Religion poll a waste of paper

Originally published in The Gateway, 9th October 2008

There’s an election going on at the moment. No—not the Obama/McCain one, and not even the Canadian one that you probably know less about, but affects you more. This one went on with almost no warning and, in the end, will have no positive effect at all.

Perhaps by now you’ve seen a certain campus group’s posters asking you to vote on whether you believe in God. By setting up a booth in CAB, and later SUB, they hope to accomplish what the SU has failed at for far too long—getting students to vote. However, one must immediately question several things regarding this concept.

Firstly, you have to ponder the purpose of performing a poll like this yourself instead of hiring a polling company. You would think that a statistically significant poll would be more valuable—but perhaps empirical evidence is a bit too foreign to some believers.

If you want a hint at their results, see if they line up with a Canada Press poll from this past year that found that 23 per cent of Canadians don’t believe in a God, and 36 per cent of Canadians under 25 were non-believers. In a university campus environment, the latter group is quite prevalent.

Next, with polls like these, one has to wonder how the terms have been defined. It’s unclear what they’re talking about when they mention “God.”

Traditionally, big-G God refers to that guy-in-the-sky that Jews, Muslims, and Christians believe in. But some people believe that there’s some universal spirit or force running through the universe, and they call that god.

Others believe in a deity that started the universe and let it go like a wind-up watch. So what definition are they going with?

Then there’s the strangeness of hinging the metaphysical existence of anything on popularity. Humans often believe pretty crazy things. For example, people have believed the earth was the back of a turtle, while others believed that the Milky Way was fluid squirted from a goddess’s breast. So to run a mock election on belief in God makes me wonder what they hope to prove.

There are a countless number of things that the majority of humanity has previously believed without any empirical evidence that later turned out to be false—the earth being flat, the earth being the centre of the universe, the sun being the centre of the universe, humans being utterly disconnected from the rest of the animal kingdom, the existence of witches, and that masturbation will cause hairy palms.

So to ask whether the majority believes in a supernatural being doesn’t lend anything to its existence—we may as well ask if people believe in the Higgs boson. Without doing actual science, we’ll never know an answer about either.

Some will claim that science can’t know everything, and that God can’t be found in a test tube. Well, he can’t be found in a student group-sponsored poll either. And rather than getting their group more believers, they may inadvertently expose how many unbelievers there are on this campus.

Alberta is often seen as the most conservative Christian province in Canada, and election day will demonstrate why. However, when the 2001 census shows that upwards of 25 per cent of Albertans claim “no religion,” second only to British Columbia, there’s clearly more going on than meets the eye.

So take charge, fellow heathens, heretics, humanists, atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, and skeptics: you are not alone.

There’s no ‘God’ in graduation

Originally published in The Gateway, 16th September 2008

Upon the gruelling end of a 4-5-6 or even 7 year journey, students embark across a stage for the chance to experience their high school graduation on steroids. This event is known as convocation, and despite the movement toward inclusiveness and tolerance, this is one stage that keeps the flame of intolerance burning bright.

When new graduates cross the stage at their convocation, they are presented with a charge by the University’s Chancellor. He issues an Admission where he states: “I charge you to use them [the powers, rights, and privileges of University degrees] for the glory of God.” It is commonly understood that big-G God here is some variant of the monotheistic Abrahamic God (or the one Jews, Christians and Muslims live in fear of).

A recent Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey suggests that around 36% of Canadians under 25 do not believe in a god. This means that when the Chancellor issues his charge, he is denying the existence of students who disagree with the idea of living in fear of a deity. He also offends the sense of the majority who believe that a public institution should have no stance on religious issues. This is the idea of separation of church and state, or secularism, that founded the United States, but is exemplified by Canada’s modern governments.

Upon hearing about this issue from several of its members, the University of Alberta Atheists and Agnostics drafted a letter which was sent to the President’s Office on July 14. Hope for a quick move to inclusiveness was dashed when nearly a month later we received a brief response stating their office had heard of the issue earlier and decided against doing anything. We were disappointed to hear that this University wishes to remain in its dark-aged roots, however, seeing as we received no reason for their decision not to change the charge, we requested the minutes from the meeting where they decided this. Continuing to drag its feet, the President’s Office has decided this is an issue that requires a FOIPP request.

Now, almost two month’s after the UAAA made a request to make our convocation more tolerant of the diversity of all students, we still don’t have an official reason why the President’s Office won’t respect our wishes. We also have over a hundred signatures of students who are outraged by this break in secular values and the separation of church and state. Finally, we have a Facebook group for people to get more information about this issue. We have had tremendous support not just from atheists and humanists but from students, alumni, and faculty of diverse backgrounds, including people who deeply believe in God but who support the separation of Church and state and recognize that this is a public, not private, university.

This push is also not without precedence. The University of Calgary’s admission is to grant degrees to those who have "earned" them and give them the "rights and privileges, powers and responsibilities pertaining to those degrees."  The University of Toronto secularized its convocation several years ago as well. Cleary the U of A can look to be as progressive as the U of T and U of C.

Many will assume this is a frivolous attempt to push militant atheism. However, we are not requesting the charge to say "use your glory to disprove god and vilify religion", we just want to feel welcome in a ceremony we have all equally earned. Further, members of our group do not wish to define "god" in some way that it makes them happy as some would suggest. We do not arbitrarily interpret words differently to get through the day. Interpreting an F on your transcript as "Fantastic" doesn’t make it so. The University’s charge comes from the charge from Oxford University, which has a clearly Christian foundation.

It shouldn’t be unreasonable for a group of students who pay upwards of $25,000 to get a degree to ask to be included in a celebration of their achievements. The President’s disregard for our wishes is abhorrent and intolerant.  We stand united for a secular convocation at the University of Alberta.

By the end of the school year, we’d managed to win a concession from the university and the convocation charge was changed.

While I’m no economist (likely a good thing in this case), and don’t have access to the entire financial records, a few methods strike me as immediately effective at easing the deficit crunch that they’re facing.

First off, change has to start at the top. While the combined $2.6 million salaries and benefits of 4 of the executive are not enough to cover the deficit, the leadership must take ownership of not just the success of the university, but also it’s failures.

A 30% paycut to each of the administrators would bring their salaries and benefits down from the mid $600,000s to roughly the level of University of Toronto president’s reported $430,000. Clearly a large, successful school does not need to pad the pockets of its administrators as lushly as the UofA does, especially in these tough economic times. This represents a savings of $780,000 among the top four, and similar cuts across the rest of the administration would likely add up to a million dollars. It may also be higher once all faculty deans and related administrators are taken into account. This move is in part punishment for mismanagement, but also symbolic of the fact that if students must shoulder some increase, than the administrators must also.

Obviously, there will be resistance to a large pay cut and the UofA will lose some of its administrators. To them I say, good riddance. This new higher wave will allow the university to analyze which administrative positions are positively contributing to the university, and which are superfluous positions. Further, fresh ideas from a new crowd could actually help turn the school around. Poach administrators from small to mid-size schools that are not having as much difficultly succeeding in these tough economic times and use their ideas to restructure the UofA so this doesn’t happen again.

Similar to cutting the budgets of the administrators, the university needs to re-examine its role as a contractor. I’ve seen no evidence that contracting out labour tends to save costs, and if anything, tends to exacerbate disparity as contractors tend not to have the protections afforded to university unions.

Next, cancel the Physical Activities & Wellness Centre and other proposed new buildings and halt construction on several others. When I left the university last year there was over $1 billion in construction projects occurring. A lot of that money was coming straight out of the university’s budget, so until they can afford to, no more massive construction projects.

Finally, the hardest suggestion I have is to cap or even decrease enrolment levels for the next few years. While there will be a small loss in revenue by having fewer students enrolled, it will offer a chance to ensure those who are there get a good education, and that the university can afford to teach them. This will also negatively affect high school students who are just at the edge of academically acceptable for the university, however, we ought to be basing university enrolment on academic and not economic merit. I’d rather a poor student with a 95% average got in then a rich one with 75%.

By capping enrolment the university can scale back its absurd vision of its future expansion and focus on the present. This will also ease the pain of freezing capital projects until they are absolutely necessary.

It doesn’t seem like it’s that hard to me to get this deficit under control. Unfortunately the university administration has convinced many students that more money is necessary for a steady-as-she-goes approach. Meanwhile, no one has questioned the actual causes for the current situation, and as the saying goes, “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”

Even more disappointing, however, is that the current hierarchical structure of the university will prevent almost any of these changes from being implemented by the current administration who only stand to lose in this scenario, but win under any other (even the university going under and them taking home giant severance packages). So to affect these changes, students need to get vocal and resist every tax and fee increase.

Tacit acceptance in not an option if you care about the future of the University of Alberta.

First, If we look just at surplus, until 2008, the UofA had a steadily increasing budget surplus while SFU has actually been running a deficit for the past 8 years, only getting the deficit under control in the past year. So while this current deficit may seem radical for the UofA, it seems peculiar and more likely to be in part due to a one-off lost in investments as opposed to evidence that they aren’t ripping students off enough.

Next, we can see that SFUs funding has been mainly attacked by a 12% reduction in provincial funding over 10 years, while the UofA has maintained a constant proportion of provincial funding. That last data point for the UofA getting 15% more funding in 2007-08 represents a large sum of money going only to capital projects. SFU clearly made its budget losses from the provincial government up by raising tuition while the UofA shows a small drop in percentage funding from tuition. However, non-tuition fees at the UofA have nearly doubled in the past decade, and with the proposed COSSS fee and “Market Modifiers” tuition will increase by roughly 20% or more in the next five years.

The UofA has also shifted its budget from the academic ranks and increased benefits and non-academic salaries. The largest increase is the doubling of expenses on external contractors. Meanwhile, SFU slashed academic funding from its budget in roughly 2003-05 and cut other salaries equally. We do notice with SFU a steady increase in student support that is absent from the UofA. This funding likely explains SFUs consistent top-notch performance in comprehensive university rankings.

As I mentioned, the UofA got 15% more provincial funding in 2007-08 than average, but similarly capital costs were up 15% as well, so that more likely represents singular grants for construction costs. This does help confirm the scenario where the UofA tried too hard to expand too fast under the “Top 20 by 2020” mandate that the administration has now disowned.

Brendan’s best graph for the UofA compares the runaway costs to students to cover the runaway costs of the university executive:

Tuition is legislated to rise no faster than CPI, hence the nearly perfect correlation, meanwhile, we can see that before the market modifier tax is applied (which will raise engineering student’s tuition by an additional 10-15% per year) students are already being forced to pay almost exponentially increasing amounts to cover salaries that are fast outgrowing inflation.

Education may cost money, but it’s clear that education is no more expensive then it was a decade ago, the only change has become this competitive drive to “be the best” school which has brought on overpaid bureaucracy and unaffordable expansion.

The free market model of competition between universities does not seem to make them any more efficient, in a story almost identical to Wall Street, we see corporate execs earn top dollar while those on the bottom continue to suffer.

That’s my naked right pinky finger. On most engineers (who are right-handed) you will typically find a piece of iron (actually stainless steel) that represents their obligation to engineering. I didn’t get mine because I refused, and still do, to sign the Obligation that would have required me to hypocritically betray my conscience while pledging to be honest. While I would still appreciate being offered the olive branch to be included in that ceremony, I’m growing even more ashamed of the people who were once my peers.

Today’s Facebook check brought an invite to the page “Engineers in favour of improving our faculty and supporting the ESS" which lists a statement by the University of Alberta’s Engineering Student Society’s Board of Directors, a body made of up of the democratically-elected presidents of each discipline plus the executive of the ESS.

The statement outlines how the Board has consulted with the faculty administrators and decided that the best when to ensure that the “world class facilities and faculty” are kept in place is to tax students.

Oh wait, they don’t use the word tax, they call it a “Market Modifier.”

Market modifier my ass, the ESS has just sold the average engineering student up shit creek without a paddle.

I’m glad my finger is naked, because I’m ashamed of these tools.

Currently the UofA administrators are pushing forward, almost without protest, a mandatory tax, sorry “Common Student Space, Sustainability and Security Fee,” of $570 per student per semester to recoup some of it’s $57 million deficit. This fee is on top of the market modifiers, so the ESS is proposing that engineering students ought to pay even more than the average student.

But don’t worry says the University and the ESS, some of these fees will go straight back into scholarships!

So to help the un-affordability that extra student taxes are creating, they offer to throw a few bucks back, at only a few students. But don’t worry, titles like “ESS President” look really good on scholarship applications, so our wonderful Board members may be able to get their funds back, plus a little of their peers.

But why is the UofA in such dire straights?

Having the highest paid administrators in Canada can’t have anything to do with it, I mean, combined they only take in $2.57 million. That’s not even counting how much the deans and their staff are bringing in. Their vision of making the UofA “top 20 by 2020” (whatever the fuck that means, remember how they never explained it) has come at the financial stability of the school and now they’re pinning the exorbitant costs on students.

Where’s the lobbying to Stelmach? Where’s the lobbying to Ottawa? These people are also in part to blame.

But instead, you have students being manipulated by these people trying to protect their overpaid jobs.

I thought it was bad enough that far too many engineers are creationists or anti-science climate change denialists. But this takes the stereotypical right-wing engineer to a far new level.

Notice how they even tilt the language, using the word “market” as though a degree is a mere product to be traded, not earned. Entitled shits. Universities used to be about higher learning and expanding your mind. If this is the future of engineering, move it back to technical school and leave university for the actual academic pursuits.

Market modifiers my ass. A tax is a tax, and this is only going to hurt the University of Alberta. Tuition only goes up, and letting them raise it will only screw students in the long run.

I’m glad I got out. I feel sorry for those who will no longer be able to get in.