[PHOTO] Pole and tiger lily

Pole and tiger lily
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[DM] "On fertility and ethnicity in Malaysia"

Over at Demography Matters I've a post up examining how ethnicity and fertility intersect in Malaysia.

[LINK] "Undergrad focus lets students thrive"

The Globe and Mail's Elizabeth Church has highlighted an idea that has recently been bubbling up re: graduate schools across Canada (see Paul Wells at MacLean's, here).

Students are the winners when smaller campuses concentrate on undergraduate education and leave graduate studies to large universities, says David Marshall, president of Alberta's Mount Royal College.

Dr. Marshall, who has shifted the focus of the Calgary campus from college diplomas to undergraduate degrees as part of provincewide changes, said defining the roles of institutions makes sense for everyone involved as long as all schools have the same access to funding.

“The result is everyone does a better job,” he said, pointing to the high scores for student satisfaction that small campuses routinely collect on surveys and the performance of their graduates. The danger, he said, is when the role of undergraduate education becomes undervalued and schools devoted to it are given a lesser status.

The roles of Canada's many universities have come to the forefront this summer with the leaders of five research-intensive schools arguing that the country needs an elite group of postsecondary institutions focusing on research and graduate education. International competition and the increasing need to innovate require such measures, they say.

Such a system, they say, also would provide students with more choice in the type of institution they attend.

While some may wish to attend a large, research-intensive school, they should also have more chances to study at small, undergraduate campuses, they say.

The message from the leaders of the universities of British Columbia, Alberta, Toronto and Montreal, and McGill, has started a debate on the need for a national strategy for higher education.

It also has prompted criticism from several university leaders who see it as a play by the big schools for cash.

[. . .]

“This is a really short-sighted approach,” said Jim Turk, executive director of the Canadian University Teachers Association. “Canada can't afford to discourage any great scholars from doing their work.”

Studies conducted in Britain, he said, have found that world-class research is more decentralized than was expected. Likewise, Mr. Turk said, Canada has “important pockets of excellence” that would be endangered under the model put forward by the five university leaders.

Apart from noting that this would definitely create a hierarchy in universities, I'd also like to point out that some universities outside of the top five could easily specialize enough to merit any number of specialty-specific graduate school degree courses--computer science, say, or Island Studies, or ...

Not that this proposal is going to be picked up, of course. I dare these university professors to make Queen's University drop its grad programs. Just let them try. Do they think that all the crowds milling about on Homecoming day, causing havoc and grad press, just disappear? Ha.

[CAT] Maybe Stephen Harper isn't that bad after all

james_nicoll surprised me.



The Prime Minister's website has more.

The Harpers are proud to support and participate in the Ottawa Humane Society’s Foster Program, which provides temporary homes for pets in the community who are not yet ready for adoption.

The program fosters out animals with mild health or behaviour issues who need individual care and nurturing to help them recover before they are adopted by new, loving foster families. 

Laureen and Stephen have been foster parents to many cats during the past year. At any given time, the Harpers have provided foster care to numerous cats at their Ottawa home. 

[LINK] "An ideology, not a fact"

It's common for Canadians to contrast their multicultural cultural mosaic with the melting pot of the United States, we arguing thast our more pluralistic approach allows different ethnic groups to retain their identities. In The Globe and Mail this Saturday past, Daniel Stoffman argues that this is certainly not the case.

The reality is that Canadians talk about multiculturalism but don't practise it. That does not mean we don't embrace diversity. Both Canada and the United States, because of high levels of immigration, are diverse societies, but diversity and multiculturalism are not synonyms. Diversity encompasses a variety of characteristics that differentiate, including dress, culinary and musical styles. An example is Toronto's hugely successful Caribana festival. Such events are hardly unique to Canada; several major U.S. cities have Caribbean festivals too.

Diversity is not divisive in secular democracies that respect individual freedom, such as Canada and the United States. On the other hand, culture is not just about superficial differences but also about core values. The people who were attending cock fights in Cloverdale simply don't understand our tender feelings toward animals. This is a difference in values and there is no room for compromise.

The notion that Canada is a mosaic while the United States is a melting pot does not survive scrutiny. In 1994, a study by two University of Toronto sociologists, Jeffrey Reitz and Raymond Breton, found that language retention of third-generation immigrants was less than 1 per cent in both countries. This was significant. One would expect foreign languages to dissolve into the American melting pot. But Canada is supposed to be a mosaic: a set of separate and distinct cultural entities. If it really were a mosaic, ancestral languages would survive through the generations. But they don't, because the offspring of immigrants are quickly absorbed into the dominant language milieux.

Language is more than a way of communicating; it is a way of thinking, of organizing perception, of looking at the world. When you lose it, you lose the essence of your culture.

Only if there is a critical mass of speakers can the ancestral language survive. The absence of a U.S. policy of official multiculturalism did not prevent Miami from becoming bilingual. It happened because of a massive influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants accompanied by an outflow of English speakers. As a result, a majority of Miami's population speaks Spanish.

It is possible that certain parts of Toronto or Vancouver will experience the same phenomenon, but only an immigration policy of continuous high levels of immigration from the same source countries could make that happen. It won't happen because of heritage language classes promoted by multiculturalism policy.

Polling data over the years debunks the idea that Canadians are more open to cultural differences than are Americans. A Decima Research poll in 1989 found that 47 per cent of Americans but only 34 per cent of Canadians favoured the maintenance of "distinct cultures and ways."

Today, he took questions regarding the article.

[LINK] "First nations aren't big enough for true sovereignty"

Also from The Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson argues that claims by most First Nations groups for sovereignty arebound to be disappointed, or at least impractical, on account of the very small size of most First Nations communities.

Pouce Coupe, B.C., has a population of about 700 people. Estevan, Sask., has a population of about 10,000. Gravenhurst, Ont., boasts about 11,000 people.

Would we think it fair, plausible, desirable or doable to give Gravenhurst, let alone Pouce Coupe, the responsibilities that go with provincial sovereignty – justice, schooling, health, policing, roads, welfare? Of course we wouldn't, and nor would the people of those communities expect it. Their numbers would be too small, their tax bases too constrained, their capacities too limited. We wouldn't do it and they wouldn't ask, not because there aren't good and capable people in those communities, but because the numbers would defeat their best efforts.

We have something like this dilemma in aboriginal policy, dealing with first nations demands for sovereignty, political status and the other attributes that normally accompany “nationhood.”

[. . .]

An Indian nation, such as the Cree or Mohawk, can contain a number of communities, and therefore collectively be much larger than a division by reserve would indicate. Another warning: The population of a band should not be confused with how many people live on a reserve. For example, Shawn Atleo, the newly elected grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations, comes from the Ahousaht First Nation. The Register lists a population of 1,876, but just 676 people actually live on the reserve on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

For many decades now, aboriginal leaders have used the “nation” terminology to describe Indian groups, because they have the characteristics of a nation: language (in many cases now lost), cultural specificity, a historical sense of distinctiveness, defined territory (shrunken drastically from centuries ago).

With that discourse has come demands for more land and funding, new treaties or respect for old ones, and the delivery by the “nation” of services to its members.

These are all understandable goals, but they crash repeatedly against the reality of numbers. Just as Pouce Coupe, no matter how much better funded, cannot deliver the same range of services a “sovereign nation” expects, neither can the 77 first nations listed in the Register with populations between 600 and 800.

Australia is the only country in a similar situation, I think, with a scattered and ethnolinguistically quite diverse Aborigine population. How does Australia manage it, I wonder?