The New Provincial Budget

Well, the Government of Alberta rolled out next year's budget, and they're running a multibillion dollar deficit.  I suppose advanced education should feel fortunate that they are "only" facing a 0 percent increase, even though we all know that's going to mean another round of cuts at our poorly run university.  However, to me the bigger issue is the underlying source of the red ink:  lowered revenue.  Two directors from the Parkland Institute offered a pointed analysis of how things like rendering permanent the criminally low revised royalty scheme imposed last year have led to the present situation.  In effect, all of the services that are being starved in the budget are helping to subsidize the oil patch, when oil is going for $100/barrel.

This should be viewed in the context of what's going on down south.  There is a concerted push underway to abrogate the social contract that has been in operation for decades (a living wage, affordable education and health care, some semblance of a safety net), in order to orchestrate a massive wealth transfer to corporations and the top 1% of individuals.  As long as there is no danger of being voted out, this government will continue on its present course, and we will continue our move towards serfdom.

Colloquy (again)

Wow.  This attempt by the University to run a blog is getting embarrassing.  In its several weeks of existence, the blog has been plagued with sporadic posting, too much propaganda, and a dearth of comments.  The latter is perhaps explainable by the pathetic handling of comment moderation, with some comments taking days to show up.  News flash:  readers will quickly lose interest when confronted with these conditions.

I hope that the powers that be decide to loosen things up and run this a little more like a real blog.

It's All About the Civil War

Sorry for the hiatus--had some inescapable real-life things come up.  In the meantime, the Wisconsin protests continue, and grow, as their governor intransigently tries to force through the revocation of labor rights that have been in place for decades.  Here is a post from Balloon Juice that ties the rabid opposition to organized labor that we see in the Republican party to earlier efforts to profit economically off the unpaid labor of others (e.g., slavery and prison labor).  The maps are quite telling.

Tote that barge! Lift that bale!

In case no one has noticed, there has been a class war going on for the last 30 years (roughly since Reagan was elected), and you can guess which side is winning.  (Hint:  one side has most of the money, controls all branches of government, and literally owns the mainstream media.)  Here is a post from the American blog Balloon Juice, which captures in a few deft words the severity of this situation.  We may be a little behind the curve here in Canada, but we're fooling ourselves if we think we're not going down the same path.  Really, the issues we are encountering with the U of A are a microcosm of the larger effort to grind down the middle class and cement a large class of serfs to service the elite plutocracy.

Let's Hear It for Trains!

With the recent announcement by the Obama administration of a major new rail initiative, I'm reminded of another old post from my former blog, which I am pasting below. I hope that Canada will show similar boldness, though something tells me that we can expect nothing of the sort from this government.

Anyway, enjoy!

In the academic racket we aspire to international scholarly reputations, and with this comes the need to travel. Trips to national or international meetings to present invited lectures are common, as are various invited talks at other universities. Then there is the overseas junket, perhaps as a visiting scholar, or a plenary lecturer. All of these things need to appear on the CV, with frequency, if one is to make the case for eminence.

What all of these activities have in common is the use of air travel. Being in an older demographic, I can still remember a time when flying had a certain allure: it was not that commonly done, and the customer service allowed passengers to convince themselves that this was something truly special. Those days are long gone, replaced with the current pathetic rituals of travel--pointless security kabuki theatre, overpacked planes, arbitrary cancellation of flights, indifferent ticket and gate agents, identical terminal food franchises, etc. The horror of modern air travel acts as a disincentive to seeking the kind of international renown that demands its use. Then there is the environmental cost. Every flight of reasonable distance consumes a significant amount of each passenger's annual carbon footprint, if we were serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In the future, when (if) the recession recedes, demand for fossil fuels will rise, and production will not be able to keep pace. This is the long-predicted phenomenon of "peak oil," and the economics are clear: when there is no longer any slack between supply and demand, the price will rise steadily, even precipitously. The impact that this will have on air travel will be profound. It will simply no longer be a routine activity, because relatively few will be able to afford the cost of a ticket that is in any way pegged to the actual cost of the fuel.

As this unfolds, we will all have to reevaluate our rationales for travel, and our expectations for how that will be accomplished. One likely outcome is a resurgence in travel by rail. Back in the mid-20th century, it was still considered reasonable to expend several days to travel somewhere distant, and this was the case for those in academics as well. An invitation to speak at Yale and Dartmouth? Book it when you have time to take the train there and back. And people were forced to be more choosy about their trips; accepting every invitation would entail traveling 100% of the time.

A return to that slower-paced approach might not be so bad. As I contemplate it, I'm reminded of Ani DiFranco's poem "self evident," written in the days after 9/11. Here's an excerpt:

here's to our last drink of fossil fuels 
let us vow to get off of this sauce 
shoo away the swarms of commuter planes 
and find that train ticket we lost 
cuz once upon a time the line followed the river 
and peeked into all the backyards 
and the laundry was wavingthe graffiti was teasing usfrom brick walls and bridges 
we were rolling over ridges 
through valleys 
under stars i dream of touring like duke ellington 
in my own railroad car i dream of waiting on the tall blonde wooden benches 
in a grand station aglow with grace 
and then standing out on the platform 
and feeling the air on my face
--from "self evident" by Ani DiFranco

Sounds pretty good to me.

Brave Functionaries

Over at the U of A's "official" blog, there has not been much activity so far, with one exception.  There have been a grand total of 3 posts, nominally by three different people (though we don't really know who is writing the posts).  Two of those posts have generated a combined total of 1 comment, but the first one has a healthy comment string approaching 20 at this point.  There is a phenomenon that I have observed previously in blog comments that has made an appearance here:  the notion that using one's real name displays a level of virtue and fortitude that is lacking in those who remain completely anonymous or rely on pseudonyms.  Thus, we have the director of the University Bookstore and the executive director of "Ancillary Services" (whatever that is) at the Lister Centre making patronizing comments about people like Keyser Sose, who is actually raising important, substantive issues.  Because he is not using his real name (presumably due to a feeling of vulnerability to reprisals by the administration), they seem to think that this makes the case for devaluing what he has written.

Here's a suggestion:  stop worrying about what name someone else is using, and try actually addressing the points that are coming up.

Elevator Use

So, this morning I rode the elevator in my building to the top floor.  On the ground floor, an undergraduate student, obviously in perfect health, got on and proceeded to hit the button to go up one floor.  (Notably, the elevators are in a large, open stairwell, so taking the stairs would consist of merely turning around from the elevator bank and walking up 22 steps...something I do many times per day.)  The question that plagues me in these situations is not so much why an able-bodied student would take the elevator up one floor (or for that matter, DOWN one floor, which is also common).  The answer is laziness.  No, what I wonder is whether these students have lost all capability of feeling embarrassment.  When I was an undergraduate, I would NEVER have considered doing something like that, and I don't recall seeing many of my peers do so either.  Apart from not wanting to wait for the elevator, I would have worried about looking totally lame to my friends and coworkers.  Are the two generations really that different in how they manage their image?  It appears so.

Colloquy

Well, I tried to drop a comment at the U of A's new blog, Colloquy, but so far it has not shown up.  There was nothing especially mean in my comment, just a discussion of the significance of the name they chose for the blog.  If that's enough to disqualify my comment, then I think we can predict that this enterprise is going to be a colossal waste of time.

Interesting Piece on Technology Lock-In

One of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, has a piece in Slate on how the historical development of a particular technology can lead a society to a development pattern that is nonintuitive and clearly not the best solution to that particular problem.  The example he uses is rocket technology, which is enormously expensive (in its current form, to say nothing of the trillions of dollars spent in its development), and does not really provide a viable platform for actual space exploration/colonization.  Furthermore, the circumstances that permitted its development were quite specific, and one can easily imagine myriad scenarios in which this would not have come to pass.  But now, it is extremely difficult for governments or the free market to countenance alternative technologies.

When we think about the many illogical policies our University, our governments, or our society undertake, it is valuable to consider the impediments to clear thinking that arise in such situations.  It's actually quite hard to embark on radically different courses, because human nature is so predictably conservative.

Rerun: On New Students

Some time back, I tried my hand at a more generic blog whose topic was the things that made me grumpy.  It was fun, but life took over and I had to let it go into hiatus.  However, I still like some of my old posts, so I think I will periodically resurrect one that seems to still be appropriate.  Here's the first, written shortly after the annual fall arrival of the undergraduate students, who are mostly missing during the summer months.  There is always a period of adjustment by all involved, perhaps particularly in the case of those who are setting foot on campus for the first time, and display remarkable cluelessness about the mayhem they are causing with their actions.

Every fall brings thousands of new and returning students to our formerly quiet campus. Of course, that's a good thing. One of our primary purposes is the education of said students. On the other hand, the level of douchebaggery that ensues in those first few weeks of the semester never fails to floor me. Here I will focus on one particular aspect, sidewalk and hallway behavior.

How many times have I been walking across campus on the right hand side of a 10-foot wide sidewalk, and had a group of oncoming students 4 abreast approach me, leaving no room for pedestrians moving in the opposite direction? I am not a small person, so if I notice this unfolding, I look the one closest to me in the eye and lower my shoulder to convey a clear message: move or you will land on your ass. Usually they move, though I doubt the lesson has been internalized. Therefore, here it is, in short form: sidewalks are not one-way thoroughfares.

Then there is the corridor gaggle. Oftentimes between classes, I (and many hundreds of others) will be walking through a building, only to encounter a huge clot of students trying to move in both directions. As we progress through the logjam, its origins become clear: a group of clueless students parked in the middle of the crowd, talking while they make everyone go around them. I occasionally provide them with some input about their spectacularly considerate behavior, with said comments typically met with eye-rolling indicating what a buzzkill I am. Well, so what? Maybe I wanted to kill your buzz. Anyway, in short: move to a table or the quad if you want to hold a conversation.

Well, that's my vent of the week. Perhaps in the future I will comment on the tools from engineering who live next door, or the pathetic freshmen who ride the elevator up one floor to get to their lab sections. In the meantime, stay cranky.

Of Course There Are Curves

Macleans On Campus reports the latest on the Kovalyov grading dispute.  They note Dean of Science Greg Taylor's letter that the Faculty does not insist that grade distributions adhere to particular curves in its classes.  (Specifically, the letter states that "...there is no quota of As, Bs, Cs and so on in a course or across sections...")  Then, wishout fanfare, the author of the Macleans piece point out the explanation given by FSO David McNeilly for his decision to recommend the changes that were made (no C-, D+ or D grades given in the original distribution), and link to the GFC Policy Manual that includes a recommended distribution of letter grades for classes at various levels.  These are fairly blatant indications that curves are strongly "recommended," if not strictly enforced.

One has to wonder why the existence of such guidelines is being so vehemently denied.  There is value in assigning grades on a normative basis in large classes where typical distributions of student performance are likely to appear.  This imposes a common expectation for overall class GPA, without the wild variations that could appear if it were left entirely to the whim of the instructor.  For example, I know someone who graduated from the U of A in the 1980's with an Honours BSc in one of the physical sciences.  This person received a grade of "4" in a math class, which those of you who have been at the U of A long enough will recognize as one grade above "fail."  And that was the highest mark in the class.  In other words, the professor teaching this class set an arbitrary (and unrealistically high) absolute standard, and found all the students wanting.  On the other hand, I have a colleague, who is not terribly careful about writing exams, and who ended up with an average grade of 90 at the end of the term.  This was a large section, and there was no way that half the students had achieved sufficient knowledge to merit an "A," yet this was his plan.  It was overruled at the Department level, and I wholly supported that outcome.  Anything else would be patently unfair to the students in other sections whose instructors knew how to write exams that distinguished those who really understood the concepts from those who did not.  Students should not be rewarded simply because chance landed them in a class taught by an incompetent instructor.

If no one felt obligated to hew fairly close to the recommended distributions and overall class GPA, I think it is reasonable to expect an inevitable upward climb in average GPA.  Otherwise, students would undoubtedly punish the instructors who used the full range of grades when their friends were in a section with a class GPA of 3.5.  Grade inflation has seriously damaged the credibility of many institutions, and I don't think the U of A has a lot of credibility to spare right now.