McMaster part of Cootes eco-protection
The Hamilton Conservation Authority, in partnership with Mac profs and students have been working towards fundraising for a Dundas EcoPark. The EcoPark is part of a larger movement for Cootes to Escarpment Park System Project, which seeks to bring together the local stakeholders to create awareness of the lands surrounding Cootes Paradise Marsh. The Dundas EcoPark would connect more than 2,500 hectares of land and would be one of Canada’s largest urban parks.
Twenty-somethings: the new “underclass”?
A recent article from Maclean’s has suggested that current young workers are working in jobs they are overqualified for. The article goes on to argue that changing labour market demands will continue to adversely effect university graduates. Continued trends predict growth in skilled trades and engineering positions, which post-secondary institutions are not readily addressing.
U of T Group Rents Swingers Club
The Sexual Education Centre at U of T has rented the Oasis Aqua Lounge to promote their Sexual Awareness Week with a “sexy social” party night. The event has sparked controversy for explicitly promoting sexual activities in the club, but bars group sex or sex in the hot tub. The club has stated that the event is about learning about safe and healthy sexual relationships.
Hamilton influenza activity declines
The Medical Officer of Hamilton has noted cases of flu or flu-like illness are slowly declining from the high rates seen over the holiday season. However, due to continued demand across Canada for flu vaccines, especially in Eastern Canada and British Columbia, local pharmacies are facing shortages. Hospitals in the region have agreed to open access to their supply to meet short-term demands.
While activists call for investment in more sustainable industries, Mac's own practices are unclear
It’s no secret that universities deal with a lot of money. Between tuition, research funding and corporate sponsorships, cash is often on the minds of McMaster administrators. But what people may not know is where the school spends its money.
Elysia Petrone is hoping to change that.
A new Hamilton resident and recent graduate of Lakehead University, Petrone has put forward a petition to Maclean’s Magazine to offer a ranking of schools based on “ethical investment” in their annual University Rankings issue. Together with Kyuwon Kim and Yasmin Parodi, also recent graduates, she hopes to promote divestment across Canada.
“Canadian Universities are proud to claim they are on the cutting edge of sustainability education and research to solve global problems,” reads their online petition, run through Change.com.
“However, together Canadian Universities are investing billions of dollars in unsustainable and unethical industries that we think students would have a problem with.”
The petition lists examples of these “unethical” industries, which includes fossil fuels, weapons manufacturing and tobacco companies.
The three young women thought Maclean’s was a suitable way to promote their commitment to divestment.
“We were thinking [the petition] would be an easier way to create effective change, because it’s going to be a challenge to go to these universities that have vested interests,” Petrone explained in an interview.
“We thought that instead of working with one university, [Maclean’s] could do a lot of the groundwork and find this information.”
She described Maclean’s University Rankings, now in their 22nd year, as the “be-all, end-all of rankings” in Canada.
Although the goal of the petition is focused on the magazine, Petrone hopes to encourage students to pressure their own universities towards divestment.
“I’ve been able to raise this issue with people in my circles here [in Hamilton], and I [thought we should] start something at Mac,” she explained.
“Right now our goal is to find local activists on campus and people who can get on board and invest their time in this project … I don’t go to McMaster, so I want to inject this idea and help it get founded.”
No Canadian universities have yet agreed to divest from fossil fuels, though campaigns exist at McGill, University of Ottawa, University of British Columbia and University of Toronto. Activists at U of T also found success with a 2007 campaign against investment in tobacco companies. The university eventually agreed to divest from tobacco and tobacco-related stocks.
While divestment hasn’t been an institutional priority at McMaster, students supported a 2005 referendum to end the university’s exclusive contract with Coca-Cola due to the company’s alleged human rights violations.
“McMaster’s a big institution, so it’s time to get this thing going here,” said Petrone.
The focus is to avoid investment in any companies that could be deemed unethical or unsustainable, but at McMaster, it is unclear whether or not such investment exists.
Details of investments made by the McMaster Department of Treasury Operations, which manages the school’s endowment funds, are not available to the public. As of 2011, McMaster had a total endowment of $519 million.
“[The investments are] managed on McMaster’s behalf by private investment managers, and these investment managers are guided by the policy, and we’re working with them to make them aware of the policy and ensure they’re directed by it,” explained Gord Arbeau, Director of Public Relations at McMaster.
“With the nature of the investment, it’s impossible to keep up-to-date information or lists as this is frequently changing.”
However, other large universities across Canada, including University of Victoria, Western University, Queen’s University, York University and many others, have such data available online. This has resulted in McMaster being ranked behind most major Canadian universities in terms of endowment transparency, according to the US-based College Sustainability Report Card.
McMaster’s policy on social responsibility in investment, last updated in 1980, states that “the primary social responsibility of the University is to fulfill its role as a centre of learning and free inquiry,” noting also that “the Finance Committee ... does have a serious obligation to consider matters of social responsibility that may arise in connection with its investment decisions.”
The policy stipulates that moral judgments of an industry are to be made based on the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights as a guideline.
Despite their enthusiasm, Petrone, Kim and Parodi have not been met with much support from Maclean’s for their proposed ranking.
“We believe this is an issue best explored in an article,” the magazine wrote in a press release. “At this point we are not considering introducing a ranking indicator on ethical investment of university endowment funds.”
The Change.com petition was set up to send one email to Mary Dwyer, Senior University Rankings editor at Maclean’s, for each signature it received. Petrone and her colleagues agreed to disable this function, but she acknowledged the initial series of emails might have strained relations. Dwyer was unavailable for further comment on the matter.
Maclean’s did respond to the petition with two articles posted on Maclean’s onCampus, a subset of the magazine’s main website. One article argued in favour of investment in divestment; the other made a case that ethical investments are not so simple.
“We want more than just two articles on this website that no one ever goes to,” insisted Petrone. “The petition has [almost ten thousand] people and we want publishing; we want [Maclean’s] to actually publish in [their] print paper every year.”
“I just feel that if there’s a will, there’s a way,” she said. “Hopefully things will spin, and pretty soon all universities will be on the divestment train.”
Remember the feeling of getting your report card? McMaster was faced with that feeling this October, as the Globe and Mail published its annual Canadian University Report.
The assessment, released on Oct. 25, tried to get away from the largely data-based rankings of other organizations, instead assigning letter grades to different aspects of the university’s performance based on student surveys.
And McMaster’s administration was certainly pleased with the report card results.
“It’s extremely gratifying to be ranked by students as providing the highest quality teaching and learning experience in Canada,” President Patrick Deane told the Daily News, referring to McMaster’s first-place finish in its division for quality of teaching and learning.
Most notably, Mac ranked first in campus atmosphere, research opportunities and quality of teaching and learning, as well as second in student satisfaction, where it placed behind Western.
It also made an impression at the lower end of the large school division, placing second to last in city satisfaction and information technology. And naturally, McMaster’s infamous SOLAR system earned the university last place in course registration.
“If you take all the rankings, they add up to an interesting perspective that we’re strong, but there are some areas which need our attention,” said Deane.
The premise of the Globe’s rankings is a survey of current undergraduate students. For the 2013 rankings, 33,000 undergrads responded to a survey, and their responses, given on a scale of 1 to 9, were converted into corresponding letter grades. But the entire premise of this style of ranking is problematic, said Lonnie Magee, an economics professor at Mac.
“How would a university student be able to know about another school?” he asked. “It’s so driven by how you compare it with what you’re expecting.” He explained that since students attend only one university, such a comparison not particularly useful.
The Globe and Mail addressed this criticism in its 2012 Canadian University Report, released last October. Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, an education consulting firm that advises the Globe on the annual report, argued that student surveys are a reliable method of devising rankings.
“Another criticism [of the report] was that student[s] … had no idea what was available at any school other than their own. That’s true to some extent – but if year after year a particular institution gets results which are particularly good or particularly bad compared to other institutions of its type, then the results start to gain in validity,” Usher argued.
Magee notes that such results come from the “temptation to make the results more objective, to accumulate statistics and present them to show that your rankings are based on these ‘hard facts’ that have been collected.” He cautioned that qualitative factors like student satisfaction are tough to compare.
The Canadian University Report is one of two major Canadian university ranking publications. The other, administered by Maclean’s, is the more well-established of the two. It will release its 22nd annual rankings issue this year, while the Globe has just published its 11th.
Rather than following the Globe and Mail’s approach of a heavily student-based survey, Maclean’s compiles a number of factors to generate its rankings. Schools are divided into three categories: medical-doctoral, comprehensive and primarily undergraduate, in order to improve the comparison.
But the factors it uses for this comparison, made up largely of data from Statistics Canada and federal funding agencies, are sometimes criticized for not being entirely relevant to students or administration.
Mike Veall, an economics professor at McMaster, has published work on the effectiveness of the Maclean’s rankings. He described their methods as being a “little bit suspect in terms of gaining indicators.”
“It’s not quite clear that the indicators match quite well with what students or administrators should care about,” he said.
While there are many factors, the rankings do consider data like the number of library holdings and amount of money available for current expenses per weighted full-time-equivalent student.
McMaster has also been rated by broader, global organizations. But these, too, have their limitations.
The Times Higher Education (THE), for example, produces a rankings issue considered to be one of the best in the world.
This year, McMaster placed 88th overall in their report. But the THE also ranks by faculty, and in the “clinical, pre-clinical, and health” category, McMaster earned 14th place in the world, making it the top school in the category in Canada.
Meanwhile, QS, a British firm, ranked McMaster 152nd. A Shanghai-based organization Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) placed McMaster this year at 92nd.
International rankings methods provide a different set of criteria. While Maclean’s and the Globe consider student satisfaction, such firms as QS and THE factor in a school’s industry influence and international impact – an area where McMaster can’t compete as well, especially when factors like number of Nobel Prize winners are considered.
But in the end, a bad report card doesn’t have a huge effect on a school, Veall said. In his 2005 study, co-authored by Qi Kong, a Mac undergrad at the time, he concluded that a change in ranking has little effect on a school’s enrolment share or the entrance average of its students. A shift of one place in the rankings can, at best, change the mean entrance average by 0.3 percent, although Veall emphasized that this conclusion was “not particularly robust.”
But even though the rankings may not matter much in the end, it doesn’t mean McMaster can’t be happy with a good report card.
By:Rob Hardy
The latest issue of Macleans magazine came right on the heels of festivities welcoming frosh and returning students back to university campuses across the country. Making it the cover story for its September 10 issue, “The Broken Generation” looks at the fallout of accumulating social and economic pressures along both sides of the border. As it examines how the youth of today have internalized the crises facing them, it explores both depression and suicide with candor. What further makes this story notable is that its detective work also included a stop right here at McMaster.
First of all, Macleans should be applauded for digging deep. As a youngster, you might have begrudgingly been exposed to this magazine in doctors’ offices when no other options were on hand. As a mature adult, however, Macleans really is one of the most trustworthy publications in Canada, and is about as hard-hitting as the mainstream media gets. This article stays true to such mantra, deftly illustrating both the hope of overcoming mental illness while discussing why the generation currently in their twenties are in such a quandary.
That being said, I did have some problems with the way this feature story was framed. For one thing, it seems to freely use the word “student” as a synonym for youth in general, whereas I would suggest that these problems are largely typical of young people regardless of whether they are or ever were specifically enrolled in higher education. Since easily more than half of Canada's young adults have at one point been college or university students, finding our way in the world seems to be the larger theme in question here.
Therefore, though some state that they’re worried about their grades, that in itself is not an existential academic crisis, specific, of course, to the studies undertaken. Grades focus on numeric categorization relative to others with whom they are competing. One student talks of stressing over marks in order to get into teachers college, and others talk of “improving academic performance,” both of which highlight a scramble to beat out their peers in a game of musical chairs, all the while evidently lacking a passion for both the academic work itself, as well as a higher discovery of self-purpose.
What the article does not cover, however, is where these students find themselves after overcoming their depression fueled by this academic struggle. Since we are told that the more ambitious youth of today, as cited herein, are mostly suffering not from some sort of inferiority complex but from a genuine hopelessness due to a bleak future, then it should be clear that the cause of their malaise still exists. Saddled with student debt, an increasingly tight job market and a general lack of opportunities befitting grads entering the workforce, the situation is indeed depressing, yet something that one should not take personally.
Our universities have definitely reached a saturation point in turning out graduates because even though most decent employment opportunities (and some less so) require a degree, the job market has not caught up with creating this kind of job for everyone holding a BA. Therefore, the pressure increases as everyone scrambles to build a resumé with various experiences, which are also competitive, as even unpaid internships are not possible for everyone seeking one.
We have to look at the bigger picture here. Is the student who is sweating over their grades rather than the content of their reading lists, really going to be happy even if they get their spot in teachers college? Is the scarcity sweeping over the job market not going to matter to them so long as “they got theirs”? Do they think material fulfillment will somehow shield them from seeing and caring about those who didn't make it, even though said student could easily have also missed their chance? Or do we actually really not want to confront these questions because they are too uncomfortable?
The Macleans feature might invite some comparison to the student strikes in Quebec, where peers mobilized as a group to defend their interests in a more active way as they, too, saw their way of life changing before their eyes. One must understand that a resumé exists to demonstrate our ability to do a job, not as something that needs to justify our right to even hold one and earn a living. Consider this: it is more necessary than ever to gain control of your life, purge all that is extraneous and find a way to battle your way to the top without forgetting all those in our communities who are getting caught up in (or under) unemployment, foreclosures, bankruptcies and other economic calamities coming at us from all sides. Though this is not a solution either, by fostering the right attitude, with support if need be, we can bravely face life and hope to persevere against its uncertainties, whatever they may be.
