By Carol Patton. Universities use flexible career programs to attract and retain faculty. How many members of your faculty would enjoy teaching the same courses, day in and day out, throughout a 30-, 40- or even 50-year career? Not many. By Tim Goral. A new book celebrates the “gold standard” of learning. While details of President Obama’s college affordability proposals are not fully known, what is clear is that higher education is going under the microscope to prove its value. Add to that a growing chorus of pundits who believe that a liberal arts education is a waste of time and a relic of the past. But two college presidents argue in a new book that a liberal arts education is, in fact, crucial to not just boosting the economy but to solving many of the world’s problems. “What you have to do is to learn the tools of learning itself,” says Swarthmore College (Pa.)President Rebecca Chopp. “The liberal arts are, in a very real sense, the gold standard for that type of approach.” 
By Sonja B. - The Black Hole. Immigration issues are increasingly relevant to trainees at higher education institutions in Canada. At my alma mater, the University of British Columbia, international students comprise 14% of the undergraduate population, and 25% of grad students; the number of foreign trainees is even higher at the postdoctoral level, with 38% of postdocs in Canada here on temporary work visas. Many of these highly skilled individuals consider staying in Canada permanently, but the immigration process is lengthy, complicated and expensive, though potentially very rewarding. More...
By Jennifer Polk - From PhD to Life. I had a great notetaking and project management system when I was working on my Master’s thesis (on Canadians in revolutionary Russia). I used a free program called Scribe, which was developed for historians at George Washington’s Center for History and New Media. The program wasn’t particularly user-friendly, but with time and patience, I made it work well for me. All my research notes went into the program, including notes I wrote by hand in the archives or library and then later typed up. Doing this meant I could tag each note with keywords, and that meant I could find anything I needed. More...
By Léo Charbonneau - Margin Notes. It’s a safe bet that there were some awkward conversations in Quebec during the holidays over the province’s proposed charter of values – shades of the many previous, divisive sovereignty debates. My father-in-law tried to engage me several times into a discussion on the subject; however, I knew we would likely not find common ground and I demurred. Similar scenarios are playing out at Quebec’s universities. Those presidents (or rectors) of Quebec’s universities who have voiced a position on the subject have all uniformly come out against it, including Alan Shepard at Concordia University, Suzanne Fortier at McGill University, Guy Breton at Université de Montreal, Luce Samoisette at Université de Sherbrooke and Robert Proulx at Université du Québec à Montréal. More...
By Roger Graves. How to get your students to submit better assignments. Do you want to:
a) Improve the quality of writing your students turn in at the end of the term?
b) Save time grading that stack of papers?
c) Improve your course evaluations?
d) All of the above?
One way to accomplish these goals is to invest in revising the writing assignments in your course. More...
Tips on how to prepare the classroom for students from different cultures. Karima Ramji (International coordinator, University of Victoria Co-op and Career Services) and Norah McRae (Executive Director, UVic Co-op and Career Services) give tips on how to prepare the classroom for students from different cultures. More...
By Laura Stemp-Morlock. This is a matter of reconciling competing rights.
“Women’s rights or religious rights: which come first?”
What began as a University Affairs opinion piece directed toward an academic audience is now a hot news item around the world. Clearly, York University sociologist Paul Grayson’s decision to decline a male student’s request to not work in a study group with women has hit a sensitive nerve with the Canadian public. More...
By Sharon Aschaiek. Competing schools work together to recruit Canadian graduate students. When it comes to student recruitment, competition between universities can be fierce. But Canada’s top engineering schools are bucking that mindset by working with, rather than against, each other to promote their graduate programs. The engineering faculties at the University of Waterloo, University of Toronto, University of Alberta, University of British Columbia and McGill University have joined forces to form the Canadian Graduate Engineering Consortium. More...
By Brian Lee Crowley. Between 2000 and 2008, the number of foreign students in postsecondary education worldwide nearly doubled, from 1.8 million to 3.3 million. That number may double again by 2020. The international student population in Canada grew by 60 per cent nationwide between 2004 and 2012. More...
