Editorial

This category contains 98 posts

Difficulties Imagine-ing

As you all know, each year UBC relies on student volunteers to help run Imagine by signing up to be MUG/Squad leaders and managers. So it would seem, with hundreds of volunteers, that the university would be better able to accommodate these student volunteers that it relies so much on- perhaps by doing things like [...]

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 [...]

An Open Letter to the AMS

Sometimes in times of crisis it’s important to look at the big picture. So that’s what I’m going to attempt here. Make no mistake – the AMS has as fundamental a crisis as it can realistically expect to face. Since it has mandatory membership its very existence is not at stake, but its ability to [...]

Re-thinking referenda

Today is the last day to vote in this year’s AMS referendum. The results of the four questions will determine if we continue to have a U-pass program, if we’ll start subsidizing refugee students, if we’ll build a new SUB, and if we’ll make some by-law changes. The reason you need to we cajoled, marketed, [...]

What to learn from the Crompton Lougheed affair

The world has gone mad. I don’t check comments for one day while working on a paper, and when I return there’s a frenzy! Anyway. There’s plenty of discussion in the below post about any and all aspects of this controversy. I want to zoom out and offer a few things we can take away [...]

Budget "cuts" are a pretty good idea.

As Tim mentioned below, the BC government had decided to reshuffle this year’s post secondary education money, as reported in the Vancouver Sun. The result is that universities lose out on a percentage or two of funding and smaller colleges and professional schools get a boost. UBC specifically is losing 8.7 million dollars from its [...]

UBC and the NCAA

[I’d meant to write this sooner, but work commitments sapped my time and writing energies. As well, there’s a very good Ubyssey article on the subject; read it here. I also note that there has been some discussion at AMS Exec about the Athletics fee; I’m not sure what it is, and I’m not sure [...]

Counterpoint: Of the Knolligarchy and Other Phantasmagoric Creatures of the AMS Politics

An opinion piece by Bahram Norouzi When Maayan emailed me a week ago and asked me to write an opposing perspective on “power-mongering in the AMS assisted by AMS funds” by the “Knolligarchy” I knew that I was up for some crap, what I didn’t know was its magnitude. Having read the opinion piece by [...]

Financial Aid and Tuition

I have been meaning to post about this for quite some time now, being heavily subsidized by a european government to study one of the most expensive programs in a college (medical) for a registration fee (covering a half year buspass as well as heavily discounted warm lunches) of 200 Euros (300 CAD) a semester. [...]

Point: focus on the Knolligarchy

An opinion piece by Jesse Ferreras, M.J. Candidate, UBC School of Journalism. Counterpoint coming next week. There’s a war on truth at this University, and a resurgent movement of leftist radicals is fighting on its front line. I’m speaking, of course, about the Knolligarchy, formerly a joke name that now encompasses UBC’s newly-visible activist front. [...]

Please vote for us in the Continuous VoterMedia Contest