New year’s resolutions for the University of Manitoba
Tessa Vanderhart, staff
Remember in elementary school, how your mid-year report card contained not abstract, useless letters — A, B, F — but rather the lovely, happy, useful, “Exceptional” and “Very Good,” appraisals, compounded with motivational “Great Effort!” and “You’re a Star!” stickers? (As you made it to university, I assume you’re most familiar with the “happy” letters.)
The cold, sobering effect of the new year (or the cold, sobering effect of your hangover), I find, hearkens back to those kinds of memories — and the feeling that hey, I don’t need a final letter grade on my permanent record, just a few words of encouragement and directionality. Well, University of Manitoba, I have compiled for you just that — a friendly pat on the back of all of the ways I’d like you to clean up your act in 2008.
Differentiate classes of TAs.
This is radical, so read closely: I think the university should hire more TAs and pay them less, and fewer TAs and pay them more. TAs charged with important duties like marking essays should be paid more, in conjunction with a suitable evaluation system to ensure they’re doing their jobs (!), for doing important jobs like marking essays. I am entirely serious: pay TAs more to give insightful comments and helpful suggestions on essays, perhaps even meet with students to discuss how to do better. Likewise for TAs that help with seminars: make it worth their while to put the effort in. On the Grader/Marker side of the spectrum, however, there’s an opportunity to provide jobs and experience to many students. Hire more students and pay them less per hour; if you want to be nice, give them more hours to reflect the amount of work they actually do. Wait, you say — such differentiation already exists?! Then make CUPE 3909 members’ earnings reflect it in the 2008 contract negotiations! (Don’t forget to amend the job descriptions.)
Challenge the commuter campus head-on.
U of M is a commuter school; this has become the scapegoat for everything, especially when we’re jealous of the hotshot-upstart-downtown-hipster U of W. So do something about it! The current system deprioritizes parking and public transportation and cycling — making it difficult to just physically get here. So: set aside an area for a safe lock-up facility, that could also serve as the U of M’s very own Bike Dump, promoting cycling culture among those who live nearby — and reduce the (slightly unfounded) fear that bikes parked on campus will be stolen. Next, the university should do what UMSU can’t — help make Winnipeg Transit better for U of M students. This means demanding more frequent buses to service campus. It means taking an active role in lobbying for a rapid transit corridor between U of M and downtown. And, most importantly, it should involve contributing, either through governmental pressure or a financial contribution (what would be a small amount to the university could make all the difference) to providing a universal bus pass for all students. This is all the more important if the university doesn’t want to transform the recently purchased Southwood Golf Course into a paved paradise, and since funding failed to come through for a second parkade in the Stadium/Smartpark area. Instead of more parking lots, the university must consider more efficient ways to divide up the existing ones — an investment that could easily be recouped in money and in public image.
Try to find a way to re-open the Tache Hall ballroom, or at least look into providing more space that students can use for clubs, groups, parties, lectures and conferences (excluding the MPR). Help the Graduate Students’ Association in their quest for a grad students’ pub (provided they’ll let some fourth-year undergrads drink there, please?), and help UMSU to provide more food-service options. In a nutshell, encourage the after-class over-coffee idea society that every single faculty of arts student, and probably most of the others, were hoping for when they enrolled. Or at least don’t discourage it.
Close some of the doors, some of the time, to the university.
You’d swear the quarter-of-a-millionaires in the U of M administration were born in a barn! The university is fighting to keep enrolment up in an effort to stave off a financial crisis if tuition receipts fall during the tuition fee freeze. Yes, if enrolment decreased by 3,000 there would be empty classrooms and some wasted infrastructure. But 3,000 fewer students would be the perfect number in many ways, as university vice-president Robert Kerr told the Board of Governors in 2005. And — get this! — with fewer students, fewer professors would have to be paid fewer hours, and fewer administrators, fewer support staff, etc.. Buildings that would cost 10s of millions of dollars to renovate so that they aren’t deemed unsafe within five years could simply be torn down, and new ones could stop being built. The PR nightmare of students who come and drop out immediately would be eliminated. All at the price of a better reputation, higher Maclean’s rankings, better luck attracting high-profile executives, and more money coming in through the remedial classes the university already offers to pull up one’s entrance grades and get into the university!
Up standards.
Don’t let grade standards for those who managed to make it here keep slipping. Anyone who has any notion of what they’re learning and all that there is to be learned can easily understand that second-year courses perfectly match the level of difficulty that first-year courses should ideally have, that third-year courses aren’t often much more difficult, and that the skills learned in fourth-year courses don’t have a lot to do with “honours.” And please don’t let master’s degrees continue to fill in the blanks for bachelor’s degrees just so the university will receive more of my (parents’) money.
Open the administration doors.
Informal Manitoban polling shows that most students don’t know who university president Emöke Szathmáry is; although she has in past years held open houses and invited the winners of large scholarships to her presidential home for a celebratory evening, the university could stand to make huge strides in administration openness. So, a three-pronged (I call it the “pitchfork”) approach: one, make students more aware of who the administrators are, even if it means spending a few hundred dollars from a faculty’s budget to give students a free coffee and a moment with the dean or department head. Step two, make good on Szathmáry’s own promise of increased accountability. Perhaps only administrators and some graduate students remember the scandal that almost was — when a professor and graduate student alleged the university was censoring their research — but I know why there is a dedicated accountability page in the administration website.
Third, and most important, is the need for the university to give up its secret-keeping approach. This may seem a Manitoban-centric problem, but the reality is that when the university gives the student paper the run-around, they’re really just avoiding students.
Grow.
There are lots of visions for the university, including the vision-in-progress of a new president, due in June. Until then, after then, what the University of Manitoba really needs is some renewal; a refinement of the things it already does acceptably, because so little is required to transform mediocrity into greatness. Encourage students and staff a little more. Put more effort into your course outlines, your essay topics, your office hours, your daily shower. Stick around after class to grab a coffee or a drink with a colleague or a student. Fix the heat and insulate the windows and replace broken chairs and beakers. You’re doing OK, university; if I had any champagne left, I’d toast ya.
