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...
By Lee Skallerup Bessette. First off, I’d like to thank everyone for such a warm and supportive reception to my piece last week, particularly on social media. On Facebook and Twitter, you shared your own stories alongside my own, which I appreciate. It’s still strange, however, to be feted as a leading activist for adjuncts and contingent labor; there are so many other people, on the ground, who have been advocating, agitating, and organizing on behalf of adjuncts, but their work goes unnoticed nationally. Read more...
By Margaret Andrews. In addition to designing and implementing several other new initiatives, I’ve been working with Dave Power to put together a two-day Design Thinking Workshop that launches in April of this year. The materials we’ve found to produce the program have been phenomenal (send me an email if you’d like the working list – or would like to contribute to the list), as have been some of the examples we’ve come across for both the outcome of and need for some very creative thinking. Read more...
By Tracy Mitrano. I am retiring from my position at Cornell University. In 1991, I began my career there as a visiting assistant professor in Human Development of the School of Human Ecology (filling in for Joan Brumberg’s sabbatical), then attended the law school, and upon graduation began teaching part time (while I was caring for parents and raising my boys) back in Human Development (filling in this time for Phyllis Moen) before taking the position in IT on April 1, 2001. I will forever be grateful to Steve Worona and Polley McClure for taking a chance on me. After all, what did I know about the Internet? (Turns out enough to get my feet wet, thanks to my partner at the time, Bill Schaff, an electrical engineer at Cornell, who gave me a modem almost the very day the Internet went public, and the inspired former Dean and Professor of Law, Peter Martin, of the Legal Information Institute.) Read more...
By John Warner. Thanks to Twitter, if you screw up these days, you’re going to hear about it.
It happened to me a year and a half ago when, as editor at large of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, I helped initiate a “comic contest.” The idea was patterned on our longstanding and successful columnist contest, through which we add new contributing writers to our stable each year. Many of those writers have gone on to bigger and better things like book and television deals, and I figured the same would work for comics. Read more...
By G. Rendell. Two recent conversations are in the process of melding in my mind. (No Vulcan required.) One of them was with an MD, and the other with a university sustainability officer. Chatting with the MD, the subject of "quality" came up. She's a solo practitioner, working with and in -- but not as an employee of -- a large hospital. Apparently, the hospital is intent on absorbing most or all of the solo and small group practices associated with it, under the pretext of improving quality. I say "pretext", because their argument is that quality is a function of the number of ways a hands-on practitioner's activities get recorded and scrutinized. The number of forms that get filled out. The number of non-MDs passing judgment on what MDs do. Without apparent reference to what outcomes are produced or what needs and expectations satisfied. "Quality", in such a context, sounds perilously close to economic efficiency; the concepts aren't inherently in conflict, but neither are they inherently identical. Read more...
By Kelly Hanson. If you've been following academics on Twitter of late, you may have noticed an outpouring of feelings this month surrounding the annual MLA Convention, the conference for academics in the modern languages. There is even an entire Twitter feed dedicated to venting such feelings. Over the past month, these digital debates have ranged from the adjunctification of academic labor to the future of the humanities. Many of the conversations centered on what were often viewed as unfair hiring practices employed by universities, especially some of the larger research universities; how MLA (or perhaps other large academic conventions) often works as a metonym for the uneven and sometimes hostile terrain that is the academic job market; and how conferences might better serve us sans job interviews. Read more...By GradHacker. As classes resume session, and as graduate coursework ramps up (or settles down), you might be finding yourself in the midst of a new schedule, new routines, trying to make sense of where you need to be and when, and what work needs to be done before your next teaching day or class meeting. It always took me (Liz) at least three weeks of a new semester to settle into a “groove” of sorts—to know what was happening when, and to establish blocks of time for various tasks throughout the week. And for me (Emily), the first year of graduate school was about learning to work, read, and write more efficiently, and to break massive tasks into manageable pieces. The second year has been about trying to put those lessons into practice. Read more...
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