Tag Archives: Concordia University

Vultures circling as talks continue

I’ve been a bit quiet about contract negotiations at the Gazette since the strike vote, and that’s mainly because there’s nothing to report. Both sides were in talks Thursday and will return to the table Friday. People are optimistic, but the work-to-rule campaign and byline strike continue, and the guild has suggested employees bring personal effects home.

The Montreal Newspaper Guild website has the latest update, which also points out that talks for the 37 employees in the (non-classified) advertising department have broken off.

UPDATE (Oct. 10): No strike is being called for the foreseeable future. Friday’s talks had progress, though jurisdiction remains a roadblock. Conciliation talks are set for Oct. 20 and 21, and the guild says that “additional measures” are necessary to show that the union is “serious” about its demands.

Meanwhile, management is apparently preparing for the worst, with Canwest News Service making inquiries of Concordia University journalism students (and Gazette freelancers) who might want to work freelance for them in the event of a strike. Because they’d be working for Canwest and not The Gazette (even though Canwest owns The Gazette), they would not be breaking Quebec’s tough anti-scab laws, even if what they write is of local interest and would only appear in The Gazette.

Concordia’s journalism department director, Mike Gasher, has sent a letter to students cautioning them against working as freelance scabs, Macleans reports.

UPDATE: CBC has picked up the story (with requisite “CBC has learned” which implies they didn’t just read it from Macleans’ blog), and J-Source has picked it up from CBC. The CBC story includes a denial from Canwest News Service’s editor-in-chief that the inquiry has anything to do with a possible Gazette strike.

Thanks mostly to the CBC, other blogs are also picking up the story.

UPDATE (Oct. 14): La Presse also writes about the story, this time including a new explanation from Canwest: that the freelance copy would be needed in the event of a Gazette strike in order to provide material for Canwest News Service and other newspapers across Canada, to compensate from the loss of Gazette copy (Canwest has no non-Gazette journalists in Montreal). Of course, as a subscriber to Canwest News Service, The Gazette would have access to this copy as well.

Journal in negotiations

As if that weren’t enough, workers at the Journal de Montréal are also at the bargaining table for a new contract, mere months after their sister union at the Journal de Québec accepted a new contract that removes their four-day work week and requires journalists to perform multiple multimedia jobs.

Updates are on the Journal du Journal website. So far nothing too serious is coming out, besides low-level pressure tactics like wearing yellow lanyards.

Still, management at La Presse are no doubt creaming their pants multiple times over at the thought of their two main competitors both being crippled by work disruption simultaneously.

Ozzy Osbourne too

Just figured I’d throw this in there: the Writers Guild of America is telling members not to work for Freemantle Media, which produces a new Ozzy Osbourne “reality” show, because they couldn’t reach a deal that would involve paying writers less in order to write less (because it’s “reality” and therefore “half-scripted”).

CJLO begins full testing on 1690AM

Concordia’s student radio station, CJLO, has begun full testing of its transmitter on 1690 kHz, after getting the go-ahead from inspectors following brief initial tests. The station is running a continuous loop as it checks for signal interference and other issues, and should be ready for an official launch “soon.”

Reports are already coming in that the station can be heard across the border in Vermont.

CJLO begins early testing on 1690 AM

Radio watchers around town are noticing some strange noises high up on the AM dial. CJLO, Concordia University’s student radio station, has finally got equipment setup to begin broadcasting on its assigned frequency, 1690kHz, and is beginning tests.

The CJLO saga goes way back to about 2001, when a real campaign to get it on the airwaves began. A Concordia Student Union vice-president remarked at the time that he expected it to be on the air by the end of the school year or 2003 at the latest. The station submitted its application to the CRTC in 2004 for use of the 1690kHz frequency, and the application was approved in March 2006, giving it 24 months to begin broadcasting (they were granted an extension to Oct. 1, 2008).

The antenna is erected and connected in a mud pit in Lachine, just down the hill from the station’s Loyola home. The station is currently limited to short, 5-minute tests (mostly generated tones to test reception and range) until an inspector arrives to do his thing. Once that’s done at the end of August, the station can begin full testing and launch in the fall.

More from the CJLO AM blog.

Now, does anyone have an AM radio lying around? More importantly, one recent enough to have the extended AM band that CJLO is in?

Concordia’s Lowy gets honorary degree

It’s a sad reality that university recognition of members of the community – and especially the grand-daddy of them all, the honourary degree – have just as much to do with how generous someone is to the university than how generous someone is to society. Though there are no rules – give a certain amount and you’ll get a certain honour – and the amount of money involved would make buying such things outright prohibitively expensive to all but the most ego-maniacal of  it’s almost expected that a university’s most prestigious donors will be thanked publicly in some way. A seat on its board, a building or program named after them, an honourary degree, or a combination of these.

I explored this issue in an article I wrote for a journalism class in 2005 and had published in The Link, Concordia’s student newspaper. I’ve included it below.

I bring this all up because Concordia has just released the names of its honorary degree recipients for this year, and a familiar name is on it: Frederick H. Lowy. Lowy served as Rector/President of Concordia University from 1995 to 2005, a time when doing so was hardly an easy job.

The community’s respect for Lowy only grew after his departure, when his replacement turned out to be a disaster. People started wishing or the good old days, when the warring factions – students vs. administrators, part-time faculty vs. full-time faculty, Senate vs. Board, were kept at a warm simmer by Lowy’s diplomacy.

In other words, they could have done worse.

And fortunately, there are no obvious conflicts with the other three honorees, one in the business management area (former CP CEO Robert Richie), one in the education field (former École Polytechnique head Robert Louis Papineau), and one in the arts (professor Laura Mulvey). That might be enough to help us forget the fact that three of these four are here for their skills managing a large organization and not, say, fighting malaria in Sudan.

Continue reading

CUPFA using YouTube

After six years of failed contract negotiations, CUPFA, the Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association, has instituted “rotating strikes” which sound more like “picketing between classes”. Among their demands are pay equity with full-time teachers (represented by another bargaining unit, CUFA) as well as basic job security, if only so that students don’t see “TBA” listed as their professors for upcoming courses.

Concordia University has declared that the show must go on though they will tolerate CUPFA’s tactics. Students must still complete all work, handing it in to departments directly if necessary.

Part of CUPFA’s tactics include setting up a YouTube channel and posting videos.

Here, head honcho Maria Peluso explains the skinny on CUPFA’s position.

Welcome to the blogosphere

As part of Matt Forsythe‘s citizen journalism class at Concordia University, students are being asked to create their own niche blogs.

Though most are very basic (after all, they’re beginners), this has greatly boosted the size of the Montreal anglo blogosphere, which is good because I’m running out of blogs to profile.

Here are a few of the blogs that seem pretty interesting, and we hope they continue to grow:

Concordia’s first woman president?

The Gazette’s Peggy Curran apparently has the scoop on Concordia’s new president, quoting anonymous sources (no doubt among the search committee) that confirm it’s Judith Woodsworth, the current president of Laurentian University and a former Concordia professor and administrator. It’s unclear if this is supposed to be the “interim” job to be filled while a full bureaucratic search committee does its job, or if it’s the “permanent” position which would carry a five-year term (renewable for another five years). The wording seems to imply the latter.

If this is the case, it follows a disturbing trend in which search committees for Concordia University senior administrators have selected only a single candidate to present to the community for comment, instead of three or four shortlisted candidates. The first time they did this was also for the position of president, when they came up with only Claude Lajeunesse.

And we all know how that worked out.

UPDATE: Concordia confirms the recommendation in what I suspect was a rushed press release after the Gazette article.

Concordian interviews Boisclair

The Concordian interviews André Boisclair, who recently started giving lectures on crisis management at Concordia as a teaching assistant under former Liberal Party activist John Parisella. It starts off with marketingese about how happy he is to teach there (in response to questions about the controversies surrounding his appointment) and then descends into a confrontational debate over whether sovereignists should teach at anglo universities:

Is coming to Concordia a sign that you’re no longer a sovereignist?
What are you getting at?

Well, I don’t know, a lot of people say that a sovereigntist might have rather chosen to go to Universite de Montréal or UQÀM to teach.
Why is that?

Well. Because they’re French universities.
Are you defending the principle of segregation sir?

Boisclair also says pretty definitively that he’s done with politics.

No word on whether he spent any time doing lines with CSU executives or checking out the stalls in the Hall Building’s 8th floor men’s bathroom (ok ok, that one was unfair).

Those wacky Concordia kids are still at it

“I believe it’s time to set petty politics aside and come together to build a stronger Concordia community.”

— Angelica Novoa, Concordia Student Union president, during the election campaign

If you’ve been anxiously awaiting more news about Concordia student politics (and we all know you have), the student media have returned from the holidays and they give you the latest:

  • An appeal was filed about the blatantly leading referendum questions in last November’s CSU by-election. It was summarily rejected by the brand new judicial board for apparently technical reasons. Now the CSU can get all the money it scammed out of students.
  • Minutes of a suspiciously-called student council meeting last April that suspiciously disappeared without a trace have now mysteriously reappeared. The meeting was nothing important, just the legislative branch of a political organization arbitrarily overruling the judiciary over a common-sense judgment that two politicians were ineligible to run in the category they filed for because they were not part of that category of student. Convinced that everything has been resolved now, the council has voted to restrict itself from ever discussing the issue again.
  • The Concordian features a mid-term report card of the CSU administration, focusing on the things they’ve accomplished.
  • But their assessment of the CSU’s commitment to accountability is scathing at best.
  • A loser in the November by-election (and, for that matter, March’s general election) publishes an open diary in The Link in which I guess she tries to be funny, but comes out sounding like the kind of get-a-life bitterness that has consumed Concordia politics for far too long.
  • The Graduate Student Association had to call in mediators because the executive and council refused to speak to each other. The meeting was held in secret so we don’t know what they said.
  • Concordia’s Board of Governors (that’s the corporate CEO grownups who should know better) apparently found it necessary to rename its “Interim President” position. Well, actually it “abolished” the “Interim President” position and created the position of “President for an Interim Period.” The person filling that position, whatever it’s named (wasn’t it “acting president“?) is Michael Di Grappa.
  • Meanwhile, administrators still refuse to acknowledge the existence of the “risk assessment committee” that was setup after the Netanyahu protest in 2002. The Acting Interim President for an Interim Period has refused to testify at an access-to-information hearing about it.
  • The search for a new provost and VP academic (the No. 2 administrative position at Concordia which is also being held on an interim basis) has drummed up a whopping two candidates: Katherine Bergman, who has been dean of science at the University of Regina since 2001; and David Graham, who was appointed dean of arts and science at Concordia in 2005.

BMO Concordia University

Concordia University is the proud recipient of a new $2.5 million … let’s call it a donation from the Bank of Montreal

In exchange for this generous offering, Concordia will name a 300-seat theatre in its new business building the BMO Amphitheatre, and it will start a BMO Lecture Series, bringing in important people to talk about business and social responsibility.

The donation was the work of L. Jacques Menard, who is a big honcho at BMO and a member of Concordia’s Board of Governors. (It also serves to remind us why big corporate honchos sit on the board in the first place.)

To give a bit of perspective to the donation, the John Molson School of Business itself was given the name after a $10 million donation from the Molson family, while Molson Inc. head Eric Molson was the university’s chancellor.

With that in mind, it seems Concordia wins the cost-benefit game here.

Concordia Student Union needs a clarity act

The Concordia Student Union is in the midst of their by-elections this week. The small sibling to its March general election, this poll fills council seats left vacant, and asks referendum questions that people couldn’t get their act together in time to get on the March ballot.

The CSU is still trying to figure out if two of its current councillors were properly elected in March. The council nullified a decision of its own judicial branch under suspicious circumstances and has now used stalling techniques to avoid the issue of whether two independent students (those that don’t belong to one of the school’s four faculties) were in fact independent at the time of their election.

Nevertheless, it’s trying to conduct a clean election.

I can’t speak for the candidates (six candidates for three seats, with clear party affiliations), but the referendum questions leave much to be desired.

Three of the four involve fee increases (student-imposed student fees have skyrocketed this decade), and they’re all written by the people who want the fees approved instead of an impartial third party. As such, they include irrelevant statements about what the fees will pay for.

The Concordian student newspaper, which is desperately trying to increase its fee to bring it on par with its competitor The Link (some background on their bickering here), has this question on the ballot:

Do you agree to raise the fee level of The Concordian, a free weekly, independent newspaper covering news, sports, arts, music, features and opinions for Concordia by $0.09 per credit, from $0.10 to $0.19 per credit, to cover the rising costs of printing the newspaper, repairing old and failing equipment and increasing the creative quality and scope of the paper? This fee will be charged to all Undergraduate students beginning with the 2008 Winter term (2008/4 courses) and will be subject to the university’s tuition and refund policy.

The problem is that the question implies that the fee increase will only cover rising costs of printing and equipment replacement. Though that’s part of it, the editors are also interested in offering contributors a small honorarium and saving some money for a rainy day.

If a competent election officer was running the show, the question would look like this:

Do you agree to raise the fee level of The Concordian by $0.09 per credit, from $0.10 to $0.19 per credit? This fee will be charged to all Undergraduate students beginning with the 2008 Winter term (2008/4 courses) and will be subject to the university’s tuition and refund policy.

The other two fee questions have the same problem. Unnecessary campaigning is emphasized below:

Do you agree to raise the Concordia Student Union Fee Levy by $0.25 per credit, from $1.50 to $1.75 per credit in order to fund important services and initiatives such as the creation of an emergency food bank for students in need, a free daily lunch offered to Loyola students and Concordia Student Union 101’s. This fee will be charged to all Undergraduate students beginning with the 2008 Winter term (2008/4 courses) and will be subject to the university’s tuition and refund policy.

Do you agree to adjust the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) membership fee levy (which includes the membership fees of the Canadian Federation of Students, the Canadian Federation of Students- Services and the Canadian Federation of Students-Québec) to $0.41 per credit per student, thereby continuing to support the increased demand for campaigns and services of CFS, some of which include lobbying for student debt reduction, better student financial aid, more funding for post-secondary education, cell phone discounts through StudentPhones, student discounts at hundreds of retailers in and around Montreal and free ISIC cards? The fee adjustment would represent a $0.01 decrease for Arts & Science, Fine Arts, and Independent students, and a $0.41 increase for Engineering and Computer Science and John Molson School of Business students, thereby equalizing the fee levy paid by ALL undergraduate students. The fee adjustment would be implemented in the Winter (2008/4) term and collected in accordance with the University’s tuition billing and refund policy.

The last question is even worse. In order to correct a decades-old discrepancy between fees paid by various faculties, it proposes to “equalize” the fees by slightly decreasing the fee for the largest group (Arts and Science, Fine Arts and independent students represent more than 65% of the population) and creating the fee out of nothing for the rest. The large group will vote to decrease their fees, and even if engineering and commerce students vote against their huge fee increase en masse, it won’t matter because other students make that decision for them.

It’s a horribly unfair system.

So why are these dirty referendum tricks tolerated? Because they have been used for years.

Just about every fee-related referendum question for the past five years has included unnecessary and leading information. The Art Matters festival, People’s Potato free lunch service, CJLO Radio, Frigo Vert, Sustainable Concordia and the Concordia chapter of the Quebec Public Interest Research Group have all used this technique to get fee questions passed.

The divide-and-conquer equalization technique, meanwhile, was first used by the Concordia Student Union itself back in 2001, and has been adapted for use at The Link (full disclosure: while I was an editor there, though I still feel bad about it). Other groups like QPIRG have used a similar technique but with a slight increase instead of a decrease for the majority.

I suppose I could just let it go and dismiss it as the work of uneducated students, but some of these people are going to be involved in real politics someday (Mario Dumont was a Concordia graduate). They’re going to have to learn at some point that this kind of manipulation of the electoral process isn’t kosher. It might as well be now.

UPDATE (Dec. 1): This post is referenced in Macleans.ca’s Nov. 30 daily campus update. Though it’s “Concordia Student Union”, not “Concordia Student’s Union”.

Also The Concordian’s Tobi Elliott informs me that The Concordian’s referendum question passed. So did all the other ones. What a surprise.

| Uncategorized

Concordia’s governing bodies now communicating via ambassadors

In a sign that Concordia University’s internal politics is getting more tense by the hour, its senate has sent ambassadors to its board of governors to ask the university’s highest governing body to establish a committee to look into the governing structure of the university.

The senate (which bills itself as the university’s highest academic body) is peeved that the board (the body so powerful it appoints its own members) is asserting too much power.

The board chair, meanwhile, hasn’t agreed to setup a task force to take away his own power.

Concordian sorry for offending Muslims

The Concordian has issued an apology to Muslim students after a recent cover of the paper had the word “Allah” apparently used in such a way that was considered offensive to some. They realized this after copies of their paper went missing, apparently taken and destroyed by offended students.

Ironically, the editor says he she checked with two Muslims to see if they were offended before the paper went to print. Clearly he didn’t check with fanatic enough people.

Fabrikant gets his way

It’s said there is a fine line between insanity and genius. Valery Fabrikant is a textbook example of this.

Fabrikant was a very smart man who became an engineering professor at Concordia University. When he became frustrated with the academic backstabbing going on at the department, he decided to start killing his colleagues. To this day he feels he was justified in doing so.

He’s in court again, a decade and a half after the shootings (for which he was convicted and is serving a life sentence), to follow through with a lawsuit he filed before the killing spree began. Throughout the proceedings, he has been acting like a lunatic, insulting the judge, raising frivolous objections and basically doing everything you’re not supposed to do in court (including, of course, representing yourself). His more immediate goal was to get the judge to recuse himself from the case, claiming the judge stopped listening to his incomprehensible ramblings.

And it worked.

The judge, fed up of the insults, finally gave in and removed himself from the case. His reasoning was that he can no longer be counted on to be impartial because Fabrikant has gotten on his nerves so much.

I guess that’s one tactic you’ll see taught in law schools now: If you don’t like the judge presiding over your case, insult and annoy him until he throws in the towel. Or maybe you’ll just see it on a Boston Legal episode.

So: Insanity, or genius?

UPDATE (Nov. 27): The next judge dismisses the case, calling it frivolous. So insanity it is.