I am a Maclean's reader. I have a subscription. Kenneth Whyte is a fine editor; I could read Andrew Coyne all day long. But since the early 1990s, the magazine has had an annual ranking of Canadian universities, and as university administrator I am supposed to loathe the exercise. The criteria by which they judge us do not make for good comparisons. Should we really discourage students from attending a great small school with excellent teachers but a poor library when that school is in an urban center, down the street from a huge institution with a great library, open to anyone with a student identification card? Scholarships are nice, but who would not forgo, say, $2,500 a year for the chance to study with someone whose reference letter can get one a job? If, as Margaret Wente always argues, research in the social sciences and humanities is a waste of time, why judge us on the number of grants we get? Still, the institutions at which I have taught have never been savaged by Maclean's, and as a matter of fact I used to get singled out as a notable teacher in their related directory, when they published the assessments of student unions. At least the national media is talking about postsecondary education, right? So, when the rankings come out, I usually have a look, hold my nose, have a chuckle, and plug along with whatever work November brings.
I have grown more and more uncomfortable with the articles that surround these rankings, however. In the 1998 edition, the oldest I still have, there were stories about technology in the classroom and studying abroad. The 2002 edition had a story on access and the shortage of undergraduate places. This year, Maclean's has stories on relationships between students and teachers, how to "fight back" against someone who gives you a poor grade, and how to do something described as "beat[ing] the clock." This last piece, counseling students to cram all their classes into two days so that there are five remaining for paid work, study, and relaxation, seems strangely reckless. The author, an undergraduate to whom I have written in the past in order to compliment his blog, also suggests choosing courses with lax attendance policies and researching on ratemyprofessors the instructors of prospective courses.
What piece of advice bothers me the most? Well, if pushed, I would have to say that advice to "stack." Doing all your courses on Tuesday and Thursdays, exclusively, encourages students to consider university a "part-time" endeavor, and this is the creeping malaise of our educational system. From a purely pedagogical view, students need time between classes to reflect and absorb material. The kind of advice Maclean's is here offering is the sort of spirited filler that I expect to see in the back of student newspapers, not in Canada's national news magazine.
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