The position itself was created as a result of Munroe-Blum’s Spring 2005 “Task Force on Student Life and Learning.” The task force’s mandate was to “broadly examine and enhance the student experience at McGill.” Mendelson joined the task force in the fall of 2005, replacing Martha Crago, also an administrator.

Mendelson was appointed to the newly-created position in July 2006. The task force’s final report, submitted to the principal in December of that year, said that the brand-new Deputy Provost would “champion the development of a greater sense of belonging for McGill students.”

Did he? Do students have a greater sense of belonging here?

We may never know, four-year undergraduate degrees being what they are. There are, to be sure, different schools of thought on that question, but it is undeniable that Mendelson has left his mark on university life at McGill. His office was occupied last year for nearly a week, with students demanding his resignation, among other things.

That occupation, he said, had an “awful impact on this office.”

“People in my office are still rattled,” he said, bemoaning what he called the necessity of increased security in the James building.

Indeed, the James building is now a remarkably different place than it was a few years ago. The interview that constitutes much of this story was months in the making, Mendelson only agreeing to it after seeing a list of topics. The door to his office on the sixth floor is now locked, a development Mendelson says he hates.

In addition to demanding his resignation, the occupiers of Mendelson’s office were protesting his refusal to recognize the element of a CKUT and QPIRG referendum question that sought to make both their student fees non-opt-outable.

Speaking of the occupation, Mendelson said: “there was a lack of empathy for the effect that this would have. The irony is the event did not change or did not achieve the goal” that the occupiers sought. Mendelson is finishing his term and the fees for CKUT and QPIRG remain opt-outable. The administration did agree to recognize the vote as a referendum on existence – though not on the issue of online opt-outs – an agreement Mendelson said was reached before the occupation.

Over the years, campus groups such as CKUT, QPIRG, and – in the interest of full disclosure – this newspaper have decried the mandated existence referenda as an attack on independent student life at the university. Mendelson, however, views the existence referenda as crucial to maintaining the “accountability” of the student groups.

“If the students say [a particular student group] shouldn’t be operating, then they shouldn’t be operating,” he said. The principle, for Mendelson, is that the University administration is charged with “putting our hand into student pockets and taking money and handing it over to a third party.” He disagreed with the suggestion that the same logic could be applied to other functionings of the University that involved third parties, such as construction companies, functionings that don’t require the student body to vote. Mendelson pointed out that as of yet, there has not been an existence referendum question that has failed.

Another of the high profile developments involving Mendelson’s office during his tenure is the authoring of a protocol governing future protest on campus. Flowing out of the occupation, the administration established a new set of rules by which protests could take place on campus, along with guidelines for security services to police them. The initial version of the protocol drew fierce opposition from campus activists and unions, and even drew a condemnation from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. The administration eventually split the protocol into two parts: a set of operating procedures and a statement of values, with only the second part to be voted on by Senate, which approved the statement last month.

Mendelson said he was pleased with how the process surrounding the protocol ultimately went. “I think the university engaged in a very serious conversation about a very serious issue,” he said.

Referencing a particularly heated 2009 confrontation between Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney and protesters from the group No One Is Illegal, Mendelson said that over the course of his tenure he has “been surprised…about the degree to which some students are very intolerant of what is being expressed, but extremely tolerant about how opinions are expressed.”

Expression of student opinion is certainly a topic Mendelson is familiar with. He has been one of the primary targets of student anger over the years, consistently bearing the brunt of criticism for various administrative decisions. From the repeated attempts to close the Architecture Café, to student referenda, to the protest protocol, it has most often been Mendelson that is seen by student activist circles as the villain.

“That was the part of this job that was the most surprising,” Mendelson said, adding that he felt as though he was the lightning rod for all administrative decisions that were disliked by students.

Of all his accomplishments during his tenure, Mendelson said he was most proud of connections he established between various previously independently operating units on campus, and the team he built to do it. The more streamlined approach, Mendelson said, is consistent with the task force’s recommendations on the fostering of a “student-centric” university.

The most visible manifestation of the streamlining of bureaucracy is, of course, Service Point. According to Mendelson, the Service Point combines services for students that were previously dispersed across seven offices in four buildings into a single location.

Does Mendelson have any regrets?

“We were not as successful in getting that across to students, I think, as we should have been. Maybe part of that was issues of communication and consultation,” he said. He stressed though that he feels communication from students to the University has improved from a decade ago, pointing to the forthcoming implementation of a student co-chair on the Senate committee on student services.

It hasn’t yet been announced who will fill Mendelson’s shoes, but they will be walking into one of the most watched positions in the McGill administration.

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(Some people still like to do these things in person. Soon these losers will be called Luddites and mocked openly by children on city streets.)

Starting in 2014, we will be able to add another entry to this ever-expanding list: attending McGill University.

Through their increasing dominance of the lives of North American human beings, the iPeople of Silicon Valley have also made significant progress in mangling all language utterly. So, here comes another cute sounding techno-word-noise that will be passing through all our lips over the next several years: MOOCs. The acronym stands for Massively Open Online Courses – and if you don’t know about them, you should. Because they know about you, and they’re headed straight for us.

MOOCs are a growing (marauding, maybe) trend in academia, and allow students from anywhere and everywhere to take college classes, sometimes paying money, sometimes for credit. There are a couple of companies – consortiums, in edu-speak – that partner with universities to offer MOOCs. Some are for-profit and some are not-for-profit, if the latter still means anything. They’re all the rage in academia, with heavy hitters like MIT, Harvard, and the like getting on board.

McGill’s Senators learned about them at the meeting on January 23 from Provost Anthony Masi.

There was furrowing of brows and wagging of jaws amongst faculty and student Senators. There was talk of the “exporting” of the “McGill brand.” There were questions about form, shape. How could we grade these massively open courses? Who’s going to grade 1,000 papers? McGill employees? People on other continents? One professor advocated for “ancient” methods of pedagogy. Others were enthusiastic about MOOCs, trumpeting their “accessibility.” Will students get credit? How much would this cost? The verbal construction “if and when McGill [decides something]” was used, and often.

It was decided that discussion had been good and helpful. Lots of food for thought and all that. On to the next topic. That evening, I filed a story for The Daily, which contained discussion of McGill’s budget as well as the provisional protocol on protests – the juicier elements of the Senate meeting, I thought. This was how provisional the Senate discussion on MOOCs seemed. I left Senate thinking that we might have at least a year or two to prepare for the dawn of the age of remotely administered tele-pedagogy at McGill, before the cyber-sun rises over the St. Lawrence and we all bow down to worship its electro warmth.

Exactly a month later, it was announced – remotely, via an MRO email – that the people who decide these things had decided. McGill shall have MOOCs, and it shall be good. The announcement thanked the contributions of the “Academic Working Group on Innovative Pedagogy,” which few people had ever heard of. The words do not appear on the McGill website. Some Senators thought that they, in fact, were the people who decided things. An email was circulated among Senators, asking some essential questions, questions like: What? When? How?
According to a follow-up email from Masi, Senate had decided (even if they didn’t know they decided). What? In the Achieving Strategic Academic Priorities (ASAP) policy statement. When? Back in October. How? Masi pointed them to several sections of the paper – an eighty-page policy statement containing mostly platitudes like “achieving new directions” and “dynamic learning environments.” The letters ‘MOOC’ appear three times in the paper. The first appearance of the word is in the context of McGill studying MOOCs. On the following page, the paper says that McGill will implement “Action 2.7.1,” and study the “integration of information technology into pedagogy… based on analytics derived also from [MOOCs].” The third time MOOCs make themselves known is some thirty pages later in a summary of all the previous action plans. Action 2.7.1 now has an interesting change – the phrase now reads “McGill’s own MOOCs.” So there we go. Masi’s email went on to assure Senators that, “if and when new courses or programs may be offered via this consortium for McGill credit, Senate will have an opportunity to discuss these issues again.”

It seems like the dense interplay of words and their meanings are a big part of the MOOC experience at McGill. When he was reminding Senators that they had already voted for MOOCs, Masi also wrote that his take-away from the MOOCs discussion in January was that “McGill should occupy the MOOCs space…deliberately.” It’s an interesting word, deliberately. As in the opposite of “accidentally,” which might be a description of how Senate came to vote on MOOCs back in October. Besides, Masi writes, MOOCs were implicitly recognized ten years ago, when Senate voted to allow the recording of lectures. “Modality of delivery” cannot be used to say that a course doesn’t meet McGill’s standards, Masi wrote.

In other words, Senate voted twice to approve MOOCs, in the administration’s mind. The first time they voted, MOOCs didn’t exist (ten years ago). The second time, they voted based on the words “McGill’s own MOOCs,” which weren’t actually a thing.

Responding to Senators’ concerns at the March 20 Senate meeting, Masi said that MOOCs have been discussed dozens of times, because ASAP has been discussed that many times. He also assured Senators that all issues that are truly academic (including specific courses) would be brought before Senate in the future.

So that’s how McGill (or some part of it) decided to get into MOOCs,.But what are we to make of MOOCs themselves? It’s still quite early in the MOOC epoch of higher education. All of the questions asked at Senate still await answers. It hasn’t been decided or announced yet whether or not McGill’s MOOCs would be available for credit, but it’s a possibility.

(Full disclosure: This is a cynic’s polemic on a particular and particularly important development at McGill and elsewhere. There have been far more optimistic assessments elsewhere in these and other pages.)

The chattering classes are certainly very excited. In January, New York Times columnist and high priest of chattering, Thomas Friedman, wrote that MOOCs were a “budding revolution.” Apparently not impressed with the actual revolution that’s been going on in Egypt over the past two years, Friedman fantasizes in his January column about how the revolutionary MOOC might change American foreign aid. “For relatively little money,” he writes, “the U.S. could rent space in an Egyptian village, install two dozen computers and high-speed satellite internet access, hire a local teacher as a facilitator,” blah blah blah. Nevermind that there is a bricks and mortar university in Cairo that has been around for about 1,000 years. America will build an internet cafe with some MOOCs and presto, “revolution.”

As Friedman’s column reflects, much of the rhetoric coming from MOOC proponents is about accessibility. Higher education is not accessible enough, costs are rising everywhere, and a massively open online course solves this problem, goes the argument. MOOCs would make a place like McGill more accessible, but that’s based on the assumption that the sounds and images beaming out of computers in a MOOC would still be “McGill.” The jury is still out on this one, and probably will be until we get a better idea of our future with MOOCs. And by jury I mean students, faculty, and staff, who should be the only ones allowed to make judgments on these matters.

There are some very serious concerns being raised already. Through their union, professors at the University of California at Santa Cruz have asserted a claim for the intellectual property of their lectures, out of a fear that a MOOC consortium would use them to make money. The UC system is moving toward joining Udacity and Coursera, commercial enterprises, while McGill has joined edX, a non-profit started by MIT and Harvard, so the situation in California isn’t entirely analogous to McGill. Fundamental questions remain over what exactly MOOCs will mean for professors. They will be the ones producing the type of content that MOOCs advocates are so sure can be easily beamed to thousands around the world. Professors were certainly split on the issue at the Senate meeting I attended, and again at the January 23 meeting. These were the only two meetings where professors have had a chance to talk about MOOCs.
The dystopian vision – to which I am prone – is a future in which “McGill” is nothing more than a flag fluttering over an empty Arts building, next to some of the most expensive, high-tech, state of the art (read: least accessible) research labs around, while most of us students blink into computers along massive computer banks, or at home peering out of our blinds trying to remember what the wind smells like. The vision might be a bit alarmist, but back in 2005 who would have thought Facebook would be something that might get us passed over for a job, based on some red cup pics from high school? Certainly not most.

Here’s a sense of just how seismic the geeks are saying MOOCs will be for our conception of higher education: Clay Shirky, the New York University professor and New Media guru, has said that this early phase of MOOCs (into which McGill is diving head first) is the equivalent of Napster, and the traditional university, the music business. Remember Napster? Now compare that to iTunes, podcasts, and Mediafire. We know that McGill is seeking to cut costs wherever it can, and why would we pay someone, like a professor, to teach a course on Shakespeare year after year? Hamlet hasn’t changed, and the scholarship about Hamlet certainly doesn’t change on a year-by-year basis. So why should McGill waste money? McGill could just record the best lectures with a superstar professor and knock out five years of professor salary from its books. To be clear, this is not what has been proposed at McGill, but if this early crop of MOOCs is Napster (because university bosses are clearly following trend-setters like Shirky on this), the mind boggles to think of what these techno-beasts will look like in ten years.

We should all be concerned about a much scarier logic at work here, and it is this: when computers break, it’s relatively easy and cheap to fix them. When the fleshier machines that work on this campus malfunction (get sick, demand higher wages, or question how decisions get made) it’s very expensive, time-consuming, and simply inefficient for the administration to fix them. If the administration’s rhetoric during the MUNACA strike last year was any indication of how the grown-ups in James think about this place, it’s that misbehaviour like strikes cannot be allowed to disrupt the “business as usual” ethos of the McGill campus. Machines don’t put strain on the well-oiled functioning of a university the way human beings do. There will never be a situation in which we have to place a court injunction on a machine. Machines can’t organize and make demands. (At least they can’t for now; we’ve all seen Blade Runner.)

* * *

When Richard Brautigan was poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology, he wrote a collection of poems called “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” A stanza or two of the title poem is worth reprinting:

I like to think
(right now please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Think of your favourite experiences in university. I bet they don’t involve a computer screen. Mine involve human contact with professors and classmates, meandering conversations where it felt like breakthroughs in my thinking were being made. This cannot, and will not, be replaced by a MOOC. I want those experiences to be genuinely accessible, not a computerized machine-mediated version of them. The process by which McGill came to join a MOOC consortium leads me to believe – this is based on nearly four years of reporting on this institution – that the decision was made before Senate ever got a chance to say anything about it. The same people who are trying to make this place less accessible through their tuition hikes are telling us that – not asking us if – MOOCs will solve that problem for us. If that sounds strange to you, it is. Let us remain students and teachers, not users and content producers.

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Once signed, all members of the association will see a 3.2 per cent salary increase across the first two years, and a minimum 1.7 per cent increase in the following year.

In addition to the across-the-board increases, the contract establishes minimum salary levels for all employees. Casual employees will immediately see a minimum hourly salary of $11.18.

Full and part-time research associates, on the other hand, who typically have PhDs, will see a minimum hourly salary of $22.75. Assistants, usually working with Master’s degrees, will make a minimum hourly salary of $19.75.

Current salary rates for research employees are determined on an ad-hoc basis by research directors, and vary across departments.

In June 2015, a tiered salary rate will be implemented according to merit.

Full and part-time employees will also see increases in vacation time, up from two to three weeks a year. Employees of seven or more years will be entitled to five weeks vacation.

Currently, full-time research employees are eligible for tuition discounts for family members. Under the new contract, regular employees working at least 25 hours a week will be eligible for the same benefits.

While the new AMURE contract won’t be officially signed for a few weeks, the tentative agreement was overwhelmingly ratified by the membership. The union is split into two bargaining units, one for research assistants and one for research associates, which voted 96 and 95 per cent respectively in favour of the contract.

When signed, the new contracts will represent over 1,200 workers, according to AMURE’s president, Matthew Annis.

The contract is the culmination of over a year’s worth of negotiations, as bargainers first sat down with the University in January 2012.

Annis said that he is most proud of the protections achieved for casual employees, such as vacation premiums and written contracts.

The union was unable, however, to achieve reforms for what Annis called “false casuals,” or casuals that have been working at McGill for years and work enough hours to qualify as part-time employees, but are still classified as casuals and thus earn less money.

The negotiations were overseen by provincial arbitration last fall, after almost a year at the bargaining table. Previously, research employees had only been able to voice their concerns through the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT), Annis said.

“This is the first time we’ve had a unified voice,” he said.

There are still two groups of workers – invigilators and course lecturers – who have unionized but have yet to see a contract.

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Massively open online courses, or MOOCs, are a growing trend across North American academia, and allow for thousands of students to enroll in college courses online, sometimes paying tuition for credit. McGill has joined a consortium called “edX,” which describes itself as a not-for-profit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts focused on the goal of educating one billion people in the next ten years.

In a press release, Provost Anthony Masi wrote that “Membership in the edX consortium ensures access to massive datasets that provide unprecedented opportunities to study how students learn in digital environments, to develop assessment tools for these broadly distributed platforms, and to improve technology-supported learning on campus.”

The decision, announced late last Wednesday, has caught a number of professors and students off guard as the decision was made without Senate approval, and with little faculty or student consultation.

At Senate on January 23, Masi gave senators an informational presentation about various MOOC consortiums. The presentation was followed by a discussion among senators about whether or not McGill should join such a consortium. As the presentation was billed as merely an informational session, no vote was taken by the Senate, and MOOCs were not discussed at last week’s Senate meeting.

During the open discussion, senators raised questions about how potentially large numbers of students would be assessed.

In an email sent to Senate by senator and political science professor Catherine Lu, and forwarded to The Daily by another senator, Lu questions the process by which the decision was made.

“I am wondering if someone can help me to understand governance processes at this university. As far as I am aware, Senate had an open discussion about MOOCs on January 23rd, and there was no agreement about proceeding with this initiative,” Lu wrote.

Lu’s email goes on to ask why there was “no effort” made to inform senators of the decision at the February Senate meeting, and questions how McGill can afford such a program of development as budget cuts are expected across the University.

According to SSMU President Josh Redel, the executive committee of the Board of Governors voted at some point during the last month to join the MOOC consortium, following a positive report from the Board’s finance committee. Redel said he was bound by confidentiality and was not allowed to say exactly when the vote took place.

Redel, through his position as SSMU president, is an observer on the Board’s executive committee, but has no vote.

Redel, who also sits on Senate, said that after the January Senate meeting “what everyone said to me is that it sounded like we were a year or two off [joining a MOOC consortium].” He did say that he was excited about MOOCs and about the particular consortium that McGill has chosen to join, but was surprised to hear about the decision last week.

“I don’t think that they made a bad choice. I think that they did put the work into it. But, just like a lot of other things at McGill, they grade-A failed at communication. Just no word about it. I’ve been here for six years. I’ve been in positions of leadership roles…. And I have never heard of [McGill’s plan to join a MOOC consortium],” Redel said.

The SSMU president went on to say that he recently learned of two “large working groups composed of very broad constituency representation,” involving University deans and members of the IT community, that have been working on the issue of MOOCs for as long as two years.

In an email to The Daily, AGSEM–McGill’s teaching union president Lilian Radovac wrote: “It is more than mildly ironic that McGill is climbing on the MOOC bandwagon at the same time as it’s putting hundreds of undergraduate courses and the lecturers that teach them on the chopping block.”

Alvin Shrier, president of the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT), declined to comment, saying that the MAUT has not had a chance to consider the decision.

On Friday afternoon, Masi sent an email to senators in an effort to respond to Senator Lu’s concerns.

In the email, Masi writes that senators were not informed of the decision at the February 19 senate meeting because the McGill was still in negotiations with edX, and was unable to announce the partnership until the next day.

Responding to Lu’s concerns about approval and the governance procedure, Masi wrote that MOOCs were implicitly given the go-ahead by senate in its approval of the Achieving Strategic Academic Priorities (ASAP) administration policy paper, voted on in October.

Masi goes on to write that his understanding of the Senate discussion of MOOCs in January was that McGill should “occupy the MOOC space,” and should do it “deliberately.”

“If and when new courses or programs may be offered via this consortium for McGill credit, Senate will have an opportunity to discuss these issues again,” Masi wrote to senators.

Money to pay for the development of MOOCs at McGill will come from exclusively philanthropic sources, according to Masi’s email.

MOOCs reportedly have a dropout rate of approximately 90 per cent, according to an article in the New York Times.

This story was updated on February 25, 1:18 a.m.

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Student associations, professors, and unions on campus have been echoing this sentiment for some time with regard to the language in the “Statement of Values on Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Assembly” and the “Operational Procedures” documents.

“Clarity” was the watchword at the second of two consultation sessions hosted by McGill’s senior administrators about the documents – a revised version of the University’s protocol on campus protests.

Senior administrators, along with members of McGill’s legal team involved in drafting the protocol, heard from the six students who attended the consultation that terms like “inconvenience,” “intentionality,” and “intensity” needed to be more clearly defined in any future versions of the protocol.

Lydia White, McGill’s associate provost in charge of policies and procedures admitted as much, saying that “as a linguistics professor, there are some problems of ambiguity here and we may need to revisit those terms.”

The six students, along with several student journalists, were split into two discussion groups, one moderated by Dean of Students Andre Costopoulos, the other moderated by White, along with Deputy Provost Morton Mendelson and McGill’s chief lawyer, Line Thibault.

The session’s two discussion groups further concluded that a clearer link should be drawn between the administration’s new Statement of Values and its proposed operating procedures.

The two documents stemmed from the re-examination of the original protest protocol, following widespread condemnation from campus unions, as well as the Canadian Civil Liberties Union.

There were no representatives of campus unions present, despite having organized a protest against the protocol in January.

Lilian Radovac, president of AGSEM – the union representing Teaching Assistants and Course Lecturers – said that the union had made a decision not to attend.

“Given that the university intends to bypass Senate and include some aspect of the protocol in the operating procedure, we see no reason to participate in consultation sessions. [Consultation sessions] won’t change that outcome,” Radovac said.

Central to discussions at both tables was whether or not campus protest should be allowed to “obstruct” or “disrupt” the way the university functions. Summarizing the discussion he moderated, Costopoulos said that the central problem was one of thresholds and how low they should be.

According to the students in his group, he said, the current threshold outlined in the operating procedures – of allowing members of the university to attend to their normal activities on university premises, free from disruption – is too low.

The University’s protocol on campus protest was written in response to the several-day-long occupation of the James Administration building just over a year ago.

Asked if building occupation was a legitimate method for voicing student grievance, both Costopoulos and Vice-Principal (Administration & Finance) Michael Di Grappa said that it was, under certain circumstances. Di Grappa specifically referenced the importance of considering the rights of those who work in administration buildings.

White, one of the protocol’s authors, declined to definitively state whether or not the tactic was legitimate, saying that it may not be in places “where you’re preventing business from being done.”

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In a tense council meeting on Wednesday night, McGill’s Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS), a member of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ), voted to adopt a motion saying that there is evidence of massive underfunding in Quebec universities.

Their stance is in line with the argument put forth by the Conférence des Recteurs et des Principaux des Universités du Québec (CREPUQ) – the association representing university administrations across the province – who have long argued that universities in Quebec are underfunded, and who will lobby for increased funding from the Parti Québécois (PQ) government.

On the other hand, FEUQ, one of the province’s biggest student federations, believes that the greater problem is that university administrations are mismanaging the money they already receive. FEUQ argues that this money amounts to an unregulated blank cheque for administrators.

The motion comes at a crucial time, as the PQ-sponsored summit on higher education is less than two weeks away.

The motion to adopt the policy position of underfunding was put forward by the PGSS executive committee after a vote of four to one. PGSS External Affairs Officer Errol Salamon was the lone dissenting voice among the executive, and spoke alongside FEUQ leadership present at Council to oppose the motion.

The motion’s supporters argued that while CREPUQ is one of the strongest proponents of tuition hikes – against the demands of students who were on strike last spring – it would be self-defeating for PGSS not to lobby for greater university funding.

Salamon argued that the motion essentially represented a deal cut with the administration, and claimed that university administrations across the province have been lobbying student associations to adopt their position.

Jonathan Mooney, Secretary-General of PGSS, objected to the characterization of the motion as being sponsored by the administration.

Salamon’s allegations stem from a meeting between Mooney and Olivier Marcil, McGill VP (External Affairs), in September. They discussed the issue of underfunding, at which time Marcil gave Mooney documents and research laying out McGill’s case.

Mooney and Marcil also met at noon on the day of the council meeting, though Mooney said they did not talk about the upcoming motion.

The motion, Mooney said, was the logical outcome of a report prepared by PGSS staff researcher Conor Farrell, and therefore had nothing to do with the administration. During a heated period of debate, Mooney told councillors that opposition to the motion was “absurd.”

Mooney said that Marcil had not asked him to create any specific policies during their meeting in September. However, following the meeting, Farrell undertook what Mooney described as a study of all the existing research on Quebec university funding, from across the political and ideological spectrum. Farrell’s report concluded that there was indeed evidence of underfunding in Quebec universities.

This assertion differed markedly with the argument offered by Justin Marleau, Vice-President of AGSEM-McGill’s Teaching Union. According to Marleau’s analysis of McGill budgets for a period of five years between 2007 and 2012, McGill’s overall operational revenues have increased 30 per cent since 2007, and 43 per cent of the increase has gone into administrative and non-salary expenses.

Leah Freeman, a McGill Social Work graduate student who is also FEUQ’s vice president of graduate student affairs, spoke against the motion, referencing a recent report from a Quebec professors’ federation saying that Quebec’s universities are funnelling money into construction projects that the government intends to be used for teaching.

“The reality is that no needs analysis has been done for Quebec universities. There has been no analysis of how many teachers we’re missing,” said Cameron Monagle, FEUQ’s coordinator of internal affairs.

In a previous version of this article, The Daily incorrectly referred to Justin Marleau as a researcher from AGSEM-McGill’s Teaching Union. In fact, he is their Vice-President. The Daily regrets the error.

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Four bargaining units from two different unions representing course lecturers, invigilators, research assistants, and research associates are all currently negotiating contracts for the first time.

AGSEM, the union representing course lecturers and invigilators, has been at the negotiating table with the University since 2010.

AGSEM has represented Teaching Assistants since 1993, but was also accredited to represent course lecturers and invigilators in 2010. The Association of McGill University Research Employes (AMURE), which represents research assistants and associates won its accreditation in 2010.

Union officials say that the slow bargaining process is primarily because the contracts in question are without precedent at McGill and need to be built from scratch.

Negotiators for invigilators are chiefly looking for an increase in wages from $10 an hour to $15.25, which the union says is the provincial average. Negotiations have been under provincially supervised arbitration since last spring.

Other issues of contention for invigilators include the posting of vacancies and a standardized seniority protocol.

According to AGSEM negotiator Sunci Avlijas, the roughly 800 invigilators could see a contract by this spring.

The timeline for course lecturers is a bit less clear, as union officials in their bargaining unit are keeping mum about negotiations.

Bargaining for course lecturers is continuing “as usual,” according to Stefana Lamasanu, the bargaining unit’s communications officer. When asked if the recently announced cuts to Arts classes – which are hitting course lecturers the hardest – were affecting the bargaining process, Lamasanu reiterated that bargaining was proceeding as usual.

Lilian Radovac, president of AGSEM, says that the slow progress of negotiations is not a surprise. “McGill has a long history of delaying contracts,” she said, adding that the first TA contract took five years to negotiate.

McGill’s 1,200 research assistants and research associates, the latter of which are classified as casual workers, may have a contract to vote on as soon as next month, according to AMURE President Matthew Annis.

While research assistants and research associates are in two separate bargaining units, the two contracts will be finished at the same time, according to Annis, who is also on the bargaining committee.

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Anticipating this, campus unions staged a demonstration outside the James Administration building yesterday, two hours before the announcement was made at Senate.

A proposed protocol regulating campus demonstrations was withdrawn last week by the administration following a condemnation from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and growing attention from the Montreal press, though its provisional version remained in effect.

At the time, administration officials stated in an email to the community that “the McGill community will be best served by an agreed-upon statement of values and principles, rather than a protocol of operating procedures.”

“We’re not surprised. This is exactly why we proceeded with the demonstration we had today. We strongly suspected that the administration was still committed to some sort of protest management policy,” Lilian Radovac, the president of AGSEM-McGill’s Teaching Union, told The Daily. “We knew this was a temporary respite.”

Despite -30-degree temperatures, prominent representatives of province-wide unions joined students and campus unions to protest the University’s recent attempts to police campus protests.

This was more than a simple show of solidarity, according to Sylvain Marois, a vice president of the Fédération nationale des enseignants et des enseignantes du Québec (FNEEQ), which represents over 30,000 professors and teachers across the province.

“We know for a fact that if McGill goes ahead with this, then other universities will do exactly the same,” he told The Daily, noting that similar rules are under consideration at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).

Jérémie Bédard-Wien, a spokesperson for the Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ), made a similar point. “The brilliant minds in the James Admin did not invent the kinds of repressive politics that are hiding behind this protocol. We are currently facing all across Quebec the systematic imposition of a culture of security on our campuses,” he told the assembled crowd.

Representatives from the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the parent union of several campus unions, were also present at the protest, as were members of several Concordia and UQAM unions.

Di Grappa announced at Senate that the protocol had been reshaped into two separate documents – a statement of values, and a set of operating procedures.

The forthcoming “operational procedures” will be guidelines for campus security and disciplinary officers about how to deal with protests on campus. Developing a specific set of procedures was one of the recommendations of a report authored by Dean of Law Daniel Jutras in response to the events of November 10, 2011, when riot police were deployed on campus.

Di Grappa made only passing reference to the controversy the proposed protocol has caused on campus, saying that there was no “unanimity” on campus to the changes the protocol sought.

“Over the period that the protocol has been in place, there have been many protests,” he said.

Both the “statement of principles” and the new rules governing campus protest – expected next week – will go through McGill’s now familiar consultation process, with two consultation fairs next month at both campuses, and a website to be launched next week.

Though the statement of principles will be subject to approval by the Senate and Board of Governors (BoG), the operational procedures will not go before either body. In an email to The Daily, Di Grappa wrote that the new set of rules about campus protests is an “operational or administrative matter.”

For teaching assistant (TA) Sunci Avlijas, “it is completely undemocratic,” that the University plans on adopting these guidelines without Senate or BoG approval. “I don’t see how they think they can get away with this.”

According to Avlijas, AGSEM’s TA unit plans on filing a grievance with the University under their collective bargaining agreement, arguing that these “operating procedures” would fundamentally change their working conditions.

The post University to adopt permanent demonstration regulations with no approval from Senate appeared first on The McGill Daily.

That was the main message communicated by Munroe-Blum’s opening remarks at yesterday’s monthly Senate meeting.

The meetings she referred to were preparatory talks for February’s upcoming summit on higher education. According to Munroe-Blum, she attended meetings on behalf of the McGill community, as well as CREPUQ, the organization that represents Quebec’s university administrations.

The provincial budget cuts represent a $19-million blow to McGill’s budget. It is the “third reversal” of government higher education funding policy since April of this year, Munroe-Blum said, referring to the Charest government’s restructuring of tuition hikes last spring amidst student protests, and the Marois government’s subsequent cancellation of the hikes.
“We also must stay the course,” in resisting the cuts, Munroe-Blum said.

Munroe-Blum added that the Quebec Minister of Higher Education Pierre Duchesne told her there would be more cuts in the 2013-14 provincial budget.

The Faculty of Arts’ recently- announced decision to cut 100 classes from next year’s course offerings has nothing to do with the provincial cuts, and had been in the works long before the current government was elected, Munroe-Blum said.

Other Senate business included the annual report from the University’s ombudsman, Spencer Boudreau. According to the report, the past 12 months have seen 271 requests for ombudsman support from the McGill community, 250 of them from students. The vast majority of students’ requests, Boudreau said, are about class grades.

All McGill students are entitled to a re-read of submitted work after an initial grading. There is no definite procedure for the process however, Boudreau said, and he recommended a clearer procedure across faculties.

Boudreau also recommended that re-reads of submitted work should be conducted by a panel of three professors, rather than the single professor currently allowed for in McGill statutes.

Associate Provost (Policies, Procedures and Equity) Lydia White said the last recommendation was unrealistic, especially in obscure fields where there may be only one or two experts in a given field.

Boudreau held firm, however, saying that all other universities in Quebec have a panel of three professors for re-reads of student papers.

The post Principal says education cuts permanent, more to follow appeared first on The McGill Daily.

According to a motion filed by VP Finance Elaine Xie, the second account was opened by a predecessor, who acted under the assumption that SUS had “lost its corporate status.”

Xie’s motion, which passed unanimously, sought to close the second account and return to using the first tax account.
Although Xie was not present at the meeting, SUS President Joanna Xu explained that the society’s accountants had been using one account, while Xie had been using another.

The motion brought the society into compliance with Quebec tax law.

Science Senator Moe Nasr sought to delay proceedings, however, by initiating an open debate among councillors about what he argued was “financial negligence.”

After the motion dissolved the second tax account, councillors debated whether or not to set up a provisional independent student inquiry into the SUS executive, as advocated by Nasr.

Many councillors declined, citing the lack of a clear mandate for such a committee. Executives encouraged Nasr to bring up a more detailed motion at the next council, on January 30.

In an interview with The Daily, Xu said that she would theoretically support such a committee for financial oversight, but disagreed with Nasr’s characterization of financial negligence.

“The [external] accountants didn’t catch it,” she said, referring to the duplicate tax account.

The post SUS finances questioned at Council appeared first on The McGill Daily.

According to Luc Roy, McGill’s director of Building Operations, a buildup of water around the pipes on the third floor caused the leak. Roy said the leak was not caused by changes made to the building’s heating system over the winter break.

Both SSMU’s General Manager Pauline Gervais, and SSMU Security Supervisor Wallace Sealy disputed this, saying that the heat had in fact been lowered over break, and that this was likely the cause of the pipe bursts. Sealy added that he had to wear a hat and coat during a visit to the building over winter break.
The leaks became apparent the night of January 4, as cleaning staff discovered water spewing into the SSMU ballroom from a burst pipe in the southeast corner of the room, as well as from a pipe in La Prep on the first floor.

The damage led the MSA to host its prayer services in a different room of the Shatner basement while repairs are made to their prayer space. The student lounge on the ground floor was also damaged, and cleaning crews have been working there and in the prayer space all week. Gervais said that repairs are expected to be completed today.

Because McGill owns the Shatner building and leases it to SSMU, the University will pay the full cost of the cleaning and repairs. Gervais said that damage to the floors in the ballroom would require them to be replaced, most likely over Reading Week.

The post Source of leaks in Shatner building disputed, costs still unknown appeared first on The McGill Daily.

McGill is the only university in the city of Montreal without a union representing its professors. Concordia, Université de Montréal (UdeM), and Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) all have them. In fact, Concordia has two: one for full-time profs and another for part-timers. The professors at UQAM went on a month-long strike in 2009 in response to internal austerity measures. Three weeks ago, Concordia’s part-time faculty voted 95 per cent to authorize a strike mandate for their union leadership, following several months of strenuous contract negotiations.

It is no secret that the culture of McGill – among students, professors, and administrators – is the most conservative of the Montreal universities. The vast majority of McGill students did not want anything to do with the red squares of the Printemps Érable (and some donned small green squares to prove it). Faculty members here are likewise almost universally unconcerned with forming a labour union. Almost.

Amidst all the collegiality at McGill, there is a small group of professors who are asking some serious questions about their place at this university. Recent changes to professors’ pension plans have left a bad taste in the mouths of many, because of both the changes themselves and the way in which they were introduced.

Last year changed things in Montreal, and here, too. Only time will tell just how much, and in what ways.

***

The strength of Quebec’s union culture comes from the massive wave of organization during the Quiet Revolution, as the province awoke from the Grande Noirceur of the Duplessis era. McGill was a bit late to the party, but we’re getting there. In the past five years, the support employees (mostly students), research employees, course lecturers, and invigilators have all formed unions or joined existing ones. We’ve had some strikes too – AGSEM (the union of teaching assistants) struck in the spring of 2008, and MUNACA (non-academic staff) was on strike throughout last fall – but they have left campus racked with bitterness, and professors’ responses to these disputes have been far from unanimous. So what is it about McGill’s culture that prevents faculty unionization? And how might it change?

There is a belief that McGill is in some way different and better than the universities that surround it. We are the Harvard of the North. We were founded in the Edenic epoch of the 1820s. We have old stone buildings. Fuck you, bumblebees. Trite as it may sound, it is clear that this mode of thought affects governance and academic labour here. “Upper administration acts as if it’s an honour to be here,” East Asian Studies professor Thomas Lamarre told me. Lamarre no longer finds that notion as compelling as it once was. One retired professor who spent forty years here said that there’s a sense that “unions are for the people who clean the toilets.”

As it stands, McGill’s professors can choose to be part of the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT). A lot of them do. According to Alvin Shrier, the association’s president, there are over 900 members, representing between 55 and 60 per cent of the teaching body. A lot of them don’t join, though. Professors can be elected to Senate, but many of them feel, in the words of one pro-union prof on Senate, that the body will never have more than “a weak veto power.”

Observe the McGill website’s organizational chart. Senior administrators and bodies like the Board of Governors are represented by a familiar McGill concept: small bubbles. When you click on a name or a governing body, the people over whom the bubble has power become illuminated, with the chain of authority represented by thin black lines. Senate’s bubble sits to the side, however, unmoored and unconnected with any thin black lines, neither more nor less powerful than any other actor in governance. When clicked, it illuminates nothing.

***

There are only two seats for academic staff on the McGill Board of Governors, which has the final say on all matters of policy. So MAUT is currently the only game in town for many professors. But MAUT is also not certified as a union, and cannot negotiate collective agreements or contracts for working conditions, as unions do.

Shrier, a professor of Physiology, told me about one of the ways in which he brings faculty concerns to higher ups like Principal Heather Munroe-Blum and Provost Anthony Masi. “We sit down and we have a nice conversation, oftentimes over a lunch, where we can discuss issues of concern from both sides. And it is, I like to say, a collegial conversation.”

Collegiality is a concept and a word of ultimate import to MAUT. It guides everything the organization does. They have a whole committee devoted to it. Shrier used the word repeatedly in our hour-long conversation. In the most recent issue of the MAUT newsletter, then-VP Communications Terry Hébert writes to members with a collegiality-inked pen. MUNACA strike? Shows cracks in collegiality. Changes to the pension plan? Rather uncollegial. The Faculty Club on McTavish? Cheery and collegial.

Several professors I spoke to who favour unionization described MAUT and its devotion to collegiality as an “old-boys’ club,” and a weak body for faculty advocacy.

Shrier has become acquainted with Provost Anthony Masi through their time in Senate, and sees him as a colleague. He has chaired Senate committees that Masi has sat on, and vice versa.* He rejects the categorization, though. “I’m not an ‘old-boy,” he said, stressing that his involvement in MAUT leadership is a relatively new endeavor, having been tapped for leadership only out of a dearth of interest.

Derek Nystrom, a professor in the English department, doesn’t share MAUT’s love of collegiality. For him, collegiality is the Febreze that hides a bad smell, rather than a fresh mountain stream. “The incessant repetition of the word collegiality is a kind of reaction formation to the fact that it’s not a collegial environment, that in fact the decisions of the University are largely top down,” he said.

In 2010, Nystrom had four pro-union posters about course lecturers torn off the door of his office. The posters were ordered torn down by Masi. Nystrom never heard anything about it from MAUT, even after the story was covered in The Daily and the wider Montreal press. Not collegial. Nystrom said that his prior job at a college in the United States was “a genuinely collegial experience of shared governance. And yet never once when I was there did I hear anyone ever say ‘collegiality,’ because we didn’t have to say it.”

***

During the MUNACA strike last fall, a number of professors got together under the banner (sometimes literally) of the McGill Faculty Labour Action Group (MFLAG) to advocate for the support workers. As the strike got nastier and nastier, MFLAG members penned a series of open letters, some gathering hundreds of signatures. In the spring, MFLAG moved on to advocating for students who were facing disciplinary charges as a result of protest actions.

A professor speaking on condition of anonymity said that MFLAG provided an outlet for “isolated faculty.”

“It was such a relief,” the professor said. Many of the professors who got involved in MFLAG have now begun to talk openly about wanting to start a proper union. Some would like to use MAUT as a starting point to move towards a union, while others would rather reject the association altogether.

The sense of separation between some faculty and the administration has been growing in the past few years. Many professors supported the unionization of course lecturers by AGSEM over the course of 2010, and objected to the way in which McGill treated the efforts of the union to organize them. Last year, the administration threatened the salaries of professors who wanted to take their classes off campus so as not to cross the picket line. At least one professor never crossed the picket line, and wasn’t paid.

A year ago, as MUNACA workers picketed yards away from the James Administration building, McGill initiated broad changes to the faculty pension program. Most pension plans are defined benefit (DB) plans, into which both the employee and employer make contributions. Post-retirement income is guaranteed, and is not tied to the fluctuations in the stock market. This creates something of a cushion for employees, because if the pension tanks in the stock market, the employer is still required to pay out benefits. Professors hired at McGill before January 1, 2009 will stick with the old hybrid pension plan, which combined elements of a DB plan with a defined contribution plan (DC). Professors hired after January 1, 2009 will move to a pure DC plan. The new plan passes the risk on to the employee, but will save McGill money. It is the new risk associated with an increasingly volatile stock market that has some McGill professors worried. Faculty members at all other universities in Montreal have DB plans.

Professors are upset about more than the changes to the plan. The plan was changed with little to no consultation – let alone approval – with professors on any large scale. As a result, we now see MAUT questioning the manner in which decisions are made about professors’ working conditions.

In MAUT’s November 2011 newsletter – its most recent – the association’s Professional and Legal Officer Joseph Varga printed a survey of pension plans at 26 Canadian universities, and reviewed the processes by which pension decisions get made. Only two universities in Canada, the University of British Columbia and the University of Western Ontario, have purely DC plans. Concordia, UdeM, and the UQ system all have DB plans. Of the 26 schools Varga looked at, half required faculty association approval for changes to the pension plan, and more still required at least some form of consultation.

The final paragraph of Varga’s explanation of the survey perhaps best sums up our professors’ concerns with the way the pension issue was handled here: “A minority [of universities surveyed] allow for unilateral Board-approved changes to their pension plans. Approximately 80 per cent of the faculty associations have extensive agreements with their respective institutions concerning access to information, especially useful when negotiating compensation issues, including pensions. McGill is not one of them.”

Shrier acknowledged that if there had been a union, maybe the pension issue would have been resolved differently. Ultimately, for Shrier, the movement toward a DC pension with increased employee contributions was something that needed to happen anyway, because of McGill’s current financial situation. The collegial approach, as opposed to the union/adversarial approach, “is not hurting us,” he said. The defined contribution plan may not be what professors want, but it’s what McGill needs.

For Lamarre, the new pension plan is somewhat grim. “The logic is that if you can’t succeed in the stock market then probably you should die.”  If the anonymous pro-union professor who joined MAUT is trying to change the thing from within, then Lamarre – who has a pair of doctorates in fields ranging from oceanology to Japanese poetry – is the bomb-thrower on the outside wanting to tear down its walls. (Bomb-throwing aside, Shrier and Lamarre were equally collegial during our interviews, both offering me tea.)

The process of asking the administration for concessions in the MAUT context is degrading, in Lamarre’s mind. “Not a kind of abuse we should accept,” he said.

Speaking at a CKUT-sponsored lunch at Community Square in front of James Administration on November 16, Lamarre told the assembled crowd that activists at McGill need to adopt a distinctly administration-style tactic: preemption. “We have to act preemptively. Let’s all just unionize now, we don’t need permission. We don’t have to beg for leniency,” he said into a scratchy microphone after holding a banner reading “McGill Feminist Anarchist Bloc.”

***

The current agitations surrounding unionization are not the first attempts at starting a faculty union. For that, we have to go back to the 1970s.

Sam Noumoff was a Political Science professor from 1967 until 2006, and was one of the original handful of professors who worked on an early unionization campaign in the 1970s. He and others gathered as many as 120 professors into a fledgling McGill Faculty Union (MFU), but the effort never made it to certification. Noumoff said that some of the difficulties in attracting membership were the MFU’s ties to the Confédération des syndicats nationaux, which was seen as “too francophone, and too radical.”

An October 1973 MFU letter of support for striking support workers asks colleagues not to cross picket lines. “We believe that no employer has the moral right to ask employees to cross a picket line to come to work,” the unsigned letter reads.

The MFU sued the McGill administration and MAUT for engaging in collective bargaining without the mandate to do so. MAUT said it was merely “consulting.” Noumoff and his fellow unionists lost in court, and that was that – no faculty union. The difficulty in organizing, however, was deeper than the courts, and had something to do with that old McGill exceptionalism. The sense was, Noumoff said, that “the McGill tradition, whatever that is, would be trumped by a collective agreement.”

While some are advocating for the abandonment of MAUT in favour of something new, there are several professors who are actively working on the democratization of university governance from within.

Greg Mikkelson is one of them. Mikkelson was among the many McGillians beaten by riot police while walking across campus during the November 10 festivities. But his work on changing university governance started long before then. He began advocating for a more ethical pension plan in 2003, which eventually became available in 2008. The new ethical option, it turned out, wasn’t so ethical, with stocks in mining companies and other nasties. Mikkelson ran for MAUT Council last year, and was elected to a two-year term. In his biographical statement from the candidacy he wrote, “Over 10 years of experience have convinced me that we need to democratize McGill from top to bottom. First the teaching assistants, then the non-academic staff, and finally students have risen up against un-collegial, authoritarian administration. It is time for us to join these other McGill constituencies in exercising our freedom and responsibility to govern.” (Collegiality, Mikkelson said, should really be a synonym for democracy.)

Mikkelson is hesitant to say what his specific plans are for the MAUT council, but said he is “agnostic” about unionization. Unions for him are “second best to worker control.” “In the context of a university, it would be worker and student control,” he told me.

As to what effect worker control would have on a place like McGill? After thinking for a long moment, Mikkelson responded with a question of his own.

“Ultimately, who knows? I believe it would transform teaching and research at McGill in all kinds of beneficial ways.”

Though he now lives in Châteauguay on Montreal’s South Shore, Noumoff – the union advocate from the attempt in the 1970s – has kept abreast of recent developments at McGill through an email list he called the McGill Wildcats. I asked him if he thought the events of last year and the pension issue would be enough to spur faculty here toward unionization, and his answer was a short, and definitive “Nope.” He echoed Nystrom, saying that if the pension issue didn’t provoke a union drive, “god knows what will.” Noumoff, however, has placed the blame for the current state of affairs at McGill at the feet of an interesting set of culprits: himself and his colleagues.

“It’s natural for an administrator to aggregate as much power as they can. That’s just the way a large bureaucratic institution will function, and the question is, is somebody going to push back? And we didn’t push back.”

The post Who’s afraid of a faculty union? appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Student radical? Nope. 

McGill Daily editorial? Not that either. 

It’s a statement that would make sense coming out of the mouth of self-identified anarchist, but the newly appointed Dean of Students? André Costopoulos is both.

The statement is surprising, and  André Costopoulos, whose term starts next week, is a surprising choice for the administrator in charge of crafting disciplinary policy, among other duties.

Costopoulos, an anthropologist by training, applied for the job in early summer, just before spending a summer with archaeology students in James Bay. He admits to being sympathetic with some student concerns – such as accessibility to education – but also says that students don’t understand the constraints that administrators must understand.

“Bridges between faculty, students, administration, staff – some of those bridges definitely need maintenance right now. They need to be strengthened, expanded,” said Costopoulos in an interview with The Daily.

So will he be an ally for student demands in the wake of growing student activism in Quebec and elsewhere? Or will he be, as one McGill activist familiar with both Costopoulos and the University’s disciplinary procedure put it, the “biggest ‘good cop’ in the world”?

Costopoulos will be one of the main voices at the table when it comes to the upcoming review of the Provisional Protocol Regarding Demonstrations, Protests, and Occupations on McGill University Campuses, as well as the ‘Green Book,’ that outlines student rights and responsibilities at the University.

“I will definitely be worrying about how the protocol, once it becomes more firm, will be interacting with what’s in the Green Book,” he said, also citing problems in the vagueness of the language.

Costopoulos comes to the position after four years as the Associate Dean of Arts, where he was the faculty’s disciplinary officer and was responsible for the banning of four students from campus last spring under article 21(a) of the Code of Student Conduct and Disciplinary Procedure.

One of the banned students, former SSMU VP External Joël Pedneault, told The Daily last March that “there was no confrontational atmosphere” at the event – a gathering of Université de Quebec à  Montréal students in a McGill classroom – for which he received a five-day ban.

The incoming dean said he would like to see article 21(a) revised, to include what he called an “oversight control mechanism” that would “check against the worst possible abuse” of the policy by the administration.

Anarchism and Discipline

For Costopoulos, it is a delicate balancing act to be both an anarchist and the administrator formerly in charge of executing disciplinary measures, and now in charge of crafting disciplinary policy.

“One of the things I always say is that ‘as an anarchist, it’s my responsibility to be in administration,’” he said, jokingly admitting that this might get him in trouble with both the administration and with fellow anarchists.

Both Costopoulos’ conception of discipline and anarchism revolve around his understanding of personal discipline, and thus the incoming Dean of Students has crafted a philosophy of discipline that involves the prioritizing of student rights.

“Because of this concept of personal responsibility, there’s no direct contradiction between hierarchy and anarchy, as long as the hierarchy is participatory,” he said.

“Usually, a violation of one of the articles of the Code of Student Conduct can be defined as a violation of a right guaranteed in the charter,” he said.

“One approach to discipline, and this has been my approach, is to cast it in terms of rights. Not your rights, but the rights of others.”

Last year, several students who participated in the #6party occupation of the James Administration Building had their punishments mitigated after making a case that there was an “undue burden” placed on the students.

In Costopoulos’ view, most disagreements at the University are disagreements about means to what are, he said, fairly universal ends.

As a McGill undergraduate from 1988 to 1992, Costopoulos said he was active in the Arts Undergraduate Society, sitting on curriculum and hiring committees. He added that it is incumbent upon student anarchists to enter student politics.

Was last year his most difficult as an administrator?

“Sure it was,” he said. “But at the same time, it’s a moment that a lot of interesting stuff can happen as a result of this. It put people’s attention on a bunch of problems that were there and were not necessarily addressed.”

The post Former disciplinary officer, anarchist appointed new Dean of Students appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Students can also expect more construction throughout next fall for the third and final phase of the renovation.

According to Robert Stanley, the Director of Project Management for Facilities Operations and Development, “unforeseen site conditions” will delay the completion of the project past its projected finish date of October.

Delays in sourcing materials for the general contracting firm St. Denis Thompson, as well as additional masonry work, have slowed the project, Stanley said.

“Inevitably when we work on these old buildings, we find lots of surprises. Things aren’t quite what you think they’re going to be,” he told The Daily.

The $1.4-million contract has at least a dozen sub-contractors.

Stanley said that if the project is not completed by early December, it will shut down for the Fall exam period, which begins December 6.

Last fall, the first phase of the Redpath project – the renovation of the walkway connecting the McLennan doors to McTavish Street – was delayed well past its projected completion date of October 2011.

Internal emails obtained by The Daily indicate that phase one of last fall’s renovations was delayed into December partly as a result of a payment dispute between Kingston-Byers, the general contractor, and a masonry subcontractor.

According to emails from within University Services dated November 9, 2011 – the authors and recipients of which are redacted – a delay in the subcontractor’s paycheck resulted in a construction manager “sending a small crew, or no crew at all” in protest.

The final phase of the construction is scheduled to begin just after convocation this spring, and Stanley said he expected it to continue through the Fall 2013 term.

“We understand that this is an inconvenience to the student population, to the employees of the university, but we have no choice. We have a four-month window of downtime,” he said.

He added that construction for phase three could begin as early as May, but that the University has opted not to start until after the convocation ceremony.

Kingston-Byers is one of the many construction firms to have appeared in the Charbonneau Commission, the provincial inquiry into corruption in the Quebec construction industry.

The contractor worked on a Laval water-processing contract that went 60 per cent over budget.

“Kingston-Byers have been doing work for us for a long time,” Stanley said, calling them “one of the best contractors in Quebec.”

Asked if the Charbonneau Commission has had any indirect effect on construction projects at McGill, Stanley said that there is an “insidious attitude of painting people as being guilty just by virtue of ‘you’re in the industry.’”

“There’s a lot of cynicism out there, and it undermines the credibility of my team as project managers and as construction professionals,” he said.

“Internally, within the McGill community most especially, people don’t understand the complexities of the construction industry. And when that misunderstanding becomes disbelief, disbelief then becomes méfiance, lack of confidence, and mistrust,” he said.

Stanley said that he has notified higher administration officials that there is roughly $600 million worth of work to be done on campus during the next six years. “The University is crumbling around us, we have so much deferred maintenance work to address.”

Although the project’s information page on the McGill website states that the renovations will include smoothing out the terrace between McLennan and Redpath, the addition of a green terrace and a railing around the perimetre, Stanley emphasized that this was “not a beautification project.”

The project was initiated to address “chronic leaks [in the drainage system] that were damaging not only the contents of the spaces below but also adversely affecting the reinforced concrete.

The post Two month delay expected for Redpath renovations appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The search is on for Morton Mendelson’s replacement, as the newly minted advisory committee charged with the task meets for the second time today.

The term of the current Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) ends in August 2013, and a recently created committee chaired by Provost Anthony Masi will meet at least four times between now and mid-November.

Details of what the committee will actually discuss are bound by confidentiality.

Created in 2006, the position of Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) is, by design, a liaison between students and administration.

As such, Mendelson has often been the target of student anger surrounding administrative decisions. Last February, Mendelson’s office was occupied for several days by students protesting the decision not to recognise the results of an existence referendum for QPIRG and campus-community radio station CKUT.

The occupation came weeks after a university-wide consultation process, which resulted in the leaders of 11 student associations signing a letter to Masi raising concerns about the size and scope of Mendelson’s portfolio.

According to a statement from Masi’s office, no major changes are being made to the portfolio, which currently oversees the Office of the Dean of Students, the Student Services Office, Enrolment Services, Food and Dining Services, Athletics and Recreation, University Residences, and the Office of International Education.

“Any minor changes would await the appointment of the new incumbent,” the statement read.

As per University Statutes, the new advisory committee is composed of three representatives from the Board of Governors, four from Senate, and two students. Of the four Senate representatives, three are professors.

Music Undergraduate Students’ Association (MUSA) VP External Katie Larson is one of the student representatives to the committee. She was a signatory to a document sent to Masi last year suggesting that changes be made to the Deputy Provost’s portfolio.

Larson’s name was put forward by SSMU VP University Affairs Haley Dinel, who said she chose Larson because of her familiarity with Mendelson’s office through activities like helping organize Frosh and as a MUSA executive.

The other student representative is Elizabeth Cawley, a PhD candidate in Psychiatry and the Member Services Officer at the Post-Graduate Students’ Society.

School of Nursing professor and committee representative Madeleine Buck said that the position requires a “balanced sensitivity to student issues,” and that any candidate must meet that criterion.

Buck added that because of the evolving nature of the position, the exact criteria are in flux.

Alex Popp, a special advisor to the committee from the McGill Association of Continuing Education Students, told The Daily that he values a candidate that is “open [and] wants communication.”

Asked if she would like to see the new hire come from within the University, Cawley said, “there’s something to be said for experience and a knowledge of McGill’s history, but whether or not that means they have to come from within, I don’t think so.”

The advisory committee’s suggestion will ultimately be subject to the approval of the Board of Governors.

In an email to The Daily, the Provost’s office said that it has hired a headhunting firm that will “[provide] the Committee with all the necessary information it will need to determine the best candidate for the position.”

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to SSMU executive Haley Dinel as VP Internal, she is in fact VP University Affairs.

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