By Jo VanEvery. I’ve been following the discussion about Big Labs (Nicola Koper) and Small Labs (David Smith) with interest. I suspect many humanities and social science folks have skipped it altogether, assuming that it doesn’t apply to them. I encourage you to read those posts anyway. They raise some important points.
Is it a zero sum game?
One of the key issues in both pieces is the amount of time and attention your supervisor can give your project and your career development. While Nicola Koper makes a good case for economies of scale in terms of equipment, field work, and conference travel, this may be less relevant to those in fields where equipment and field work are not so central, whether in the humanities or more theoretical scientific fields. Read more...

By Rosanna Tamburri. Publisher licences make it difficult for libraries to share books by interlibrary loan, hampering small universities most of all. Electronic books, for all of their convenience and versatility, are threatening to put an end to a longstanding and cherished tradition at academic libraries: interlibrary loans. As libraries try to grapple with the problem, some are experimenting with new ways to share electronic monographs. “With e-books we are in a whole different world,” said Brent Roe, executive director of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. When purchasing a print version of a book, libraries own the copy and are free to lend it to whomever they wish. But electronic books are most often licensed to, rather than purchased by, libraries. Licensing agreements usually permit a specified number of multiple users to view an e-book at once, giving libraries more flexibility to lend books to their own students and faculty while alleviating some of the space crunch that libraries face. Read more...

By David Kent. Lack of data makes it difficult to craft good policy to meet postdocs’ needs, say organizers. In 2009, the newly created Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars undertook its first survey of postdoctoral fellows, or PDFs. The results revealed that the average fellow in Canada was between 30 and 35 years of age, earned under $40,000 and had limited access to extended health coverage or other benefits.
This workplace snapshot was taken at a time of great unrest for PDFs, as the federal government had recently changed its taxation policy to make student scholarships – but not postdoctoral fellowships – tax-exempt. As a result, a substantial cohort of PhD graduates who continued in academic research as PDFs now earned less pay than they received during their graduate student years. In an effort to see if the situation has changed, CAPS has launched a new survey of PDFs and is encouraging all postdoctoral fellows in Canada to take part. Jeremy Mitchell, former chair of CAPS and leader of the current survey, said there is a pressing need for more complete and up-to-date data. Read more...

By Brenda Brouwer. The overarching principle at Queen’s is to support students in completing high-quality work in a reasonable time frame. As noted in the column “Queen’s plan to change its graduate policy needs more study,” published on March 27, the Graduate Studies’ Executive Committee (GSEC) at Queen’s University recently approved revisions to our policy on time-to-completion for graduate students. I would like to respond to some of the issues that were raised in that piece.
The old policy, which had not been updated in many years, stated that students had five and seven years from the time of registration to complete Master’s and PhD degrees, respectively, with no mention of mechanisms to safeguard that students were progressing to completion prior to these time points. The revised policy reflects the standard program lengths approved by the province for full-time registration, which is two years for a Master’s and four for a PhD. It also acknowledges that many factors contribute to the time in which a degree is completed. Read more...

By Ryan Bullock, Gayle Broad, Lynn Palmer and Peggy Smith. Joining together to assert control over forests. There is a rich and romantic cultural history associated with natural resources and communities in Canada, one reinforced by images and narratives of self-reliant white northerners eking out an existence in isolated communities and rugged landscapes, surrounded by pristine and endless resources. A more modern and less positive view of resource communities is that they are antiquated, marginal settlements, wrought with social conflict and racial tension, whose glory days passed when the last resource industry left town.
However, municipal leaders, Aboriginal and government representatives, academics, businesses and community groups recently came together at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario for an interdisciplinary conference on building resilient communities through community-based forest management. The goal was to learn about new cross-cultural networks and grassroots collaborations that are initiating transformative change by rethinking rural economies, cultures and landscapes. As the meeting organizers, we contend that universities and natural resource-related departments, in particular, have much to learn from communities about the changing nature of resource sectors, societal needs and the role of universities in partnered research. Read more...

By Jonathan Thon. One way of recovering costs for federally funded research is by having governments proportionately included in intellectual property agreements resulting from their angel investments. While not all projects are ultimately profitable, funds allocated to university investigators for basic research should be regarded as a diversified investment portfolio from which successful ventures offset risk. As lab-bench discoveries are translated to bedside technologies, funding agencies can earn profits from their grants, encouraging further funding through re-investment. Crafting a mutually beneficial relationship of this sort would keep politicians from having to choose between funding basic research (popularly believed to be a welfare practice) and supporting economic growth; which is a false dichotomy. Read more...

By Carolyn Steele. On September 26, 2008, we launched Career Sense as a conversation, or as a forum among academics across Canada about professional issues unique to them. For University Affairs, Career Sense was an experiment of sorts. Online technologies have provided a valuable way for a community with shared interests to come together and share their thoughts. Career Sense was to be one such resource.
Indeed, over the past 19 months or so some good conversations have emerged through reader comments. For instance the open forum on reference letters and the discussion on making the best of a dismal job market each generated some interesting, and sometimes contentious comments. The post which was e-mailed out most often was my open letter to John Milloy, the Minister of Training Colleges, and Universities. And 407 people responded to polls about various topics in the posts. Read more...