently issued orders for the university to reinstate them. The university must also “Refrain in the future from committing the same or similar contravention, namely,
mandatory retirement.”

University officials are not pleased with the order and estimate that compliance will cost more than $1 million in addition to $325,000 required to respect the order on an annual basis. “For comparison purposes, this is double the increase to our government operating grant for Main Campus in 2010-11,” Gary Bradshaw, vice-president finance, said in a statement. Bradshaw further warned that “Restrictions on hiring and on discretionary expenditures are anticipated.” UPEI is also on the hook for $52,000 in legal costs that the UPEI Faculty Association incurred in arguing the case.

The university maintains that their mandatory retirement policy was justified under a provision of the Human Rights Act that states that prohibitions against age based restrictions “do not affect the operation of any genuine retirement or pension plan.” The university has also cited a 1990 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that concluded mandatory retirement policies were exempt when there exists a “genuine retirement or pension plan.”

The Human Rights Commission disagreed with those arguments, concluding that the university ” had failed to establish that the discrimination was justified.” UPEI is appealing the decision to the Supreme Court of Prince Edward Island.

The Faculty Association is satisfied with the result and in its own statement said it would provide a check on the university to ensure it respects the rights of the reinstated employees. “Moving forward, the Association will work to ensure that the collective agreement rights of those being reinstated, of the departments involved, and of other members in those departments are all respected,” the statement read.

The association also expressed concerns over the university’s response. “It is unfortunate, though, that the Vice-President’s memo also seems to threaten the entire University community in response to the Commission’s Decision and Order . . .  This is especially concerning given that we are now in negotiations.”

Is the university looking to make more money? Hard to say, since they treat student borrowers better than most

The University of Prince Edward Island is the latest university in Canada to announce plans to disallow the use of credit cards for tuition payments.

The university expects to save $125,000 a year in transaction fees.

The undergraduate student union president Tim Cullen expressed concerns to CBC News that students may incur late fees university because of delays getting student loans. Under the current credit card payment system, it is possible for students to avoid late fees by charging to their credit cards and paying off the credit card balance with student loans.

While I normally agree with the concerns expressed by Cullen, the situation is not as black-and-white as it first seems.

UPEI is more reasonable than most universities (Not saying much, I know) in the country for student borrowers. Many universities punish students requiring student loans with “administrative fees” and high interest rates that probably make credit card companies blush. (See a chart of these fees at 27 selected universities here)

UPEI allows two weeks for student loans to arrive from the beginning of the semester. For most students, this is more than enough time to process and receive their loans. Many universities require payment prior to the beginning of the academic year and charge student loan recipients “late fees.”

While UPEI may be reasonable in this policy, it is clear that students unable to meet their deadline will be “SUBJECT TO LATE FEES AS SPECIFIED UNDER THE FEES SECTION OF THE UNIVERSITY CALENDAR” (emphasis is from university’s own form for students requesting permission for late payment.)

Instead of fighting against the university, the students’ union should be lobbying the university to use the $125,000 saved to waive late fees for students in financial need. Then, the new policy will be a win-win for the university and students. The university will save more money than it will use to “subsidize” students needing alternative payment agreements. Students needing extra time for payment will receive it without having to turn to credit cards to bridge them over.

While I commend the UPEISU for taking a stand on the issue, their energy may be better spent looking for a new solution for students who use credit cards instead of trying to hold onto the status quo.

Yeah, an exam near exams sucks, but it’s better than a bad election at a good time.

CBC reports that a new election will be held for student union president at UPEI after problems with the first election.

I’m glad to see that at least one students’ union in this country understands the importance of a fair, transparent election process in the ability of the students union president to successfully hold the creditably to do the job.

It may be annoying to hold another election, but it is much better than having a president who does not have the ability to lobby because they are not seen as legitimate.