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Currently viewing articles tagged with Education.
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Web Exclusive: Setting the Record Straight
Tyler McCreary’s Tough Union, Tough Lessons would be a useful contribution to the important post-mortem of a strike ended wrong, if not for the fact that most of the evidence upon which his arguments are premised bears little resemblance whatsoever to the historical record.
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Web exclusive: The Achilles Heel of Pandemic Prevention
“The next pandemic is only a plane ride away,” says Thomas Rowe, a scientific researcher for China’s International Institute of Infection and Immunity. The Toronto SARS outbreak in 2003 fits his comment to a tee, after just one SARS carrier caused an alarming 375 infections and 44 deaths. Luckily, SARS was an epidemic, and not a highly contagious disease. Though Canada was spared a pandemic disaster, the global health community warns that countries face a deadly disease of pandemic proportions in the future.
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Tough union, tough lessons
Over the last three decades in Canada, governments’ neoliberal policies have created a crisis of under-funding in post-secondary education. With steep funding cuts, universities and colleges have looked to other measures to balance their books: increasing tuition and ancillary fees, soliciting greater private funding and implementing cost-reduction measures like increased reliance on contract faculty to teach courses. The present economic crisis has further exacerbated the financial situation at many universities, as cash-strained investors restrict their donations, universities’ sizable endowment funds bleed with investment losses, and deficit-laden governments balk at increasing education funding.
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York University’s get of jail free card
The longest university strike in English Canada came to an unhappy end on January 29, 2009, in a manner that should send a wake-up call to an entire labour movement already on the defensive. After 85 days on the picket line in an effort to reverse the trend towards casualized teaching in post-secondary institutions, the contract professors and graduate-student workers of CUPE 3903 were legislated back to work by a Liberal-Conservative coalition. One by one, MPPs stood up to vote for Bill 145, as picketers outside could be heard singing the words, “we’ll not stand for this.” Within days, there were reports of imminent legislation forcing Ottawa transit workers back on the job. Within a week, 70,000 elementary school teachers accepted a tentative agreement after being told to “watch the situation at York very closely.”
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High Schools Against Israeli Apartheid
In July 2005, 171 Palestinian civil-society organizations issued a call to the “international civil society organizations, and people of conscience all over the world, to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel, similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.” This call came after 57 years of ethnic cleansing, 38 years of military occupation and one year after the International Court of Justice issued its advisory opinion declaring Israel’s apartheid wall to be illegal under international law.
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From Apathy to Activism
Regarding the deeply rooted apathy that many students exhibit, my observation, and that of those with whom I have consulted in writing this article, is that it is an offshoot of a sense of self-entitlement. Most students have yet to experience any political upheaval or economic hardship for themselves. The wave of relatively steady economic growth in Canada, and the consumer culture that accompanies it, results in a dangerous combination of political complacency and consumer insatiability. Coupled with the demolishment of the welfare state, the resulting competitive individualism produces a sense of hostility expressed as self-entitlement, which has had a potent demobilizing effect across campuses nationwide.
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Power to the Students!
Bertell Ollman is a professor of political science at New York University, and is well known for books like Alienation and Dialectical Investigations, and for well over fifty articles and commentaries on a variety of left-wing subjects. In this book, directed to American university students, Ollman makes a deal with his readers.
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Close to Addiction
Walking with Dr. Gabor Maté through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is like being on the arm of the Pope. He knows everyone, and stops, again and again, to chat and check-up on patients and area residents he’s come to know over the past decade.
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Radical Campus - or Haunted House on the Hill?
This is an in-house account by a 37-year loyal history professor, tying up all the loose threads into one happy ending for the 40th anniversary of the founding of Simon Fraser University. It is a short story, really. The bright threads appear in the initial four-to-five-year period, but, by 1970, with the defeat of the series of radical challenges of those first years, SFU is already draped in the bleached, drab garment it wears today.
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Latino Mercenaries for Bush
n the faculty dining room at the California State University where I teach, a Mexican-American woman places the thin slice of turkey on the bread to make my sandwich. The stress lines that radiate down from her high cheekbones twitch as she tells me politely that she’s fine. One of her sons is in Afghanistan, she reports. The other will leave tomorrow for Iraq. “I pray every day,” she says, smearing the mayonnaise on the other slice of bread.
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