Class Size, Funding and Sessional Instructors: Universities in Transition

Today's Globe and Mail includes an article by Jeffrey Simpson about the problems with universities these days. Simpson rehashes three common complaints about the university experience and then uses selective quotations from Robert Campbell, the president of the well-known research-intensive Mt A, and Harvey Weingarten to claim that universities are finally admitting to the problem.

Why You Should Vote

Why should you vote?

Teaching Tip #4: Maintaining Sanity While Grading

Given the slow news day on Friday, it might be time for a return of the Teaching Tip.

For those who missed it, a York University Teaching Assistant was caught making disparaging remarks about students on Facebook and then apologized. Various people were sought for comment, or perhaps merely invented, since there is the standard union line (TAs are overworked), the standard entitled undergraduate (I demand better customer service and an ego-stroke), the standard disgruntled graduate student (it's not just TAs, it's Professors and Deans too), the standard department line (we accept the TA's apology and have full faith in her abilities - meaning the TA is either getting a pedagogical and PR refresher or will be shifted to non-teaching duties in the future) and no comment from the TA in question.

Dissertation Update #3: Drafted

Finished!

Dissertation Update #2: "The Last Good Year"

I finished a chapter during the week, finally. I zoomed past my intended page count at least a week before that, but it turns out that I couldn't say everything I needed to say about the International Geophysical Year, Diefenbaker, the Glassco Commission, Pearson, the 1964 White Paper on Defence, the Mackenzie Report, the Science Secretariat, the Science Council, Integration/Unification, the Laurendeau/Dunton Commission, the Bird Commission, and how all of these things impacted the Defence Research Board in a mere 50 pages. The last few pages of the Chapter kept stretching out. One more sentence turned into one more paragraph, and one more paragraph turned into one more page.