Winter picket lines in Canada: O-fun or M-fun ?
My friends who are at St. Thomas took their kids with them to the picket line, and report that the kids had a blast.
Everything Canadian universities do that's irritating to faculty is "to protect the students." Apparently Canadian faculty *love* to be unfair to students at every opportunity, and are only restrained from such cruelties as pushing back due dates, reweighting assignments that everyone did badly on, or changing readings by onerous rules like "you cannot change anything on the syllabus without the signatures of every student in class, even those who don't bother to attend."
purportedly in part to protect the students from the stress of a strike (how's that again?).
Well, if you get an automatic A because your roommate dies, I figure the stress of a strike is worth at least a B...
4 sounds suspiciously like everything American universities do to faculty, too.
Not that I'm bitter.
health benefits are under negotiation? What does that mean, up in the land of socialized medicine?
8 It probably means access to an `extended health package' which will involve things like dental, prescriptions, travel, etc.
8,9: Things like dental, prescription, vision, most likely.
And possibly health coverage for travel abroad. We had a pretty sweet package for that, actually.
Also, mental health care in some provinces, anyway, is crappy.
Well, if you get an automatic A because your roommate dies...
Is that really true? Seems like it would create a dangerous level of moral hazard.
Legend on my campus had it that you got an automatic A if your roommate commited suicide. At least in that instance you would have to go to a lot of effort to make it look self-inflicted.
Union bashing for the sake of the students doesn't surprise me at all. Increasingly, the students are not only the consumers of a product (an "education", a college degree) but also the client base for an occupation that is fast becoming a "feminized" helping profession. The students as objects of tender concern, and anyway, they're the ones writing the teaching evaluations. When faculty resist the ongoing degradation of their position, they are accused of "not caring" for their students. It's supposed to be a labour of love, after all, or maybe a vocation in the old-fashioned sense of that term.
As people above have said, additional health coverage would be for things like dental, prescriptions and so on.
It's not completely true that STU is totally integrated with UNB in the way the excerpt suggests; I was playing soccer against STU as recently as three years ago. On the other hand, I was going to the Halifax version of St. Thomas, and except to those directly involved the precise level of distinction between the larger university and the smaller school is totally without interest.
13: And really, they're trying to have it both ways. Keep the medieval model of scholar-monks devoted to their calling as far as the faculty are concerned, and adopt the modern model as far as students and revenue are concerned.