University Affairs

Despite my initial misgivings with Twitter when I began using it last year, I’ve become a big fan of this micro-blogging utility. The fact that I’m even using the words “micro-blogging utility” in a sentence would have been surprising to me a year ago. (My most recent “tweets” can be seen in the righthand side of this page, if you scroll down just a bit.)

I use Twitter mainly for information gathering and, through it, have come across many interesting story leads and sources. Others use it for basic back-and-forth communication, although I don’t find it quite as useful for that purpose.

Many mix personal and professional communications on their Twitter accounts, and I find that somewhat annoying. Sorry, but I’m not that interested in the personal stuff, so I really wish these individuals would create two separate accounts, one for personal use, the other for professional purposes.

This brings me to an interesting news story I saw recently in the online University World News. Apparently a group of academics have created “Sciencefeed,” which the article describes as a “scientific version of [the] popular social-networking site Twitter.”

The article continues:

The aim is to speed up international scientific debate, with rapid-fire exchanges of thought between informed academics. Where Twitter users may comment on the latest fashions or habits of their dog, Sciencefeed users are supposed to blog about cutting edge research discoveries.

Sciencefeed apparently will be compatible with other social media platforms, so users can share their posts with their contacts and friends on Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed and other similar services without having to log-off from Sciencefeed.

It’s a great idea, and one I think could be replicated. I’d love to see a Twitter “feed” related primarily to postsecondary education in Canada, as well as one devoted primarily to science policy. Yes, I know you can create something of the sort by actively following certain hashtags, but that is a bit of a hit-and-miss proposition, and still requires a lot of sifting of the wheat from the chaff.

I’m really not very “techie,” so perhaps something like this already exits. If anyone has suggestions or knows of an easy way to create such information channels, I’d be eager to hear from you.

What should you do if you’ve “done everything right” – went to university, perhaps even grad school – and yet you’ve failed to land meaningful employment? I have no career advice to offer, but do suggest you might have a look at a new blog by Laura Servage, a doctoral student at the University of Alberta. It’s called “My So-Called Career” (nice reference to one of my favourite shows from the ’90s), and focuses on “when your education and training hasn’t produced that ‘career’ after all.”

Ms. Servage’s studies focus on transitions from postsecondary education to work, work and learning, and Canadian higher education. The blog is part of her doctoral research. Under the title, “Over-educated, Under-employed,” she explains the blog’s premise:

You’ve been hearing forever that you need a good education to get a good job. You bought in. Now you’re under-employed. Or not employed at all. I started this website to gather media, research, and stories for and about people who’ve “done everything right” but haven’t got the great job they thought they would. … I want to understand why governments continue to promote higher education even as “good jobs” become more and more scarce.

It’s a touchy topic within the postsecondary education sector. Universities continue to extol the virtues of higher education, obviously, and in general I do strongly believe that there are enormous benefits to Canada of a robust, expansive and well-resourced postsecondary education sector. At the same time, I do see a growing sense of unease from some commentators that a degree may not have the payoff that students expect. Ms. Servage is clearly among them. From a recent blog entry, she writes:

What’s interesting to me is that the argument for ceaseless expansion of post-secondary education functions as a very effective distraction from much more fundamental issues that are routinely overlooked or ignored by post-sec stakeholders. These include: a lack of secure, quality jobs; significant increases in “precarious labour” (that’s crappy part-time, temporary and contract work); credentials and relevant experience not as objective requirements to do a job well, but as “gate-keeping” or “screening” tools when there are too many qualified people chasing too few jobs.

She continues, “you really have to wonder about this whole ‘knowledge economy’ thing.” Critics have argued — and from her own research, she concurs — that the knowledge economy and the skilled labour it requires is more about speculation than empirical certainty. The promise is always coming, she says, but never fully arrives.

A bit of an over-generalization, I’d say, but compelling nonetheless. Your thoughts?

It seems a safe bet that there’ll be many “green jobs” created in the environmental sector over the next decade, so why aren’t more students flocking to fields related to the environment?

The Canadian Council on Learning doesn’t have the answer, but it has raised the issue. In a report released yesterday, “Meeting the demand for trained personnel in Canada’s environmental sector,” the council claims that jobs in this sector will increase by more than eight percent by next year, yet enrolment in postsecondary environmental programs has actually dropped – by nine percent – since 1999.

“The green economy is an undeniable part of our society and global culture, and it is critical that Canada is prepared to meet this sector’s need for skilled workers,” says Paul Cappon, CCL’s president and CEO. The report says people who pursue these types of careers have a “strong emotional connection towards the environment and passion about the environment and environmental issues,” so “we need to nurture that commitment at the earliest possible stage,” says Mr. Cappon.

The report cites various examples of environmental careers, such as agronomist; ecologist; environmental chemist, engineer or lawyer; forester; geographer; oceanographer and toxicologist.

The report says stimulating an interest in the environment among students is the best way to increase the supply of graduates in environmental programs. The report recommends a number of ways to do this:

• offering students experiential activities such as outdoor programs;
• educating teachers and students about the diversity of the jobs available in the environmental sector;
• offering information and guidance during the career decision-making process; and
• focusing on the elementary and middle school years as a time to introduce environmental education programs.

As an emphatic outdoor enthusiast, I’m all for offering students chances to experience the great outdoors. Yet, I must say I’m a bit surprised that enrolment in environmental programs is down. That seems counterintuitive in this era when there is so much attention devoted to the perils of climate change. Perhaps couch kids and their harried parents are simply spending less time in outdoor pursuits, or maybe the constant downbeat message on the environment has driven students away. Any thoughts?

As an aside, the federal government decided to end its funding of CCL in January. The money apparently runs out on March 31, so I suppose this is one of a handful of final reports working their way through the pipeline at the council.

The Regina campus of First Nations University, designed by First Nations architect Douglas Cardinal.

The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada held a day-and-a-half workshop last week for university presidents focussing on aboriginal education. This workshop was the first in a series of planned AUCC events on aboriginal access to higher education, which was identified by AUCC as one of its three main advocacy priorities this year. “All Canadians stand to benefit if Aboriginal Canadians have improved access to a university education and the tools they need to complete their studies and transition into the work force,” AUCC President Paul Davidson said recently.

I point all this out simply to underscore how tragic it is that First Nations University of Canada may soon be forced to close its doors following yesterday’s announcement by the Saskatchewan government that it is cutting funding to the institution, the country’s first and only aboriginal-run university. It seems like one step forward, two steps back for aboriginal higher education in Canada.

According to the Globe and Mail, Advanced Education Minister Rob Norris said the province had “lost confidence in the direction of the institution,” after recent allegations against its senior administration by a former financial officer. This comes in the wake of a string of problems at the Regina university mainly concerning how it is governed. The Canadian Association of University Teachers went so far as to censure the institution in December 2008 for its failure to resolve the governance issues.

But the latest accusations of financial improprieties were the “tipping point” that compelled the provincial government to withdraw $5.2 million in funding from the university as of April 1, said Mr. Norris.

I am in no position to second-guess the Saskatchewan government’s decision. It could not have been an easy decision. I know both CAUT and AUCC, which also conducted a review of First Nations University and placed it temporarily on probation, found no joy whatsoever in making these moves. AUCC lifted the university’s probationary status in April 2008.

Again according to the Globe and Mail, while the province cannot shut down the university, Saskatchewan’s actions place the school’s existence in jeopardy. The federal government is expected to contribute $7.3-million this year, but is likely to follow the province’s lead, a spokesman for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs said last week.

If this is indeed the end, it is a very sad day for aboriginal higher education in Canada.

The National Post carried what I thought was a balanced piece this past Saturday dealing with the controversy surrounding Trinity Western University. That is praise indeed from me, as there is much in that newspaper that I find unbalanced.

For those unfamiliar with the TWU controversy, it began last year when the Canadian Association of University Teachers created an ad hoc investigatory committee “into whether academic freedom is being infringed at Trinity Western University by the requirement of a faith test as a condition of employment.”

The two professors who took up the investigation, William Bruneau of the University of British Columbia and Tom Friedman of Thompson Rivers University, concluded in their report this past October that indeed “TWU’s Statement of Faith, its Res­ponsibil­ities of Membership statement and the univer­sity’s policy on academic freedom allow for unwarranted and unacceptable constraints on academic freedom.”

Jonathan Raymond, TWU president, is taking CAUT’s actions very seriously. “Such an allegation can easily damage the reputation of a university and place a cloud over the scholarship of its faculty,” Raymond wrote in a recent response to CAUT’s report.

It’s not clear to me exactly why CAUT took up the issue when it did. TWU’s faith conditions are hardly new – they’ve been around for as long as the university itself, which was founded in 1962. It’s also not news to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, which granted TWU membership back in 1984.

The CAUT report received only scant media attention immediately after its release, but Maclean’s On Campus and others have recently picked up on it. See some of the Maclean’s online commentary on this issue here and here.

University Affairs also recently ran an opinion piece on the issue by John G. Stackhouse, Jr. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was our commentary which tipped the Maclean’s On Campus crew to the story.

I won’t downplay the fact that this is a complex and thorny issue. I know academics are supposed to question all assumptions, and I would personally feel uneasy it I were told that that there is a base set of assumed and unalterable truths that I must work from. But I think Professor Stackhouse is right when he suggests that a committed group of scholars can take “a number of basic assumptions for granted” (i.e., faith) and still “go on together to analyze a wide range of important questions.”

I think there is one other important point: no one is forcing students and professors to study and teach at TWU. They are there of their own volition and are almost certainly well aware of the conditions imposed on them and have accepted to live within them.