"Upping the Ante"

I really don't understand why the University goes with this sort of nearly pointless news story.  Wow, the province doles out $3M in cancer grants!  Is that a lot?  How does it compare to cancer research funding elsewhere?  (A guess:  probably very much on the low side.)  And how exactly is it "upping the ante"?  Is it more than in previous years?  The story does not tell us.

Pensions

Jeremy has a post about Parking Services that has devolved into a lengthy discussion about early retirement and the state of the U of A's pension fund.  Well worth perusing.

Also, Happy Canada Day, everybody.

Go Trent!

Macleans On Campus describes the latest stats on faculty salaries in Canada.  As has been discussed over at Whither the U of A, Calgary far outpaces the U of A, but even they take a back seat to a surprising winner, Trent U.  Bear in mind that this institution ranks 7th (between Wilfrid Laurier and St. F-X) on the Macleans list of "primarily undergraduate universities."  The dataset is not complete (e.g., no U of T or McGill), but it should validate the concerns of those who are watching with trepidation as the Alberta economy starts heating up (with consequent inflationary pressures).   And we're being asked to ratify 1.75%/2%.

It Taints Us All

Wow.  It's amazing how efficiently the clowns in charge are destroying the U of A brand.

Who Runs This Place, Under What Authority?

There's a lot of discussion at Jeremy's blog about how to turn GFC into a body that actually exerts some influence on how the University is run.  This prompted me to re-read the Post-Secondary Learning Act to try to decipher which body or person has what authority (e.g., BoG, GFC, Senate, President, Chancellor, etc.).  Unfortunately, I could not make much sense of it.  Perhaps I just have not had enough coffee today, but this document seems deliberately vague, almost as if it were designed to fit whatever situation certain people needed it to do.

Airing of the Grievances

I'm still not sure what to make of this grievance filed by the BoG against AASUA.  According to the Post-Secondary Learning Act, "Each academic staff association shall have the exclusive authority, on behalf of the academic staff members, to negotiate and enter into an agreement with the board of the public post-secondary institution."  Apparently, the BoG believe that by talking to CAUT, AASUA has violated that exclusivity requirement.  AASUA does not agree, and really I can't see this grievance being taken seriously by anyone who can read.  More likely, it's a shot across the bow in order to cow a historically passive organization, which may be showing signs of coming to life.

Bloggered

Wow, that was quite the outage.  Still not sure if all the posts survived.

Faculty Positions for Sale

There's been a lot of discussion on Jeremy's site on the question of a proposed new institute, to potentially be sited at South Campus, that would focus on technology commercialization and whose "professors" would not hold tenure.  This is another example of the creeping corporatism that continues to invade academia.

As usual, our neighbours to the south are ahead of us.  A particularly egregious example is this apparently successful effort by a foundation controlled by one of the Koch brothers to completely control the hiring of a position they have funded.  Are similar things in store for the U of A?  Are they already underway, and we just don't know about them?