National Post

‘Not every opinion is valid:’ Carleton University free speech wall torn down within hours
Only hours after students installed a “Free Speech Wall” at Carleton University to prove that campus free speech was alive and well, it was torn down by an activist who claimed the wall was an “act of violence,” against the gay community.

“What we wanted to promote was competition of ideas, rather than ‘if I disagree with you I’ve got to censor you,’” said Ian CoKehyeng, founder of Carleton Students for Liberty, the creators of the wall.

Installed on Monday in the Unicentre Galleria, one of campus’ most high-traffic areas, the wall was really more of a 1.2 x 1.8 meter wooden plank wrapped in paper and equipped with felt markers.

By Tuesday morning the wall was gone, destroyed in an act of “forceful resistance,” by seventh-year human rights student Arun Smith.

‘We make your papers go away’: Website has unemployed profs writing students’ essays
Montreal — As an associate dean of academic services, Catherine Bolton spends a lot of time studying, lamenting and worrying about cheating in universities, but a Montreal-based online service that propels the activity to a new level made even her wince.

The website unemployedprofessors.com has teachers writing papers for students.

“So you can play while we make your papers go away” is its tag line.

“The idea that it could be legitimate for any professor to sell their brain, when they know better than anyone that papers are assigned for students to learn,” said Ms. Bolton of the faculty of arts and sciences at Concordia University.

Sid Ryan: The case for zero tuition
In Ireland, where I’m from, education is free from kindergarten through university. It seems absurd to me that we charge our young people any college or university fees at all, given that their skills and knowledge will propel our economy.

There are 20 developed countries in the OECD that currently charge zero or nominal fees for higher learning. However, here in Canada, free tuition continues to be treated like a radical idea, while the more than 150,000 students who have been striking in Québec for the past 15 weeks to stop fee increases have been chided by politicians and pundits alike for harboring a sense of “entitlement.”

Isn’t it time to consider free and universal access to college and university in the same way it universalized high school education at the beginning of the last century? Isn’t it time that profitable corporations were obliged by law to invest in workplace-based training such as apprenticeship and basic skills?

Queen’s University marching band suspended for distributing ‘explicit’ and ‘degrading’ material
Canada’s largest and oldest university marching band has been suspended for the rest of the term after materials containing “offensive language that is particularly demeaning to women” drew the attention of the school’s administration.

Queen’s University’s co-ed bands will not be appearing at any of their scheduled events due to the materials, which came in the form of member guides and songbooks including lyrics such as “I wish all the ladies were pies on a shelf and [if I] was the baker, I’d eat ‘em all myself,” to quote one of the tamer tunes. (Photo: Justin Chin/Queen’s Journal)

Ryerson student takes veganism discrimination dispute to Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario
The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario is to decide whether ethical veganism is a creed, as protected by anti-discrimination laws, in the case of a Ryerson University master’s student in social work who claims senior faculty “sabotaged” her career because of her moral equivalence of animals and humans.

Sinem Ketenci, 37, who immigrated from Turkey as a young woman and studied at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay before doing a master’s at Ryerson, alleges a senior professor disagreed with her comparison of maltreated animals with marginalized people, said the connection was “very inhuman and racist,” and pressured Ms. Ketenci’s untenured supervisor into withdrawing his recommendation of her PhD candidacy at other schools, which she called an academic “kiss of death.”

In an interview Monday, Ms. Ketenci said the fallout has extended to her personal life, costing her friends among fellow students, and left her “traumatized.”

“This systemic discrimination and harassment that silences marginalized minority peoples’ voices, such as me as a Racialized Ethical Vegan, is a serious threat towards freedom of speech and freedom of belief,” Ms. Ketenci writes in her complaint to the tribunal.

“I entered the [master’s] program with good intentions, and instead, I was attacked and treated unfairly because of my belief in ethical veganism and because I am a member of a marginalized community, vegan animal rights activists.” (Photo: Peter J. Thompson/National Post)

New U of T course has students exploring ‘sex in the city’
Finally: a chance to sit around and talk about sex for university credit. University College at the University of Toronto this fall offers first-year students a new course, UNI10471: Sex in the City

“Students will learn about the sexual politics of the city and how cities and their neighbourhoods become sexualized spaces. How and why do certain spaces become ‘gay ghettos’ or villages? How some spaces are designated or coded as ‘safe,’ ‘dangerous,’ or ‘sexual,’ and how are these designations inflected by racial and class markers?”

Dr. Rayter said a lot of students want to talk about sex.

Photo: The Brass Rail on Yonge Street would be a good candidate to be included on a sex-themed “Jane’s Walk.” (Peter J. Thompson/National Post)

Student debt bankrupting a generation
In 2006, Nereid Lake was a single mom with an undergraduate degree in French linguistics from Simon Fraser University and well on her way to a master’s degree in linguistics when Canada Student Loans informed her she had exceeded the lifetime lending limit of the federal program and would have to leave university — without her degree.

At the time, she had accumulated about $60,000 in student loans.

“Even though I had an armload of academic awards, I was forced to leave,” she says. “My aspiration was to work in the field of voice recognition cognitive science, getting computers to understand human language. Instead I had to take the first job I could, as a low-earning court clerk. Now I’m nearly 40 just barely making ends meet and still owe more than $50,000 in student debt. I naively thought student loans would be the great equalizer. Instead I’ve plunged into a student debt nightmare.”

Ms. Lake is not alone. Nearly two million Canadians have student loans. That debt is worth about $20-billion and includes federal and provincial government loans and personal debt in the form of credit cards, family loans and lines of credit all used to finance post-secondary education. And that number is only set to grow as student loans owed to the government of Canada alone increase by $1.2-million a day. At the same time, the amount of unrecoverable student loan debt now sits at $149.5-million.

The Week That Wasn’t by Sarah Lazarovic: Ryerson plans to unseat TO’s reigning flashy university building.

Peter Kuitenbrouwer: Ryerson bringing glass atrocity to Yonge
Ryerson University’s new $112-million Student Learning Centre at Yonge and Gould Streets is a 10-storey glass box that turns its flank to Toronto’s most storied retail and entertainment strip, and may act as a giant buzz-kill for the street.