Measuring excellence

By Mary Dwyer - Sunday, October 30, 2011 at 4:30 PM - 0 Comments

Andrew Tolson/Maclean's

Maclean’s places universities in one of three categories, recognizing the differences in types of institutions, levels of research funding, the diversity of offerings, and the breadth and depth of graduate and professional programs. Primarily Undergraduate universities are largely focused on undergraduate education, tend to be smaller in size, and have relatively fewer graduate programs and graduate students. Those in the Comprehensive category have a significant degree of research activity and a wide range of programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including professional degrees. Medical Doctoral universities offer a broad range of Ph.D. programs and research; as well, all universities in this category have medical schools, which sets them apart in terms of the size of research grants.

This year, Maclean’s revised its classification of universities—the first change since 1992 when the categories were created—moving Brock, Ryerson and Wilfrid Laurier from the Primarily Undergraduate category to the Comprehensive category. The move is in response to both the number of graduate offerings at these universities and the size of the student body. Ryerson, with 20,000 full-time students, has always been an anomaly in terms of size in the Primarily Undergraduate category, where the full-time population at other schools ranges from roughly 2,000 to 7,000 students. Meanwhile, Brock and Wilfrid Laurier have doubled in size over the past decade with full-time student enrolment at each now standing at 15,000. In recent years, all three universities have significantly increased their graduate offerings. This trend, particularly at the master’s level, is not uncommon at some of the institutions in the Primarily Undergraduate category, but coupled with the size of the student body, the increase in graduate programs at Brock, Ryerson and Wilfrid Laurier translates into a lot more graduate students on campus.

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What Brazil knows that we don’t

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 28, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Pedro Ladeira/Agencia Estado/Keystone Press Agency

This week we are wondering whether the government of Canada thinks it’s more important to talk or to act.

Every now and then, Stephen Harper’s government phones up some experts and asks them to lead a panel and come up with smart advice. Then it ignores the advice. In 2008 it asked a businessman named Red Wilson for advice on making Canada more competitive. Wilson offered 65 recommendations. Most were never implemented. This fall there are new reports, from businessman Tom Jenkins on corporate R&D, and from career soldier Andrew Leslie on the structure of the military. We’ll see whether they do better.

Meanwhile, every week brings a new panel. In October, Ed Fast, the trade minister, was in China announcing a panel to come up with advice on “an international education strategy.”

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That’s ‘professor’ uptight to you

By Josh Dehaas - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 8 Comments

Photographs by Laura Mills

June Madeley is annoyed with the increasingly rude demands she gets from students at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. Ten years ago, it was common for them to see her during office hours when they had a question. “Now there’s an expectation that we’ll answer their emails immediately and meet them whenever there’s a good time for them.” And as surely as the leaves pile up on campus each October, the communications professor knows her inbox will soon fill with complaints about mid-terms scheduled for the week after the Thanksgiving holiday. “There are a lot of people who feel they can’t make the exam because of travel arrangements,” she says. “And others who think it’s unfair that they have to study that weekend.”

But when Madeley gets frustrated, she doesn’t fire off a snotty email to the student. She logs on to “That’s ‘Professor’ Uptight to You, Johnny,” a Facebook group with 297 members, all of them teaching at universities and colleges. The members-only site is a place where university educators can vent in the form of steaming emails they wish they could write to their students but can’t because that would be, well, rude. Madeley, who says she hasn’t posted yet, enjoys reading the rants from her colleagues. The site is run by Khrystyne Keane, a Connecticut-based editor for a non-profit group, who took over its administration as a favour to a professor friend. The logo—a unicorn standing under a rainbow—is a jab at students, some of whom feel they are every bit as special as the fabled one-horned horse and the multicoloured arc.

The posts are all written to anonymous Janeys and Johnnies, but they share one trait: carefully crafted sarcasm. “Dear Johnny, I suspect that if you had spent as much time and effort on your last assignment as you did on the long flaming email you just sent me, this whole ‘conversation’ would never have happened,” reads one. “Dear Janey, I want to assure you that we didn’t do anything important in class. We just stared out the window for three hours in silence,” reads another.

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Who should teach our teenagers about drinking at university?

By the editors - Monday, September 19, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Dave Chidley/CP

Some predictions can be made with absolute certainty. The tides will shift. The sun will rise. And young university students will drink to excess.

From Tom Brown’s Schooldays to Animal House, exuberant drinking by underage students has long been a part of the experience of going away to school. Realistically, there is little society can do to change this fact of life. But what can we all do to cut down on the harm it may cause?

Last week, Canada’s university community was shocked by an orientation-week death at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S. A first-year student from Calgary, just 19 years old, was found unconscious in a basement dorm room at the school suffering from severe alcohol poisoning. He later died in hospital. Fellow students told reporters he’d been playing a competitive drinking game called “flip cup” and had consumed an estimated 40 ounces of alcohol during the night.

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And if you don’t get in…

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:45 PM - 0 Comments

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Roughly three-quarters of medical school applicants are rejected each year. Bummer. Luckily for them, wannabe doctors have better alternatives than ever. These four professional health care programs can be completed in just a few years, are in high demand, and pay well directly out of school. That means graduates can start paying off their student loans while medical residents are still driving beat-up old cars to 24-hour shifts.

Health Care Manager

The Job: Health care managers work in hospitals, medical clinics and nursing homes where they direct teams of health care providers. Their job is to make sure patients get excellent care and, simultaneously, that Canadians get good value for the nearly $200 billion they spend on health care each year.

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Ranking Canada’s law schools

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Ian Barrett

Are a law school’s professors significant contributors to the intellectual life of their discipline? Do a law school’s graduates land the most sought-after jobs in government, the private sector and academia? These are the two questions Maclean’s annual law survey seeks to answer.

All of the data used in the Maclean’s law rankings are publicly available. All focus on law school outputs. Fifty per cent of the overall ranking is determined by faculty quality, and 50 per cent by graduate quality.

The four measures of graduate quality look at the success each law school has had producing graduates able to land the most competitive jobs. The indicators are:

Elite Firm Hiring: Maclean’s calculated how many of each school’s graduates are serving as associates at law firms on Lexpert’s list of the largest firms in Canada across all regions, or at one of the five leading New York firms, according to the employment website Vault. This was done by examining the online biographies of thousands of lawyers at dozens of law firms. To scale this measure to each school, the tally was divided by first-year class size, averaged over the past three years. This measure is worth 20 per cent.

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Bye-bye Bay Street

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Nayan Sthankiya

When she was in law school, Amber Biemans always figured she’d practise in the city. After she and her husband had kids, though, she felt the pull of small-town life. At age 26, Biemans joined a firm in Humboldt, Sask. (population 5,900); two years later, she’d bought out a senior partner at the firm who was ready to retire. Making partner at age 28 was an “amazing opportunity,” says Biemans, now 32, but beyond that, “the benefits here are immense,” from the commute to work—which takes all of five minutes—to the close relationships she’s built with clients.

Small-town lawyers like Biemans are becoming an endangered species. As a group, they’re getting older: outside Winnipeg in southwestern Manitoba, almost three-quarters of lawyers have been practising for more than 20 years, says the province’s law society. Rural lawyers who want to retire are having a hard time finding young lawyers to replace them—but at the same time, in Canadian cities, young lawyers are having a harder time than ever finding work. In Ontario, the lack of articling positions has gotten so bad it’s been called a crisis, and the number of students being hired back has gone down, too. Some U.S. law schools are even facing lawsuits from disgruntled ex-students who allege they were misled about their employment prospects after graduation. Newly minted lawyers have typically chased jobs at the big downtown firms, but given the current climate, it could be that some of the best opportunities are in smaller practices, as Biemans found.

This month, Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in Kamloops, B.C., welcomed 65 students to its faculty of law, Canada’s first new law school in over 30 years. Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay, Ont., also recently got the go-ahead to open a law school of its own—Ontario’s first in 42 years, and the only one in the north end of the province. (Lakehead’s first class of 55 students will start in 2013.) It’s worth noting that both law schools share a similar mandate: to train lawyers in relatively remote settings, in the hopes they’ll settle there. This model has already had success at Lakehead’s Northern Ontario School of Medicine, which has managed to attract and retain doctors in the area. About 60 per cent of graduates stay to practise there, says Lakehead president Brian Stevenson, and “another 15 or 20 per cent go to other rural medical practices in Ontario.”

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The home advantage

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Vincenzo D’Alto

“Canada has gone from brain drain to brain gain,” Stephen Harper told a crowd at McMaster University on Aug. 3. He was speaking at a ceremony to announce the 167 recipients of the 2011 Vanier Scholarships, awards that were launched in 2007 to provide whiz-kid graduate students from around the world with $150,000 in funding over three years. The Prime Minister made the goal of the big cheques clear. Research leads to innovations, which creates Canadian jobs, he said.

But wait a minute. Has the brain drain that sucked south 488 members of the graduating engineering class of 1995 before the ink dried on their degrees really been plugged? Look more closely at the 167 Vanier Scholarships awarded this year. Only eight will fund engineering research. Only five of those went to Canadian citizens or residents.

The shortage of Canadians in our graduate engineering programs is masked by another phenomenon: international enrolments in graduate engineering programs grew by 36.6 per cent between 2006 and 2009, allowing for a modest 3.5 per cent growth overall at a time when Canadian enrolments declined 2.5 per cent, according to Engineers Canada.

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Get them where they live

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Richmond Lam

Ridge Cross-McComber is about as blasé as your average overachiever when it comes to his laundry list of goals for the next few years and beyond. He’ll finish his year at Montreal’s Dawson College, move to Vanier College for either nursing or pure and applied science, then go to medical school to become a surgeon. After that, he’ll practise medicine in Kahnawake, his hometown. “I want to be a role model for my community,” says the 17-year-old, sitting in a café in the native reserve near Montreal. “It’s something I want to do for my town and my people. I want to show that I can do this.”

As far as medical school goes, history and statistics are stacked against Cross-McComber. Wealthy students tend to be overrepresented in the field, for one. According to a study by the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada, nearly 45 per cent of medical students come from families making over $100,000 a year. (Only about 26 per cent of Canadian families are in this demographic, according to the AFMC study.) And while medical schools are decidedly less uniformly Caucasian than they used to be, the AFMC study indicates that many visible minorites continue to be under-represented.

McGill’s faculty of medicine wants the situation to change, starting with students like Cross-McComber. Last year, the faculty instituted “Towards Health,” a program aimed at actively recruiting from outside the traditional student pool. Towards Health is what is known as a pipeline program, in which the university recruits at underprivileged Montreal-area high schools in hopes of inspiring minds to come its way in the future.

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Poor little rich M.B.A.s

By Paul Wells - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

As defenders of the downtrodden go, Roger Martin deserves points for chutzpah at least. It’s harder to feel sympathy for Martin’s chosen underprivileged group than it would be if he were sticking up for, say, orphans and widows—because Martin has spent much of the year arguing that Canadians, and especially their governments, aren’t giving enough money to the country’s business schools.

At first glance, Canadians might be reluctant to shed a tear. Martin is the dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, not conspicuously a hardship case. The school has raised $130 million on its way to a $200-million fundraising target, timed to coincide with next year’s opening of a new 15,000-sq.-m building in downtown Toronto. But its successes, Martin maintains, come despite the lack of adequate government support, especially from Ottawa.

“For some reason the federal government thinks it’s a good idea to spend hardly any money on business education,” Martin said in an interview. “And that’s just confusing. Why is it that a government that’s interested in competitiveness and productivity—not just this government, it’s any government—doesn’t live up to that priority? I just don’t get it. Where do they come up with their theory that says business schools are unimportant?”

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Where wannabe journalists are flocking

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 3 Comments

Carmen Smith used to think she didn’t need graduate school. And why would she? Even before finishing her bachelor of journalism degree at Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C., Smith was the publisher of a women’s magazine called Belle, which she founded.

But she changed her mind after an academic adviser told her about a new master’s in journalism program offered at King’s College in Halifax that could help her do better with her own publication. “I really thought it was interesting to see how they were developing their program around entrepreneurial journalism,” Smith recalls. “That’s why I came.”

Smith, now 22, is one of a growing number of wannabe journalists heading to master’s programs in Canada. Before 2000, there were only two degrees available in the country, at Carleton University and the University of Western Ontario. Today, there are six, with the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University both gearing up their own programs.

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Canada's League: Maclean's 2011 Guide to Canadian Universities

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 4, 2011 at 1:51 PM - 0 Comments

Maclean’s thanks Canada’s universities for collaborating on the 2011 university guidebook video and acknowledges all footage used was submitted and provided by them. The universities are: Bishop’s, Carleton, Dalhousie, Kwantlen, Lakehead, Laval, McGill, Memorial, Mt. Allison, NSCAD, OCAD, Queen’s, Quest, Royal Roads, Ryerson, Simon Fraser, St. Thomas, Thompson Rivers, Trent, UBC, UNBC, UOttawa, PEI, USask, UVic, and UWO.

Music by Simon Gadke; Voiceover by Philippe Gohier; Directed and produced by Stephanie Findlay and Kerrin McNamara

Bureaucracy now!

By Josh Dehaas - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:36 AM - 2 Comments

Photograph By Andrew Tolson

It can be lonely for recruiters manning the booths for big banks or retailers at Ryerson University’s student job fairs. “The government agencies get a lot more attention,” says Ian Ingles, the organizer of the Toronto events.

That’s no surprise, considering the statistics. In a recent survey for Studentawards.com, 30 per cent of university students picked the government of Canada as their employer of choice. Then came Health Canada. Provincial governments did well too, beating out all of the banks and the video game developers. Even the trendiest private sector companies, Apple and Google, couldn’t beat the federal agencies.The results echo another recent survey of nearly 10,000 Canadian students by research firm Universum. In it, arts graduates, for example, gave the government of Canada, the provincial governments and Health Canada gold, silver and bronze respectively.

The recession explains some of the zeal for the civil service. During the rough days of 2009, students got the message that private companies were shedding employees while government workers were relatively unaffected: there was a record-setting 4,000 applications for 106 Ontario government internships in early 2009.

But how to explain the post-recession jump in applications for the same internship program? Last March, even with many private sector employers hiring graduates again, applications to the annual program grew by more than 20 per cent to just over 5,000 for 76 spots.

Demographics—and the altruistic goals of new graduates—best explain the march toward public service, says Sandra Botha, a campus recruiter for the government of British Columbia. Modern immigrants to Canada are proud to work for the government, she says. “Many students perceive a government job as having a lot of prestige, because it did in their parents’ country of origin,” she explains. “We have many more Chinese-Canadians applying in B.C., and if you come from China, working for the government is considered the job.”

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The more things change

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 11:36 AM - 17 Comments

Jacob Serebrin looks at how the discussion of education policy has and hasn’t changed since Lester B. Pearson addressed the University of British Columbia in 1965. He also digs up a Canadian Press clip from the time that recounts the heckles Mr. Pearson was treated to at that speech and one earlier in the day.

Shouts of “Yankee parrot” and “go back to the U.S., Mike” greeted the prime minister as he spoke for 35 minutes almost without pause before 2,900 in the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

He seemed to be replying to the hecklers when he said: “Whining anti-Americanism is not the same as vigorous Canadianism.”

Earlier, he faced good-natured needling as he spoke to about 4,000 students at the University of British Columbia.

“What’s new, pussycat?” one student shouted as Mr. Pearson was quoting statistics on university financial problems from the recent Bladen report. “Mike for the Senate,” another interjected as the 68-year-old Liberal leader finished his speech.

Reinforcements

By Paul Wells - Monday, December 20, 2010 at 4:38 PM - 14 Comments

I finally got around to reading Patrick Deane’s installation address as President of McMaster University, which came highly recommended for its defense of the campus as a bastion of values more universal and durable than we usually read about in the morning papers. The whole speech is worth reading. Deane doesn’t just offer ringing endorsements of grand principles, but acknowledges that worthy goals can conflict. But I stopped short after the first sentence — “In 1975 I was an undergraduate at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg” — because it suggests a trend.

Deane is in fact South African. He came to Canada in 1978 as a grad student, the kind we are sometimes told will take “our” fancy education, paid with our tax dollars, and go home. He stayed. So have a growing number of Canadian university presidents who were born far abroad.

I’m most familiar with Amit Chakma from Bangladesh, who is already making an impression as Western’s new president. A few weeks ago Léo Charbonneau wrote about a bunch of others, including Alaa S. Abd-El-Aziz at UPEI, Feridun Hamdullahpur at Waterloo, Mamdouh Shoukri at York and a relative veteran, Indira Samarasekera at the University of Alberta. Lesley Lovett-Doust, at Nipissing, is Scottish. Neil Turok, not quite a university president, is Canada’s most prominent advocate for higher education in his native Africa. One could go on and on.

I mention this for its own inherent interest and because we’ve got some fights coming up in Canada about whether our universities (and, yes, our tax dollars) are supposed to help us function in the world or reinforce our parochialism.

UManitoba—PhD 'diploma mill'

By Carson Jerema - Monday, November 1, 2010 at 1:19 PM - 0 Comments

Originally published at Maclean’s OnCampus, October 28, 2010

Earlier this month Gabor Lukacs received two letters from University of Manitoba president David Barnard. One invited the assistant professor of mathematics to a dinner in acknowledgement of his teaching excellence award. The other informed him that he was being suspended without pay.

Lukacs is accused of violating the university’s privacy regulations with respect to the identity of a PhD student who had been asked to withdraw from the program after twice failing a comprehensive exam. The student later successfully appealed that decision to the Dean of Graduate Studies, John Doering, who, in fall 2009, waived the requirement that the student take the exam at all. The student is said to suffer from “extreme exam anxiety.”

After months of attempting to use university channels to have Doering’s decision reversed, Lukacs filed an application in late September at Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench. The application calls for Doering’s decision to be quashed and for an affirmation that the dean had no authority to resolve the issue without consulting an appeal committee of academics. Lukacs alleges that Doering violated Faculty of Graduate Studies regulations and the University of Manitoba Act.

Although the student’s identity was included in Lukacs original court application, at a hearing Thursday morning a judge ordered a publication ban on the name.

When outlining the reasons for Lukacs’ suspension, Barnard cites the court application directly in his letter, a copy of which has been obtained by Maclean’s. “These documents include unauthorized reference to a student’s personal and personal health information,” Barnard wrote. The university president calls Lukacs “insubordinate” and further accuses him of “having engaged in a pattern of behaviour with regard to [the] student which the university considers to be harassment.”

Several people contacted for this story, including Dean Doering and certain professors in the Department of Mathematics, either declined to speak to the matter, did not respond to a request to be interviewed, or redirected Maclean’s to the university’s Director of Public Affairs, John Danakas. Danakas declined to speak to the specifics of the case, citing “personnel” and “privacy” issues, but agreed to address university policy in general terms.

In a written response, Danakas stated that all university employees are bound by the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, and the Personal Health Information Act. “In general personal information about a student, with or without the name attached, may only be disclosed to other university employees who absolutely need to know the information for the purposes of performing other duties,” he wrote.

As for the powers of the dean, Danakas stated that “It is university practice to attempt to resolve appeals at the lowest possible level. This could include a dean achieving an informal resolution with a student after a broad consultation.”

Lukacs, who says he did not meet the student in person until he served the student with court papers, says he is motivated by a desire to protect academic standards. “I have a personal interest in protecting the integrity of the PhD program in Mathematics, because it affects my reputation whether I am a member of a respectable department or a diploma-mill,” he stated via email.

When asked to respond to allegations that he violated the student’s privacy, Lukacs defended himself: “The right for privacy cannot trump the need for review of decisions made without jurisdiction, or decisions that are patently unreasonable.”

According to emails and other documents included with an affidavit filed by Lukacs, the dispute began in March 2009 when the student failed for the second time a comprehensive exam in analysis. Under regulations outlined by the Faculty of Graduate Studies the student was required to withdraw from the PhD program.

In July, after an unsuccessful appeal to an associate dean, the student appealed the withdrawal to Dean Doering on the basis of suffering from “extreme exam anxiety.” Doering reinstated the student and requested that the Graduate Studies Committee in the Department of Mathematics devise an alternate examination option.

The committee, after consulting with disability services, agreed to allow the student to retake the exam with more time and relaxed conditions.

In late August 2009, Doering rejected that proposal and requested that the student be given an oral exam. When the graduate studies committee did not agree to those terms, Doering waived the exam requirement altogether.

Lukacs first became involved with the case in October 2009, after he was elected to replace a member of the graduate studies committee who had resigned, allegedly in protest of the dean’s decision.

Lukacs was briefed on the case and was informed that the department was awaiting written confirmation from Doering that the exam requirement was indeed waived for the student. Lukacs then took it upon himself to investigate the matter further and, in an email dated October 30 2009, requested that Doering affirm his decision.

Lukacs also challenged the dean’s authority to settle academic appeals, writing: “my understanding is that the Dean has no jurisdiction to determine academic appeals at all—that power is reserved for the Appeal Committee of the [Faculty of Graduate Studies].”

In an email response, a copy of which has been filed in court, Doering confirmed that he waived the exam requirement and disputed the claim that he did not have the authority to do so. “I heard that appeal and rendered a decision, i.e., I reinstated the student and waived any requirement to sit another comprehensive exam,” the dean wrote. “Moreover, I would note many of the things a dean can do are not written down.”

When Lukacs persisted, Doering referred him to the university’s legal counsel, who affirmed the assertion that the dean acted within his powers. Lukacs subsequently contacted the university secretary, as well as the vice-president academic. Each time he was told either that Doering acted correctly or was referred elsewhere.

On December 2, 2009, Lukacs called a meeting of the mathematics department council to discuss taking the case directly to the university’s senate. In the notice sent to the department, some details of the case were revealed but the student’s name was not given.

As a result, Mark Whitmore, Dean of the Faculty of Science reprimanded Lukacs, arguing that “this disclosure has exposed the university to a potential complaint by the student” in relation to a breach of “privacy.” Lukacs was advised to consider the matter closed and warned that further disciplinary action could be taken.

Several faculty members of the math department signed a letter in protest of the reprimand.

One of those colleagues was George Gratzer, a distinguished professor of mathematics who told Maclean’s that while a dean has authority to decide if a student appeal has merit and may try to mediate a resolution, an appeal committee of academics has to be called if conciliation is not possible. “In this case the dean decides he had powers not written down, and that counter the published regulations of the faculty of graduate studies,” Gratzer said. “This strikes me as something as incredibly inappropriate.” Gratzer has filed his own affidavit in court in support of Lukacs.

On two separate occasions Lukacs requested the senate’s own appeal committee hear the case, and both times was told that the case was outside the senate committee’s jurisdiction.

It was after his second appeal to the senate was denied that Lukacs filed his court application. In addition to arguing that Doering acted outside of his authority, the application also alleges that the student “abused” the appeal process by waiting until twice failing an exam before claiming exam anxiety.

Additionally in August of this year, it was discovered that the student was short one course to complete the doctoral program. Doering decided to allow the student, who was scheduled to graduate this month, to elevate a fourth-year course to the level of a graduate course. Lukacs is also applying for that decision to be reversed.

A court hearing is scheduled for Nov 30, and counsel for the University of Manitoba will file notice that it will contest the case by Nov 5.

Lukacs is grieving his suspension through the faculty union and his students have circulated a petition advocating his reinstatement.

Meet your kids' new roommate: The Bedbug

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, October 9, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

David P. Hall/Corbis/ Mark Rightmire/Zuma/ Keystone Press

Imagine you’re a bedbug—a creepy nocturnal creature, maybe no bigger than an apple seed, that craves human blood. Times are good for you right now in North America. DDT once rendered your species a distant memory, a revolting relic found only in children’s rhymes. But you’ve evolved immunity to the short-lived, environmentally friendly insecticides of today, and you’re on the march. So where would you prefer to nest and spread your progeny? You’d look for a communal setting, one where people are frequently moving and swapping furniture. Tidiness is a minus; substance-induced inertia a plus. The ideal host population would include sheltered young people who have never seen a bedbug or learned to recognize its excreta.

“Universities are in the line of fire,” declares Don McCarthy, president of Braemar Pest Control in Bedford, N.S., and board member of the Canadian Pest Management Association. “You’ve got transient populations. You’ve got a lot of the social aspects that come with being at university—your buddies come over and sleep over; everybody’s going back and forth to parties and study sessions. There is not a major university anywhere in North America that does not know this is a major problem, whether or not they have it.”

There is no evidence bedbugs can transmit disease, and their whole modus operandi is to be noticed as little as possible. But news of their presence can ward off visitors and clients as effectively as any plague—as retailers are discovering in New York City, where flagship stores for franchises such as Niketown and Victoria’s Secret have had to close temporarily to address infestations, and as Toronto learned in August when a mere Internet whisper had Toronto International Film Festival organizers double-checking venues.

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From e-books to no books

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

Andre Zelck/laif/Redux

Earlier this month, the University of Texas at San Antonio announced it had built the world’s first bookless library. Its Applied Engineering and Technology Library offers access to 425,000 e-books and 18,000 e-journal subscriptions, and librarians say they’ve yet to hear a complaint from the 350-plus students and faculty who pass through its doors daily. “We’ve gotten no negative feedback,” says Krisellen Maloney, library dean at the University of Texas. “We looked at circulation rates, we looked at electronic resources, we looked at requests, and we decided that having the services was more important than the physical books.” She adds bluntly: “When we prioritized the needs, the books weren’t the priority.”

It used to be that the size of a collection defined a library’s greatness, but now with access to online academic journals and e-books, a large physical collection doesn’t yield the same competitive advantage.

Now the bookless trend is taking hold in Canada, where more and more libraries are expanding their electronic resources. “My own institution has increased its holdings exponentially,” says Ernie Ingles, vice-provost and chief librarian at the University of Alberta and president of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL). “Virtually 90 per cent of our journals are electronic now, without print equivalents, and I believe we have approaching one million e-books in one kind or another.” Ingles says that all the members of CARL, including the University of British Columbia, the University of Ottawa and Dalhousie University, are moving in a similar direction.

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The beginning of the end of frosh week

By Julia Belluz and Nicholas Kohler - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph Andrew Tolson/ Pawel Dwulit/CP Images

Natasha Zapanta, a cheery first-year Queen’s University business student in a perfectly manicured first-week outfit, won’t be telling her grandchildren about any Old School-worthy hijinks. Frosh week for this 17-year-old involved scavenger hunts, a video dance party and “Commerce Cares”—random acts of kindness visited upon unsuspecting fellow students by commerce freshmen. “There was nighttime partying,” she admits, “but we just stayed in the residence hall.” Most of her friends are also 17, below Ontario’s legal drinking age and, while alcohol is readily available, they’ve been warned not to indulge.

For biochemistry major Connor Forbes, the week was so low-key it threatened to dampen that famous Queen’s school spirit altogether. The gloom extended even to the engineering faculty, where students were this year banned from the school’s ancient move-in day tradition, in which engineers paint themselves purple and taunt incoming freshmen. Engineering society president Victoria Pleavin, citing complaints, sent an email to all engineering students warning them that anyone caught engaged in the practice would be escorted off campus. “Move-in day was really an introduction to the fun of the school and gave you a sense of community,” says Forbes. “The event is gone and we don’t know if it’s coming back. They took it away.”

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Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 15, 2010 at 1:50 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Ignatieff throws out a suggestion.

On the second day of his summer-long cross-country tour, Ignatieff told people at a town hall meeting in Kingston that international experience is not something that should be frowned upon. It’s a direct rebuttal to the Conservative party’s efforts to paint Ignatieff — who spent more than two decades living and working in Britain and the United States — as someone who’s just visiting Canada.

“I don’t want Canadians to think the only good Canadian is someone who’s never left these shores,” Ignatieff said. He envisions a program in which the federal government would provide subsidized placements with Canadian institutions or partners overseas to “internationalize” an entire generation of young people.

Law school: 'kindergarten for cretins'

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, June 3, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 15 Comments

Getty Images

Most people think of lawyers as silver-tongued, but Robert Martin, a retired law professor at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., admits that subtlety is not his strong suit. His paper, “University Legal Education in Canada is Corrupt Beyond Repair,” is as subtle as a sledgehammer: in it, he compares law faculties to “psychotic kindergartens” populated by “a horde of illiterate, ignorant cretins.” The paper, published last fall in the academic journal Interchange, made the rounds of law blogs and news sites in Canada and abroad last week, turning Martin into a minor Internet phenom.

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When reality bites

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 32 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

During his final year at the University of Ottawa, Justin Cantin had one goal for his first job after graduation: not to wear a uniform. Ideally, he hoped to put his undergraduate degree in history to work in a museum or doing research. But after graduating last December, in the aftermath of the most severe recession in decades, reality hit. With $45,000 in loans, the 23-year-old moved back in with his mom in Mississauga, Ont., and started sending out resumés. He soon broadened his search to include part-time jobs, factory positions—“whatever would give me a paycheque,” he says. Last week, he landed a warehouse gig in Waterloo, Ont. Though relocating for a manual labour job is not something he ever imagined he’d do, he says, “It’s better than nothing.”

As Cantin struggles to adjust his expectations, he can take comfort, however cold, in the knowledge that many of his peers are doing the same. Though it’s been months since Canada’s economy returned to growth, recessions have a way of bearing down hard on youth, even long after they’re officially over. Predominantly employed in industries like retail and food service, which depend on consumer demand, or in unions where seniority rules, youth tend to be first on the chopping block when the economy goes south. This time was no different: since October 2008, more than 190,000 jobs for young people have disappeared; unemployment among 15- to 24-year-olds rose to 16.3 per cent in August 2009, almost double the overall rate.

Although jobs are slowly coming back—as of February, youth unemployment had dropped to 15.2 per cent—what’s on offer is hardly the stuff from which middle-class careers are made. Thanks to the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, hiring freezes and the delayed retirement of workers, for many the reality is a spell of unemployment or a low-paying gig—both of which can have lasting consequences, derailing careers for years to come. While it’s impossible to know how much their future will be shaped by the Great Recession, one thing is clear: the generation raised to believe in the limitlessness of their own potential has just been dealt a very unlucky blow.

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User pay: how lucid

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 4:51 PM - 55 Comments

Lucien Bouchard, whose government maintained a cap on tuitions at Quebec universities, urges Jean Charest, whose government has been increasing tuition fees at a timid rate of $50 per semester, to blow the doors off and let tuition rates rise to the national (that is, Canadian) average. I am hunkering down while the CFS loads its muskets. Many years ago I spent weeks here writing arguments that closely resemble Bouchard’s. The archives of this blog being a bit of a fragile flower, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Where all that money is going

By W.D. Smith - Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 1:10 PM - 14 Comments

The annual tuition fee debate has begun. This is the war dance that takes place every winter, when senior university administrators announce that students yet again face substantial hikes. Those administrators roll out the rationale they use every year: the increases are necessary to protect educational quality, top faculty costs top dollar, and the only alternatives are declining quality and staff layoffs or increased government funding. Students get angry. They claim that university is becoming a place for only the wealthy, that quality has suffered enough, and that debt loads are becoming unmanageable. Boards of governors—the guardians of public interest when it comes to the operation of universities—wring their hands and voice genuine empathy. They hope for solutions but find none. And then, as they always do, they approve the increases proposed by senior administration.

Here’s the thing: the students have a point—at least according to a detailed analysis of the finances of Canada’s largest 25 universities. A study of 21 years of data compiled annually by StatsCan for the Canadian Association of University Business Officers (CAUBO) reveals some startling trends. In 1987-88, the top 25 universities spent $6 billion across all their activities; by 2007-08, that had increased by almost four times inflation, to $21 billion. That equates to about 13 per cent of Canada’s health care budget, or more than the entire defence budget. And that’s only the top 25 schools.

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