GSS Handbook Upheld

Nothing like a little controversy to start the fresh school year off! The Graduate Student Society (GSS), like the AMS, releases an agenda and handbook that’s distributed to students for free every year. This year they asked a well-known campus activist, Nathan Crompton, to put it together. Supervising it was the GSS Handbook Committee chaired [...]

Introducing Maria and Blake!

We’re very happy to have Maria Jogova and Blake Frederick on board for this year of the blog. I’m really excited about the year to come with both of them. Now for a brief introduction to the next generation of UBC Insiders bloggers: Blake is a fourth year philosophy student and now works in the [...]

What can the endowment do for us? The Berea college example.

UBC Student Senator Alfie Lee posted this New York Times article on facebook a few days ago. I think it’s worth thinking pretty hard about. Berea College, which outwardly looks like a typical New England private school, uses it’s 1.1 billion dollar endowment for students. From the Berea website:/ Berea continues to build upon a [...]

The Underground Bus Loop – analyzed to death

This is a guest post by Dr. Darren Peets, who just completed both his Phd in physics, and his term as a student represetitive to the UBC Board of Governors. One issue at UBC that’s particularly bothered me, and which wasn’t resolved to my satisfaction during my Board term, is the proposed underground bus terminal [...]

Welcome to the University club

News and analysis by Tariq Ahmed, UBC law graduate and former Senator. Depending on how deeply buried in the library you’ve been for the last few weeks, you may have heard about Premier Campbell’s trip around the province waving his magic wand and turning everything short of a high school into a “university”. If you [...]

Note to our readers

Hi everyone: I just recieved an email regarding the new Voter Funded Media system: Only 15 people are registered to vote. Needless to say this is bad for democracy, because I can get my three roomates and brother to vote and sweep the contest. Now then. As approved by AMS council, VFM is now running [...]

Historical review of SDS

A historical polemic by UBC alum Mike Thicke Do you know who the man in this picture is? If not, you probably lack a lot of knowledge that would be helpful in understanding the current activist climate at UBC. With Trek Park, the “Lougheed Affair”, and the recent Knoll Aid 2.0 RCMP confrontation, tension within [...]

Good luck on exams everyone!!

B.C. PSE budgets are actually being cut

Last week, the Vancouver Sun broke a story about the Campbell government’s decision to deviate from the expected funding levels for post-secondary institutions by redistributing some money, boosting health care and trade training in some colleges and cutting university funding. I wrote a post saying how reasonable this was with respect to strategic development of [...]

March 2008 AMS Referendum results

Don’t forget the below posts. It’s a busy week!Well, unoficial results are in, and all the questions have been approved with a majority ‘yes’ vote. Here are the numbers: Overall turnout: 44%Total votes: 18,446 U-Pass renewal NO: 500 YES: 17,945 ; 97.2% in favourBylaw reforms NO: 1284 YES: 4357 ; 77.3% in favourWUSC (student refugee [...]