Spotted at Concordia University last week
Nice to know I have a government that will spend my tax money on giant, unnecessary signs that advertise to me other ways the government is using my tax money.
I wonder if there's a similar sign outside Canada's sign-making factories, saying the government is "investing" in them too.
Concordia University is launching a two-year graduate program in journalism studies for fall 2009, and is currently accepting applications. Unlike its one-year graduate diploma, the MA program isn't designed for students interested in pursuing a journalism career, but academics and mid-career journalists looking to research about journalism itself, and complete a research project (perhaps to find a business model that will bring back those 30% margins?).
Applications are due by April 30 (April 10 if you want to apply for scholarships)
In Sunday's Gazette, universities columnist Peggy Curran has a piece on the current silliness at Concordia University in which hundreds of thousands of dollars are unaccounted for (so much so even the auditors can't figure it out), a huge blackmail plot is alleged and everyone is suing everyone else.
In it, Curran points the finger at student apathy, saying people who go to university just don't care enough about what goes on in their student government:
The truth is, your average student is usually too busy with classes, work, movies, gym and love life to pay attention to student government. So the decision-making and, more importantly, that ginormous bankroll, falls to that small clique of keeners for whom politics is passion and bedside reading is Robert's Rules of Order.
This argument sounded familiar to me, so I went looking in the archives. Allison Lampert said the same thing eight years ago, when students started to turn on their radical left-wing student government:
It's a university with a history of political activism, and a group of older, working-class students who feel their social causes are as important as what they learn in the classroom.
It's also a university that attracts mature working students, who prioritize their jobs and part-time classes over voting for student council.
"The same things that make a small number of students really active also make a large number of students less involved," observed Concordia University student Zev Tiefenbach, 23.
...Some observers argue the CSU executive was elected because of voter apathy at Concordia - about 7 per cent of students cast ballots in the last election, compared with 20 per cent at McGill University.
Their explanation: Concordia has a larger number of part-time students - 45 per cent of the student population - who are often less inclined to get involved in school politics.
Apathy is certainly a problem, no matter what the political leanings of the student government. And apathy breeds corruption. But the CSU actually gets a lot of students involved. Its elections have gotten as much as 10% turnout, which is very high for student elections in large universities. The fact that these scandals are being uncovered should be considered a good sign in that regard. I'm sure there are plenty of questionable expenses from smaller student groups, like clubs and faculty-specific student associations. But few people care about those.
It's not just Concordia, either. Dawson's student union learned a hard lesson last fall when an executive went crazy with a union-financed credit card.
Should the university step in, and take the financial reins? Even if they wanted to they couldn't. The CSU is an accredited student union that's separate from the university, and Concordia can no more step in and take control than an employer can take control of a workers' union.
The decision must be the CSU's to make, and while they've already promised even tighter financial controls, that's not the answer. After all, financial controls are what got them into this mess in the first place, after almost $200,000 went missing from its coffers in 1999 and 2000.
And it's been shown time and time again that turnover every four or five years causes an inescapable loss of institutional memory, and the slow deterioration of any good intentions that may have been placed there by predecessors. Outside staff hired to make up for that loss (like the bookkeeper accused of mismanaging those hundreds of thousands at the CSU) end up gaining more and more power through their growing knowledge, and learn how to manipulate things behind the scenes.
Instead, the CSU and other student associations charged with managing any money simply shouldn't be doing so. They should setup an independent organization to handle their finances, sign their cheques and do financial reports (with another accounting firm doing the auditing, of course). Political decisions would rest with the elected student government, but balancing the chequebook would be left to professionals instead of 20-year-old students with no experience handling a million-dollar-plus budget.
My worry isn't so much about the CSU, which has a few eyes on it at all times, but more about the smaller organizations getting student money that aren't the subject of constant attempts at coups d'état. Their financial mismanagement - or just imprudent choices of where to spend money - might go on for years before anyone notices them.
If student government want to be truly proactive about solving this problem, they first have to admit they have a problem, and that they need help to solve it.
UPDATE: A McGill student association executive resigned over personal use of a $2,000 hotel gift certificate that was deemed inappropriate.
The Quebec government is planning a new law that would impose minimum requirements on university boards of directors/governors/regents/Imperial Senate. They include ridiculous things like gender quotas, and things that seem to make sense like requiring community consultation before big decisions.
One of the provisions requires that at least two thirds of the boards' members must come from outside the university and be chosen from the "community"
That sounds great, in theory. Universities are government-funded, so they should belong to the people.
But in practice, there's a major problem with these boards that the law doesn't fail to address: How they are appointed.
Currently, board members are chosen out of applications from the community by a committee set up by the board, who then make recommendations to the board which are then approved by the board.
In other words, these boards are self-appointing. They literally dictate their successors like some sort of monarchy.
Fortunately, the boards of universities (which, in theory, can be overruled by the Quebec government) are benevolent dictators, take their responsibilities seriously and work to better the universities out of a sense of civic responsibility.
But these boards also have a very strange sense of what "community" really means. They're predominantly business elites, CEOs of large corporations and their friends/wives/tennis partners. You won't find many plumbers, community activists or artists here unless they bought their way onto the board with huge donations to the university. Though there's never a formal quid pro quo, the reality is that your chances of being appointed to a university's board are much greater when you've given a substantial amount of money in donations.
This is what the Quebec government has to deal with, this idea of informal shareholders who buy a stake in a university in exchange for a bit of control over it. But the government won't do that because they rely on these donations to offset the huge cuts the government made to education over the past two decades.
All this makes the new law seem a bit silly, don't you think?
In case you missed it, last Thursday's Gazette included a four-page insert called "Champlain's Gazette", which showed what a fictional newspaper might look like back then (mind you, it wouldn't have had pictures or process colour, nor would the text have lined up perfectly, but you gotta take some creative license).
Editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips explains the history of the project in his blog. He also links to the associated website, as well as a page with teaching materials for educators who want to make this part of their classrooms.
Since people have been Googling about school closures tomorrow (Monday, December 17), here's a quick list of decisions that have been made as of 11pm Sunday. (Assume "open" means "tentatively open" and check the website before leaving in case they change their minds.)
(Decisions apply to all schools and head office unless otherwise indicated)
(That I could think of, have your butler check the website (or CJAD's list) if not listed here)
Universities are usually open through all but the most crippling of snowstorms. Check individual class websites or student portals for details.
I was going to do some Christmas shopping today, but because (a) shopping malls amazingly are still closing at 5pm on weekends two weeks before Christmas and (b) I took one look outside, I decided to stay home and be one less strain on the transportation network.
That kept me in perfect position to see the lightning that everyone's talking about, along with its acoustically suppressed thunder.
UPDATE (Dec. 18): The Journal wonders if the schools jumped the gun and if the closings were really justified.
Apparently forgetting that correlation is not causation, Associated Press promotes a study that says more sleep leads to better performance in schools compared to all-night cram sessions the night before an exam.
It reaches this conclusion based on the fact that people who stay up all night have statistically better grades.
This is an uncontrolled study. Rather than take two randomly-selected students and have one stay up and the other go to bed, it asks people after the fact about their habits. While it shows a link between sleep and grades, it does not show that the lack of sleep while cramming causes a decrease in grades.
The study could be simply explained away by the fact that students who do poorly tend to procrastinate to the last minute and do all-night cramming. There's no evidence that getting them to bed earlier would improve their grades, because nobody has actually tested for that.
AP (and the Globe) should know better than this. Comments attached to the Globe story pounced on it immediately. Why didn't a journalist?
Just when you thought the EMSB election was over, a loser (and I use that term in only its literal sense) is contesting the vote claiming corruption. George Vogas, the incumbent in the Park Extension/Plateau district who lost by 6 votes, alleges winner Julien Feldman's wife, CBC radio's Joanne Bayly, was acting going to "every polling table" and otherwise doing evil election-fixing things.
(Full disclosure: I worked at CBC radio briefly, and Bayly told me I had a good voice for radio, which I naturally took as a marriage proposal. Though the fact that she's already married might therefore have upset me somewhat, I think our relationship was doomed the moment I won an argument that the U.S. has never issued a $1 million bill.)
Since I have a clear conflict of interest, I'll leave assessment of the legitimacy of this complaint as an exercise for the reader.
UPDATE (May 21, 2008): Vogas has dropped his complaint.
Commissioners at the English Montreal School Board, elected less than a month ago, have already started back-stabbing, alliance-breaking and back-room dealing.
A memo to Jean-Luc Mongrain:
Acting like Bill O'Reilly doesn't make you a better interviewer. When you invite a leader of the student protest movement on your show and yell at him like a madman, it doesn't make people agree with your position more. In fact, people already agree with your position that protesters provoke police and that the tuition hikes are modest and don't necessitate this kind of response.
So why are you yelling like a baby who thinks nobody is listening to him? You invited the guy on your show to speak his mind. At least let him speak.
Mongrain Clenche Porte Parole Etudiant 50 Dollar
Uploaded by mediawatchqc
UPDATE (Nov. 19): Mongrain's contract expires next spring, and he doesn't seem worried about his future.
UPDATE (Nov. 20): via Patrick Lagacé comes this example of classic Mongrain:
As predictable as the sun's rotation around the Earth, the militant student group ASSÉ, which is on "strike" this week against the unfreezing of tuition (despite the fact that most of its members are CEGEP students who don't pay tuition), started a fight with riot police during one of their protests and is crying "police brutality".
It's not that I think there aren't any rotten eggs in the police department, or that their tactics aren't a bit heavy-handed when it comes to protesters (fully-armored riot cops don't exactly have to fear for their lives against kids), but at some point the boy has to stop crying "wolf". Especially when the protesters are the ones starting the fights.
As if to deliberately underscore how chaotic and disorganized the student activist movement is, two separate, competing protests are being organized over the next two weeks concerning tuition and accessibility of higher education.
The first, by the CEGEP-heavy, highly militant unlimited-strike-at-the-tip-of-a-hat ASSÉ, is this Thursday afternoon. (The event's tagline is telling: "Parce que la lutte continue, tabarnak !!!")
The second, by the bigger-budget, more organized PR-savvy FEUQ, is the following Thursday.
The reason behind the two protests is nothing more complicated than the two groups engaging in a pissing contest with each other. Rather than put aside their differences and come together, student groups prefer to fight and sue each other.
But even if this wasn't the case, the protest is pointless for one simple reason: They've already lost the battle.
In the last provincial election, Liberal leader Jean Charest made it abundantly clear he intended to unfreeze tuition and raise it by a small amount. ADQ leader Mario Dumont even wanted to go further. Those two parties took over 2/3 of the seats in the National Assembly.
The public, meanwhile, made it very clear that keeping Quebec's tuition the lowest in Canada is not their top priority. Even some students think our tuition is too low, and would prefer to see more student money go into the education system.
These protests (and the laughable "unlimited general strike", which hurts no one but the few students participating in it) are organized on the assumption that the public supports them. But it doesn't. And tying up downtown traffic so that some hippies can yell how $200 a course is too much to pay for university education isn't going to help their cause at all. It will just piss people off and make them think that these students have far too much free time on their hands that they could be spending earning money to lessen their tuition load.
The tuition debate is over as far as the government is concerned. If you're going to try to revolutionize the way Quebec finances post-secondary education, you have to convince the voters to think like you. That means a big, honest education campaign, not a protest.
And don't hold your breath expecting attitudes to change overnight.
Now that school board elections are over, with absolutely atrocious voter turnout, the inevitable we-have-to-do-something leadership-by-hindsight begins.
Some of the options being considered:
Abolish school boards entirely: This is the ADQ's solution to the problem, and the excuse for reason why they want to force a real election. Administration of schools would fall to municipalities, the provincial government, and the schools themselves, removing a layer of bureaucracy. Unfortunately, as municipal mergers should have shown us, it's not that easy. The bureaucracy created by the change might be as large or even larger than the bureaucracy it's replacing.
Give school boards more power: For those (like me) who complain there aren't any issues to be decided here (things like school taxes and curricula are set by the Quebec government), this might make elections more interesting. But it would also make the boards inconsistent, and that could lead to problems down the road.
Tie school board elections to municipal elections: I can't see how this isn't a good idea. Let's reduce the amount of times we need to go out, update a voters' list and wait in line to cast our ballots.
Here's one I'd like to suggest adding to the list: Have school board commissioners appointed by municipalities instead of elected by the populace directly. This may sound anti-democratic at first, but the system it's replacing isn't perfect either. This solution would keep the bureaucracy as is, but the decisions about how local schools would be run would be left in part to the municipal governments they're in. (Municipal politics aren't high on voter turnout either, but it's better than school board elections -- and most people can name their mayor at least.)
Just a thought.
I don't blame you if you slept through it, but yesterday was school board election day across the province. Turnout in English boards (which have a much smaller electorate because you have to specifically request to be added to it) was low, about 10-30%. Turnout for the French boards was comically bad, in the low single digits.
That probably had something to do with the fact that there were no issues in this election, nobody knew anything about the candidates, and school boards are powerless to make any meaningful changes about how our kids are educated anyway.
Still, for those who care (the immediate families of the candidates come to mind), here's a quick breakdown of what happened.
The EMSB election, as Henry Aubin explained it, was a battle between chairman Dominic Spiridigliozzi (whose team had a slim majority on the board) and Rocco Barbieri and Angela Mancini, who work together and whose candidates did not compete against each other for seats. Despite having four candidates elected through acclamation (including Spiridigliozzi himself), the team managed to win only 10 of the 23 board seats, with the rest going to Barbieri and Mancini's teams. This will represent a major shift in the way this board is governed.
Spiridigliozzi lost 3 incumbents: vice-chair Elizabeth Fokoefs (NDG Ward 3), Daniel Andrelli (St. Henri/Point St. Charles/Westmount Ward 6) and George Vogas (Plateau/Park Ex Ward 13)
Two of the races were extremely close (close enough that judicial recounts have been ordered): Rocco Barbieri won by a margin of only seven votes: 319-312. Julien Feldman (also on Barbieri's team) defeated incumbent George Vogas in Ward 13 by only six votes: 319-313, with 52 votes going to independent Adam Beach. (A second independent, Ilias Hondronicolas, dropped out.)
As for Bryce Durafourt, who I had high hopes for, he received only 49 votes against Barbieri's Liz Leaman (454) and Spiridigliozzi's Mario Pasteris (200).
Not as fun to analyze as the other board because there weren't any declared teams and there were only seven races. Two incumbents, Howard Solomon (who's been there 14 years) and Don Rae (a one-time incumbent whose website is filled with stock photos of smiling kids), lost their seats.
Wow. You can't go wrong with a 100% victory, but that's exactly what the MEMO group did here, picking up 13 acclamations and winning all eight contested elections against independents. Even Dominique Cousineau, whose campaign apparently consisted of pointing out that her opponent was named Mostafa, won her board seat. I can't find a list of the vote totals (though with a turnout of less than 4%, maybe they're embarrassed to show them).
List of winners (PDF, apparently scanned from an old fax machine)
With 20 of 21 seats contested, this board's election was the most active. Diane Lamarche-Venne was the big winner, picking up 14 seats of the 19 her candidates ran in (including herself and one candidate who was elected through acclamation). Jocelyne Bénard-Rochon, who ran 17 candidates, only saw three victories, and lost her own seat to a Lamarche-Venne candidate.
Surprisingly, four independent candidates, three of whom ran against at least one of the parties, also picked up seats: Guylain Desnoyers, Jean-Guy D'Amour, Sonia Gagné-Lalonde and Sarita Benchimol (the latter ran in Cote-St.-Hamp-West, which didn't see any party candidates).
The turnout was also abysmal here, at just over 3%.
This week, I talked with Bryce Durafourt (above), who's running in the school board elections for the English Montreal School Board in TMR/Saint-Laurent. He's 20, a McGill microbiology student, curler, and ran for city councillor the 2005 municipal election in Saint-Laurent, only to come dead-last as the only independent candidate.
So I asked him: What's up with that?
Also this week (though not online) is an explainer about the status of the Canadian dollar, which is constantly hitting new highs compared to the U.S. dollar. It also mentions the situation in Zimbabwe, home of the least-valued currency in the world and one of the worst examples of hyperinflation since the 1940s.
First CBC's Test the Nation had a small problem with its algebra, then a Cyberpresse quiz was riddled with grammatical errors. Now comes news that a TVA spelling quiz had errors of its own.
The blog post points out that the test was developed by a French teacher and that this teacher made the errors. It also gives some complete B.S. about how the media is thorough in its research, which it clearly isn't.
Having a professional create the test was a good move for TVA. But not having the test verified by another professional was where they failed. It's relying on a single source to verify that something is accurate. This is one of the first things they tell you in journalism school not to do.
But TVA wasn't concerned too much with accuracy, because they didn't take it seriously. Just like the other tests given in the media, it was nothing more than a gimmick to fill air time and possibly generate ratings. Infotainment that had nothing to do with quality journalism.
Until the media start taking these kinds of tests seriously and having them properly verified, the public can put about as much faith in them as they have in the spelling accuracy on this blog: not mcuh.
Apparently realizing that there are no real issues in this school board election, Commission scolaire de Montréal candidate Michel Bédard has decided to invent a scandal. Bédard is running as an independent against incumbent Paul Trottier of the establishment party MEMO in Division 15, which is the area around the Gay Village in southeast downtown.
Bédard is complaining that the school board had Canada Post print some of its election material, and they did so in Toronto. Apparently this blatant outsourcing is taking jobs away from Montrealers willing to print flyers.
Yeah.
Scandal.
If you've been wondering what those election-style signs are doing up around town, you've missed the fact that there's a school board election going on. Four boards on the Island of Montreal (two English, two French) are electing 54 of 86 commissioners on Nov. 4 to vote on important school board matters, not that I have any idea what important school board matters are.
Le Devoir has an op/ed today about university governance. In it, an executive at the university teachers' association talks about how university governing boards aren't representative of the teachers and students involved in the universities. Instead, they're filled with rich, connected businesspeople who buy their way onto them through donations to the universities.
The problem isn't so bad on paper. Universities reserve more than half the seats on their governing boards for members of the community. This can mean businesspeople, community leaders, people at other educational institutions, retired educational industry professionals, doctors, lawyers, etc.
The problem mainly lies in the fact that these seats are self-selecting. They're the highest governing bodies at their institutions, answerable only to the government, and so the boards basically control themselves. Nominations as members of the community are dealt with by a nominating committee of the board.
This causes two related problems: the people who are nominated tend to be friends or business associates of people already on the boards, and dissenting views get actively or passively shut out.
When I was at Concordia, I wrote a piece about the corporate connections of the members of Concordia's Board of Governors. A little bit of Google searching found a lot of associations between most of the members' companies. One acted as a lawyer for another. One serves on the board of the company whose CEO is the wife of another member. And so on.
In some cases, these associations are perfectly reasonable, having been formed after the two were appointed to the board together. But the chronology doesn't solve the problem that the fat cats are friends and do things together.
There's also other problems: These connected rich people tend to be more likely to receive honourary degrees, have buildings and academic programs named after them, or receive other official praise from the universities they're connected to, in exchange for their generous donations. (Technically, board memebrs can't receive honourary degrees while they're on the board, and paying for such degrees isn't allowed either. So we see a lot of anonymous donations, or PR people stressing that donations aren't made with strings attached. And degrees are handed out after people retire from the board.)
The government needs to step in and solve this problem with new rules. Representation from academics and students needs to be increased. More non-business types need to be brought in. Academic decisions need to be deferred to academic bodies. And tough conflict-of-interest rules need to be established.
Business leaders should be on boards of universities. They have experience running large organizations, and have a lot of expertise they're willing to share. But the power this gives them is very big, and it needs to be kept in check.
Cyberpresse has another one of those quizzes going around to show parents are stupid (the Journal did a similar one last week on grammar). The questions (only 10 of them) are very random, and as Le professeur masqué points out, they're riddled with mistakes of their own.
Oops.
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