The NCAA Issue

This week’s posting will be all about athletics. A number of things have crossed my desk in the past few weeks that deserve comment. I’ll start with an article by James Mirtle that appeared in yesterday’s Globe: “NCAA grass might not be so green”. The National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Division II paved the way for Canadian institutions to seek active Division II membership when they approved a 10-year pilot program at the 2008 NCAA Convention in Nashville, on January 14. Schools must make application by June 1^st to commence play next year.

In Canada, university athletics is governed by Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS). In a press release, the CIS made several comments related to this issue through its Executive Director Marg McGregor. In my opinion there won’t be a mad rush to the NCAA by universities in Ontario. The competition is quite good and the travel requirements are relatively modest. The latter helps keep the costs under control. The issue seems to be driven by UBC and Simon Fraser. These universities are somewhat isolated and indeed travel to Washington and Oregon wouldn’t be any more expensive.

I’m sure that the athletics officials at UBC know what they are getting in to. My experience though is that the average Canadian University student does not. Their experience is watching Division I basketball during “March Madness” on CBS or one of the college football bowl games during the Christmas break or perhaps a game involving Michigan or Ohio State during the fall. Division II in the NCAA is nothing like that. The crowds are often comparable to those in the CIS and the competition is comparable. That is what makes Ian Newbould’s comments in James Mirtle’s article so interesting.

Mr. Newbould is the President at North Carolina Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount, N.C. And he was at the NCAA meetings in Nashville and came away surprised at how the decision was portrayed by Canadian media. “Thinking it’s the big time – it doesn’t work that way,” Newbould said. “There would be very few athletes in Division II that got a full ride.” Mr. Newbould is also familiar with the Canadian scene since he is the former president of Mount Allison University and is a native of Guelph, Ont. Quoting again from Mirtle’s article: “Newbould said a school such as the University of British Columbia, which has spearheaded the push to join the NCAA, would dwarf every Division II college in terms of enrolment, but that wouldn’t necessarily guarantee success. “The competition is really good,” he said. “Any Canadian school coming to the States is going to have to work hard.”

Just for fun I went on to the North Carolina Wesleyan College website. I note that on January 6^th NC Wesleyan defeated Penn State University (Perks) 90-62 in front of 100 fans at a tournament. This past Tuesday they had a big win over Christopher Newport (123-88) in front of 501 fans at home. Home crowds seem to range between 100 and 500 – similar to (if not less than) CIS crowds. Granted Wesleyan is Division III but many Division II schools are similar. In fact McMaster and other schools frequently play Division II and II schools with mixed success.

So why would UBC want to join the NCAA? Because even Division II schools can offer full scholarships while in Canada scholarships are limited. In Ontario a student athlete might get an AFA (Athletic Financial Award) of $3500 if there average entering university is greater than 80%. In the other provinces students can get awards of up to the value of tuition, ancillary fees and books. A “full ride” at McMaster could be quite valuable. For an engineering student with all the costs in the value would be over $20,000 while for a visa student (like an American for example) it would approach $30,000.

It is not clear to me where the money will come from for UBC to afford these generous scholarships. Despite what people in Canada might think, my experience (more than 10 years in the U.S.) is that very few schools in the U.S. are able to fund their athletic programmes without significant money from university operating funds. I doubt whether any Division II school is even close to breaking even.

Now that it is possible to join the NCAA it will be interesting to see whether any school from Canada takes the plunge. My guess is that, on reflection, they won’t!

Another story that caught my eye was Kent Austin leaving the Saskatchewan Rough Riders as head coach to become the offensive coordinator of the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). The story is about a couple of things. Ole Miss is Austin’s alma mater. He will probably have to take a slight pay cut to move from Canada as a head coach to U.S College as an assistant. Estimates are that both jobs are in the $300,000 range. (Note that this is two to four times what a Canadian university head coach would make). However there is additional financial incentive. The University of Michigan hired Coach Rich Rodriguez away from West Virginia University and will be paying him $2.5 million per year! Likewise June Jones left the University of Hawaii to join Southern Methodist University. According to a report on CBS Sportsline: “He (Jones) agreed to a 5-year deal with SMU, which will pay him about $2 million a year, agent Leigh Steinberg told the Associated Press.”

So the potential up-side for Kent Austin is substantial. Head football coaches in the U.S. make big money and as a top assistant at an SEC school, Austin could be considered a potential head coach. This is the sort of thing that turns off Canadians when they think about the NCAA – the excesses! Now, as I said above though, NCAA Division II is a very long way from the excesses I just described but for some it’s a slippery slope.

Community Concerns

A number of news items this week relate to topics that I’ve blogged on in the past and will form the basis for this week’s posting.  The first was a story by Marc Fisher that appeared in the Washington Post on Sunday:  “At Va. Tech, Near Silence for a Student’s Anguished Cry”.

A young man named Daniel Kim committed suicide at Virginia Tech University in December. Daniel was a loner but he did play World of Warcraft and people got to know him through that connection. One such person was Shaun Pribus, a senior at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who sent an e-mail to the Virginia Tech health centre saying: “Daniel has been acting very suicidal recently, purchasing a $200 pistol and claiming he’ll go through with it,” “We are very concerned for his safety. . . . please forward this to who can give him the best care.”

Despite promises after the April shootings that the Virginia Tech would be more responsive to warning signs, despite written protocols requiring that any student who makes “any gesture or reference to suicide . . . must be seen by the psychologist on call,” no one from Tech’s counseling center contacted Daniel or his family. Instead the university referred the matter to local police who drove to his off-campus apartment and asked if he was OK. They reported back that he was fine. That was the end of it except then Daniel shot himself.

One sentence from Fisher’s article caught my attention. “After Pribush’s e-mail was received by the university’s Care Team — counselors and administrators who meet weekly to discuss troubled students — no one made any effort to get in touch with his parents.” Like other universities, we have created a similar “care” team in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings. The notion is that the university would contact parents in a case like this in spite of any privacy legislation. However, Dean of Students Tom Brown is quoted as saying: “We really need to have written protocols as a foundation to stand on because you can get into all kinds of legal and privacy issues,” said Brown. If the police check “had indicated any cause for concern, we would have contacted the family.”

Our rule here is that we err on the side of contacting the parents and accept the consequences if the student complains. There is no question that in hindsight Dean Brown wishes he had made the same call.

In September I wrote about several sexual assaults that had occurred on campuses in Canada and the U.S. In Wednesday’s Toronto Star there was an article about the fifth sexual assault that occurred on the York University Campus this year. Apparently the assault took place Friday night in a stairwell at Founders College but was not reported until Monday.  The story was also written up in the York student newspaper – The Excalibur  with additional comments from student government leaders in the CITY TV site. The issue that the students have with the university is that the administration has not hired consultants to do a safety audit. Apparently the university reviewed its security procedures after the September attacks and implemented new procedures this Sunday – after the most recent attack.

University campuses are very difficult to make secure due to their openness. People are able to come and go pretty much as they please on a campus. Residences however should be different. Doors are locked and only residents are supposed to be able to gain entry. Students are a trusting lot though and when someone their own age asks to be let in to see a friend, or because they “forgot their key”, the person is let in. People will often “tail gate” behind someone who gained legitimate entry to the building. We even had a local television reporter tail gate behind a student and show it on TV just to show how easy it is. I would never blame a victim and have absolutely no knowledge of the case at York. However, my message to students is to always lock the door to your own dorm room (for a variety of reasons) and also be aware of who is following you into your building. We have several safety features built in to all of our residences but the best feature is for students to take responsibility for the own safety as well. The York University’s Security Department offers these other tips:

• Always be alert to your surroundings and the people around you. Walk confidently and at a steady pace.
• If you feel uncomfortable with a situation or person, leave.
• Learn to trust your intuition; the human brain is never more intuitive than when it is at risk.
• If you work/study alone or after normal business hours, ensure doors and windows are properly closed and locked.
• Keep a written record of obscene telephone calls, harassing behaviour and save harassing e-mails and letters.
• Never assume that an individual wandering through a building is a staff member. Asking simple questions such as, “May I help you” or “Who are you here to see?” can discourage the dishonest without intimidating the legitimate visitor.
• Never leave visitors alone in an office, work or reception area. Never disclose confidential information to a stranger whether over the phone or in person.
• Report graffiti, homophobic, or racist behaviour, as well as suspicious activity, crime and property damage.
• Report problems with safety equipment, such as discharged fire extinguishers, damaged emergency telephones, burnt out lights and malfunctioning electronic door access systems.

In another story related to campus security, Brock University unveiled its “Lockdown procedure” for on-campus threats. According to the article the procedure would be implemented in the event of an active shooter on campus, serious approaching weather conditions or a hazardous substance spill. The procedures themselves are on the Brock website at http://www.brocku.ca/campussecurity/policy.php and a pdf can be downloaded.

In response to the shootings at Virginia Tech as well as Dawson College and the general need for campuses to become more secure with better plans such as the ones at Brock, the Canadian Association of University Business Officers (CAUB) is planning a workshop on emergency preparedness. The workshop will take place in Toronto in mid March and I may attend.

Earlier in the Fall I wrote on neighbourhood relations. This item hit the news again in Oshawa this week. The City of Oshawa had proposed a bylaw that would only be applied to the immediate area of University of Ontario Institute of Technology (quite a mouthful – call it UOIT) and would require landlords to obtain a $250 annual permit (per bedroom)before they could rent out a house as well as adhering to minimum standards for health and safety. The number of bedrooms would be limited to four and landlords would also be required to submit detailed plans for property maintenance and parking to the city.

A public meeting was held at the local Sikorski Hall on Monday and Maclean’s blogger Joey Coleman was there. According to Joey, local residents complained about the students while the students (and some permanent residents) were concerned that the bylaw would force students into substandard housing. City council cancelled next weeks vote on the bylaw and scheduled a special meeting of the development services committee for next Monday. Other municipalities with universities are watching the developments in Oshawa. My hope is that the bylaw is not enacted. The city would do better if it got people who rent to students to provide safe housing.

Finally, the 2007 McMaster University Student Affairs Annual Report is on the web!

Research Over Head!

In this week’s posting I’ll be wearing another of my hats – that of a full Professor in chemical engineering. My motivation for the blog comes from an article by Elizabeth Church that appeared in the Globe and Mail: “Will Alberta’s energy boom revolutionize higher education?”. The thesis of the article is in its second paragraph: “As oil-boom riches roll in, expectations are building that this new wealth will transform higher education in the province and shake up the postsecondary landscape of the country. Billions in research funds, a campus building boom and university leaders with full pockets on the hunt for talent are adding to the buzz.”

The President of the University of Alberta, Indira Samarasekera, would like to put her school into the top 20 in the world by the year 2020. She believes that the province’s present economic advantage should be used to attract academic (read research) talent to the university to increase its prestige. Current rankings by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University have the U of A in the top 101-150 category and ranked 5^th in Canada. (The present world-wide rankings for Canadian universities are: U of T (23^rd), UBC (36^th), McGill (63^rd), McMaster (87^th), Alberta (101-150), Waterloo (151-200), Montreal (151-200),(Calgary (203-304)..).

The University of Calgary has opted to focus on four key areas. According to its President, Harvey Weingarten, “If you don’t establish priorities, then you will diffuse the impact of any money you spend”. I think that in the end Calgary’s focused approach will be best. However they are still focusing on research at the expense of the student experience.

One thing that I have observed is that you can’t buy a reputation. When I was a grad student in the mid 70s Texas was flush with money (it was the days of the Arab oil embargo and a drive within the U.S. to become more energy self-sufficient). Texas universities were trying to attract top faculty members and graduate students by paying them more or, in the case of professors, giving them large start-up grants. It didn’t work. The University of Texas was already a good research university and got slightly better. (It is typically listed in the top 10 Engineering schools in the U.S News and World Report “Best Graduate Schools” and top 5-6 in chemical engineering). The University of Houston however spent a lot of money and didn’t get much to show for it. I used to show potential graduate students around our department at Caltech. Invariably they would already have an offer of admission to the University of Houston with a much higher stipend. To my knowledge, no student took an offer from Houston over Caltech simply for the money. Likewise a high powered faculty member was recruited to Houston and paid a lot of money. His view was that the university was simply buying his reputation and essentially did no work.

In addition, it is getting more and more difficult to do high level research in both Canada and the U.S. This has led the Presidents of some of the top research universities to advocate for more selective funding. In an article from Maclean’s magazine, University of British Columbia president Stephen J. Toope says research funding should be focused on a small number of world-class universities, including UBC and maybe two other Canadian universities. “Rather than spreading research funding around in an unstructured and misguided effort to be fair — to provide a bland level of sameness in all regions of the province and the country — we must spend strategically on institutions that are legitimately able to compete on the international stage.” I wonder what the Presidents of the Alberta universities think of this.

A remarkably similar situation has just presented itself in the United States. The provosts of 11 public universities in the Midwest of the U.S. have published a letter in Business Week taking exception to quotes attributed there to Drew Faust, Harvard University’s new president. Faust was quoted last month as expressing concern about the state of federal support for research. She predicted that Harvard and a few other elite universities would be fine. “They’re going to be — we hope, we trust, we assume — the survivors in this race,” she said. The article went on to say: “As for the many lesser universities likely to lose market share, she adds, they would be wise ‘to really emphasize social science or humanities and have science endeavors that are not as ambitious’ as those of Harvard and its peers.” The provosts’ letter said that they “emphatically reject” the idea that they should settle for less ambitious research. The letter acknowledged that budget limits have hurt public universities, but went on to say that the solution is providing these universities with adequate funds, not diminishing their role. “If we are to continue the extraordinary process of discovery and creativity that is the hallmark of our great research universities, we must be willing to provide the support our public institutions need to sustain their educational and scientific excellence. The ultimate stakeholder is the nation. And the stakes are high,” the letter concluded. Notably, other universities in Canada offered a sharp rebuttal to President Toope’s proposal as well.

A side-bar article by Elizabeth Church in the same issue of the Globe: “While research funds flow, the basics suffer” gives the student side of the story. According to Church: “While Alberta pumps billions into building projects and research initiatives at university and college campuses, student leaders say some basic needs such as student services, residence and undergraduate instruction have been overlooked”. A particular challenge in Alberta is housing. Due to a shortage of on-campus housing students must compete with workers and families moving to the Province to find work. The cost of off-campus housing is skyrocketing while the vacancy rate is nearly zero.

A story in the Edmonton Journal notes that student leaders at the University of Alberta are planning a month of protest to challenge a pair of proposed fee increases: a 4.6-per-cent hike to tuition and an 8.75-per-cent jump to residence rates. Notably though, the proposed fee increases would still keep Alberta’s fees well below those paid by Ontario students. The cost of a residence room would increase to approximately $300 per month while Ontario universities are charging in the neighbourhood of $400 to $500. In Ontario first year tuition for Engineering students ranges from $6,500 to $7,500 per year.

There is no question that research costs a university to conduct. Granting agencies give very little to the universities to cover the indirect costs of doing research. To a company, having to pay overhead on a research contract will often negate the deal. This should be contrasted to the U.S. where research overhead rates on 70 to 100% are the norm and the universities are still crying about the costs. On the other hand, building a research reputation is the quickest way to improve the university’s overall reputation. Research has an international audience. At McMaster, discoveries in our medical school are frequently touted in national and even international newspapers. Student life and teaching are much more local issues. Universities can be known locally as a good place to go – I could list several examples in Southern Ontario – but none of them will make the top 20 in the world rankings as President Samarasekera desires. Perhaps the best that we can do is emulate the University of Western Ontario which proudly proclaims on its homepage: “Western provides the best student experience among Canada’s leading research-intensive universities”.