By Shannon Gadbois. When I began my sabbatical this past January, I was unexpectedly and overwhelming cognizant of a marked imbalance in my life. With a teaching semester juxtaposed next to a sabbatical period, a dramatic shift in daily activities resulted in one of the most pressure filled and lonely times I have spent (only comparable to preparing for my comprehensive exams during my doctoral studies). Prior to my sabbatical, I was in constant physical and intellectual motion. Generally, I spent the greatest share of my time meeting expectations of students and colleagues, and the least amount of time conducting or writing about my own research. There was a definite imbalance between time required for daily, necessary activities and time remaining for research activities. More...

By Peggy Berkowitz. University Affairs was a major contender in the Canadian Online Publishing Awards, announced in Toronto Wednesday night. The magazine website won two gold medals, for best news coverage and best blog, and a silver medal for best website design. UA competed in the category for business-to-business, professional and scholarly publications. More...

By Daniel Drolet. At the University of Saskatchewan, the enrolment challenge this year was an unexpected surge in applications from Alberta. At many universities in Atlantic Canada, the ongoing concern is how to manage declining demographics. For the University of Windsor, it’s figuring out how to grow the student body in a region with a relatively small population. Planning university enrolment has never been easy. Demographic trends are predictable but societal changes and swings in the economy are not, and surprise developments – as when a provincial government cuts funding to universities, sending applicants scurrying to neighbouring provinces – can disrupt enrolment targets. More...

By Maureen Mancuso. In my last column, I argued that, like it or not, we as faculty members need to participate in and lead the effort to define and measure our own productivity. The alternative is to allow others to determine the tools and scales of measurement, and try to live with the inevitable distortions, oversimplifications and skewed incentives that result. The first step is to insist that productivity measurements acknowledge all three types of faculty effort: teaching, research and service. Attempts to assess productivity that do not account for all three categories will be misguided and inaccurate; worse, such unbalanced metrics will in turn create perverse incentives that undervalue and thus undermine the types of effort that are overlooked. More...

By Kristopher Gies. The prevailing conditions of today’s academic job market bring pause. The number of PhDs awarded each year remains high despite comparatively few tenure-track positions. At the same time, university teaching is increasingly performed by contingent faculty for low pay and with little job security. These trends have led to a situation where scholarship and a stable career have become mutually exclusive for many talented, motivated men and women. Moreover, little guidance about non-academic careers has been offered to doctoral candidates during their education, a point expressed in reports by both HEQCO and the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars/Mitacs. This represents a longstanding failure of Canadian doctoral programs to adapt to current realities. More...