Check this out. I snapped this shot at the Cannes Film Festival a few days ago. It’s the classic red carpet shot, the men in black tie (required dress for the red carpet), the ushers at attention like foot soldiers, trying not to stare too closely at all the frocks, the Talent at the top of the stairs, posing for all the world. The stars here are all headliners in a violent Western directed by John Hillcoat (The Road) called Lawless. If you know your pop culture you can spot Guy Pierce, John Hardy, Dane Dehaan, Jason Clarke, Nick Cave, Hillcoat, and Shia LaBeouf. And, oh yeah, there’s Mia Wasikowska and Jessica Chastain—Mia in purple and Jessica in, er, something diaphanous. between Hillcoat and LaBeouf.

Like any self-respecting Cannes voyeur, I took a lot of pictures. Celebrities were as common as Kardashians. But this one of the Lawless gang really spoke to one of the scandals generated by this year’s festival selections—the notable absence of women from the pantheon of official selections. Indeed, with 22 films from all over the world in competition, it is just plain odd that not one of them has been directed a by a woman.

I had a few missions at Cannes. Okay, I ate croissants, drank chilled rosé, gawked at celebs, walked the beach, explored Anitibes, etc etc. Hey, I was in the south of France. But I was also there to scope out films by women and meet the filmmakers, inviting them to submit to the festival here with which I am involved (www.womensfilmfestival.com) and get their sense of the women-excluding Cannes of 2012. Some of us had attended the Women in Film panel at the American Pavilion, moderated by Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood and included a bunch of accomplished women in the business, notably producers with big successes on their résumés (Blue Valentine, Kaboom). It’s safe to say the panel was a whimpering disappointment. Maybe it’s because the invited panel were all suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, but I felt a discernible chill in the room, and it wasn’t coming off the azure waters of the Mediterranean.

When women who are the exceptions to the gender-biased rule start saying they don’t see there’s any problem in the industry you know they haven’t walked through the looking glass.  Sure, there were hardships in the industry, they agreed, but, come on, it had nothing to do with gender, only lack of merit. Interestingly, the only woman on the panel who spoke a little more truth to power was the entertainment lawyer who admitted she was compelled to start her own firm because she got tired of hanging with only the boys in the office. Discrimination in her legal world, at least, was definitely a fact.

How was it, then, that the women engaged in the film industry were in such denial? The facts are appalling. Every year, Martha M. Lauzen of the Center for the Study of Women at San Diego State University produces a report showing the grim statistics—that women make up 5 per cent of working directors—and the number is actually declining!

Oh, sure, by the end of the discussion at the American Pavilion everyone agreed that although things are better we still had a long way to go and needed to mentor younger filmmakers and be more encouraging, but I felt deflated and disappointed in their general responses. On the other side of the activist spectrum, a group of French feminists had banded together to form a wonderfully subversive group called Le Barbe. True to their name, they staged a few protests during the festival while wearing fake beards, even showing up on the red carpet last Sunday carrying signs with phony fawning text, like “Merci!”, and “Splendide!” Their original letter of protest, also a witty mock endorsement of the whole festival, had been published in the French daily, Le Monde and in the UK’s Guardian. Consequently, they received a fair bit of attention from the French and UK media at the beginning of the whole deal, but hardly a notice outside those hubs of culture and commerce. Even today, someone who I thought would have known all about Le Barbe and the protest admitted she hadn’t even heard of it.

Walking Le Croisette at Cannes, elbowing through thousands of pedestrians and scores of limos, I realized just how impossible it would be to stage a protest of any kind in that environment. The scale of the event is overwhelming and the publicity, glamour, and hype machine is way too large to be noticed. The hundreds of camera-toting media people presented are largely interested in scandals of another kind—can you see through Nicole Kidman’s dress? Is Matthew McConaughe stoned? Why is Brad Pitt alone? That sort of thing.

And so back to the snapshot—compare the number of women and men. See what I mean? This was pretty typical of the red carpet scene, fun as it was to attend.

I learned a few things at Cannes, not the least of which is the importance of continuing the tradition of holding a women’s film festival in St John’s, Newfoundland—or anywhere for that matter.

A couple of weeks ago, New Yorker editor Ben Greenman (@bengreenman) launched a Twitter-based game he calls “Questioningly.” It’s a fun time-filler for multi-taskers who need to stop juggling all the balls for a few minutes to gain composure and a normal heart rate.  Greenman poses a suitable tweet question every week and activates a conversation. This week’s is “Which Beatle did you think of most recently and why?”  I like the game’s first question best so far: What word should be eliminated from the English language? The list quickly gained momentum and before you could say “impactful“(sorry) Greenman’s thousand or so followers had come up with some hilarious proposals.

For example, high on the list were “he,” phlegm,” “actually,” and “God.” The NYorker editors agreed that the winner was “slacks,” a pretty benign but useless noun that just doesn’t sound right, or so they said. Slacks begone!

I am sure we all have our word or phrase hate lists. My list keeps growing, although I confess I am guilty of utilizing using some of the very words I profess to loathe.  It’s hard not to in this day and age. Take incentivize—please! I hear myself using it sometimes and wonder if I have been possessed by idiot aliens. I never use “hopefully” but almost everyone does –and incorrectly. Knock it off the lexicon immediately.

No one likes “like,” as in, like, you know, this list… but it’s probably here to stay with everyone under the age of thirty. Have you noticed that “arguably” keeps rearing its ugly head?  I’m starting to acquire an aversion for “learning.”  It’s got a trendy buzz to it and I wish it would disappear altogether. “Allegedly” has also crept into the language like a slow-mo virus. And don’t get me started on the oddly abbreviated “priorize.”

English stylists have long dismissed the following empty adverbs: basically, consequently, famously, and incredibly. There are more, but these are arguably among the worst offenders.

I taught part of a professional writing course in the winter semester and in the written assignments I noticed the usual verbal offenses. Because the subject was writing about film, a number of these clichés and overused phrases were drawn from the conversations we commonly have or read about movies:  must-see, incredible, awesome, action-packed, crowd-pleaser, quirky, roller-coaster, hot-button, Oscar-worthy, chick-flick… you get the, er, picture. They’re all on my hate list.  But once I pointed these out, everyone became self-conscious and for the most part the written assignments were remarkably free of cliché-dependency. But it takes self-awareness and some discipline to strip away the bad habits and acquire some best practices better ones.

Twitter is surprisingly free of words I loathe. The mandate of succinctness puts additional pressure on words. They need to carry a lot of meaning, and they need to sound fresh. Twitter is a 21^st century version of haiku—so much to say and so little space to say it in, brevity being the soul of wit.

Which reminds me, such brevity got a local MHA into some serious, if time-wasting, trouble this week. I won’t dwell on it here but the alleged culprit is university colleague and MHA Dale Kirby who tweeted at the end of a long and no doubt frustrating day in the legislature. You can pound on the desk, interrupt speeches, hoot, holler, and yell like a school brat but you can’t call another politician a liar—not in the House and not, apparently, in a tweet. “Unparliamentary,” they say. Now there’s a word that has lost its meaning. And so has “ironic.” No one nails that one anymore either.

Enough rambling. Back to “Questioningly,” and this week’s challenge. I think of Paul McCartney. How could I not? He’s everywhere—even on 30 Rock. As he once sang, these are words that go together well.

This week the university announced plans to shut down its Division of Lifelong Learning at the end of August. The rationale is clear: the unit just can’t sustain itself. It’s hemorrhaging too many dollars. Unsustainability is the catchword. Lifelong learning, or LLL as it is commonly identified, grew out of the earlier designation of “continuing education” – an it-is-never-too-late-to-learn philosophy of education. It is meant to cater to those who have either never been to university or those whose university days are long behind them, but who want to acquire knowledge in a structured and informed environment. It’s all about learning as an evolutionary, not a terminal, exercise. One wouldn’t want to argue with that commonplace or with the whole lifelong learning paradigm. The question for me is this: is the university the best place for lifelong learning programs? Well, yes and no: yes, for the most part, but perhaps with focused content and a new delivery model.

Predictably, social media chatter in response to the announcement has been whiney. The blogosphere is made for lovers and complainers, and so a number of haters have taken the opportunity to dump on the cancellation as evidence of Everything That’s Wrong with Universities Today. But I think Memorial has been both straightforward and honest about the budgetary challenges of running such a division, and I’d predict that the flap will be minimal and short-term. Besides, Memorial is wisely transferring the guts of the program offerings, those with university relevance (good bye “how to draw, paint, sing, build a greenhouse, speak a second language, critique wine, navigate our coastline,” etc) , to faculties and schools (Business Admin, Arts, e.g.) where they can be more appropriately housed. Not all the babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Not sure Memorial is the place to host a not-for-credit course on cooking caribou.

In a much bigger picture, the picture of the future, Harvard and M.I.T have teamed up this week to form what they are calling edX, a suite of free online courses available to the whole wide world. If lifelong learning is going to evolve then surely this is how it will do so in a meaningful way – to anyone with an electronic device.

When M.I.T. started this trend late last year they generated a lot of buzz. M.I.T.x, as the new platform is called, launched its new site with its first course, “Circuits and Electronics.” Mmmm, wonder what the gender ratio looks like in that course?  Hey, it’s not my favourite subject category, but, guess what? M.I.T.x enrolled about 120,000 students – yes, you read those zeroes right. Compare with the average dozen or so participants in any one of Memorial’s Lifelong Learning classes and you can start to appreciate the different economies of scale. The M.I.T.x  students who will finish the online course will get a certificate but no grade and no official credit. Having a piece of paper that certifies attendance at M.I.T. is credit – or social capital – enough. And as I write this, several other elite US universities are jumping on the bandwagon, preparing to offer free online courses for the masses in all manner of non-traditional subjects.

The business model for these courses is pretty straightforward, at least in the US. You get a partnership going with a big corporation or commercial investor – a group that sees value in enhancing its own technological development and shoring up its own interest in a vast community of online learners, and you have the financial framework to offer just about anything to the global village. There are probably tons of unintended benefits to such a delivery model.

Canada hasn’t really moved in this direction in that way, yet, with the exception of Athabasca University but we’re bound to do so, radically transforming the notion of lifelong learning to a much more publicly engaged model of education. iPads for everyone!

Now is the season of student discontent. Every day brings more violence and rage in Quebec, as students continue to protest the government’s fee hike on the streets of Montreal. The issue has clearly escalated from general anger against the (modest) tuition increase to a much wider Occupy the Man sort of movement, with echoes of éclater le bourgeoisie heard all around. I have no idea where this Quebec Spring is going to end up but it’s serious and powerfully disruptive. When I was in Montreal a few weeks ago I saw hundreds of student demonstrators on the street below our hotel, calmly marching to somewhere. A colleague of mine exclaimed that it was fabulous—just like the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. I don’t know, I had an uneasy feeling about it all. That calm has since been replaced by something darker and determined, for sure. Perhaps the end of the winter semester will lead to some dissipation of protest energy, although there are no signs of slowing down yet. Government is playing chicken; the students feel roasted.

Here in Newfoundland our provincial budget came down this week. Loudest applause in the House of Assembly surely went to the Finance Minister when he announced the continuation of the tuition fee freeze. I am not sure students would be taking to the streets with the fervor of Quebec students should things have been different, but there would have been a lot of noise, for sure. A province that moved into the black for several years, that has been flush with oil revenues,  couldn’t possibly get away with tuition hikes—not now, and not without an enormous amount of fuss. So be it. As long as the university is duly compensated for the low fees and can go forward with confidence and appropriate support then I’m more than good with that.

In related news, I woke up to a national news story about the current goings on at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Maybe it’s a slow news day. It’s rare that this kind of thing gets that much media attention. But maybe it’s the sheer stupidity of the situation that caught some CBC reporter’s attention. Seems to me someone made a real bonehead decision on their board of governors, effectively prohibiting the three student reps on the board from voting on matters concerning student interests – like tuition fees. Now, how dumb is that? Why don’t they censor the faculty members from board meetings when they discuss pay scales, or curriculum changes? Isn’t everyone ultimately in a conflict of interest? Surely the greater good – the health and well-being of Lakehead – is the common purpose?

Either you have representation from your constituent groups on a university board or you don’t. Everything on a board agenda should be of interest to all parties in attendance. Otherwise, what’s the point? The Lakehead Chair of the board claims he sought the ‘best legal advice’ on the matter. Somehow that doesn’t seem right. Will lawyers say anything you want them to? The Lakehead student union is challenging the bylaw. They have their own legal counsel. My money’s on them.

At this time of year, hearing pleas from international students to be readmitted into programs from which they have failed helps put the whole student rights issue into perspective. The School of Graduate Studies simply can’t unilaterally readmit a student, giving him or her a second or third chance. Not without strong and compelling arguments from the departments or programs themselves, not without very sound reasons. And even then…all students need to be treated the same way. But many international students are so loathe to return to their home countries after failing out that their pleading takes on a special urgency. You can hear it in their emails and their awkwardly phrased letters of entreaty. You’d have to have the heart of Labradorite not to be sympathetic. And we try to keep them in the game by recommending alternate pathways to their goal: perhaps some undergraduate courses to improve both their grades and understanding of the subject they wish to pursue.

The point is, the needs of international students are often quite different from those of our own. I wonder how many international students are marching on the streets of Montreal.

This postcard comes from Halifax where I am attending the annual meeting of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools (NAGS). I have blogged about NAGS before. It’s a cozy club. We just finished Day One of panels and meals, the US and the Canadian deans having exchanged ideas, political stories, and travel tips. Halifax isn’t necessarily looking at her best mid-April, and the wind off the harbor water is cold enough to produce hat head, but for the American visitors the city holds an exotic appeal. I get that. There are steel-grey frigates in the harbor and maple leaves on our flags, and although we share the same sea with the deans from New Jersey or Massachusetts, it’s definitely different here.

I think the difference tends to get exaggerated when we compare experiences of graduate student funding. We always sound so much more progressive and supportive of graduate education. Our institutions are public and our provincial governments are obliged to fund our post-secondary institutions. A speaker representing MITACS, a federally-funded initiative aimed at enhancing professional skills for graduate students, makes this country look enviably awesome. Quebec students are marching in the streets against tuition fee hikes that wouldn’t even cover the cost of a one-semester parking rate at a US school. These meetings always generate the view that it’s simply better up here.

But, as someone pointed out today, Canada’s productivity growth ranks 15th out of 18 countries at comparable levels of development, and the government is preoccupied, as others before it have been, with being more innovative. This is part of a much longer discussion about why this is so, how we might measure innovation, and what we need to do to generate more of it. The March federal budget is, by some accounts, a deliberate turn to this matter.

We aren’t here to be discussing such vexing issues, however. We are here to find points of common interest. And nothing screams common interest more than interdisciplinarity, that which we continue to promote and continue to find difficult to manage. Today’s panel on the topic stressed how deans from both sides of the border succeed in supporting interdisciplinary graduate programs in spite of ongoing resistance. The barriers are the same: faculty workload issues, territoriality, suspicion of the benefits of such approaches to knowledge, institutional intransigence, and so on. But ultimately, and after a good discussion, there was a feeling in the room that we shouldn’t worry about coming up with one all-purpose model of managing interdisciplinary programs. We should just get on with making such programs happen, come hell or high water.

The afternoon panel also demonstrated how far we have gone toward offering professional enhance development programs for our students. At first I thought the panel wouldn’t stimulate much discussion but I was clearly out to lunch. Discussion extended well into the pre-banquet stretch of late afternoon. For the most part, no one thought in terms of American or Canadian practices. We were all talking about the importance, even moral obligation, to equip all our students with the right tools for a working life well beyond the academy. This is as true for students in Halifax or St. John’s as it is for those in Hartford or New York.

Tomorrow we will compare notes about integrating postdocs into our cultures, as well as other topics, and I would put money on it that my panel on social media will reveal that both American and Canadian deans have never considered opening a twitter account, by and large. We will also hand out teaching, mentoring, and dissertation awards to deserving recipients from both sides of the 49^th.

I like hanging out at NAGS. It’s both satisfying to have one’s national pride stoked a little, and reassuring to be reminded that we’re all in the same boat.

Next year we gather in New Brunswick—New Jersey, that is.

If your article falls in a forest of print journals does anyone read it? Oh sure, it exists as an entry on your cv, but that might no longer be good enough as a measure of your scholarly impact. Today, if no one is reading your work, to some it doesn’t exist at all.

This week our University Senate passed a motion encouraging researchers to deposit electronic copies of their scholarly work in MURR, the Memorial University Research Repository. This means, in effect, that your work will become freely available to the international world—the whole reading planet, that is. It’s all about access, open access. Attending to the motion is a statement about (encouraging the community) to disseminate scholarly and creative work in open access journals—those without subscription barriers. This is the sign of open access, as designed by the Public Library of Science, worth a glance for its witty simplicity:

The operative verb in the motion on the floor is ‘encourage.’ As our Librarian stated on the floor of Senate, the motion before us was pretty soft, promoting open access, not mandating it the way some other universities have gone forward. What rational Senator, after all, would vote against a motion merely encouraging some kind of behaviour? Of course, the motion passed unanimously, but the brief discussion preceding the vote hinted at how far we still have to go towards a full appreciation of what open access is all about. To be fair, I can appreciate the current of doubt that informed some of the questions. Senators were given a list of examples of approved open access policies at North American universities. The list is shockingly short. It includes Harvard, the standard bearer in the open access debate, as well as Columbia, Duke, MIT, Stanford, and Princeton—not bad company, indeed. In Canada, the list includes Concordia, Queens, and Calgary.

Discussion about open access has been going on for years, with university libraries leading the charge, often battling the publishing industry that has so much to lose—or so they think– in the shift towards an open universe of information exchange. In 2005, the Canadian Library Association endorsed a resolution on Open Access, and our federal granting agencies have done the same. But, typically, lamentably, the academic world spins slowly, way too slowly in this case. So it is that some Memorial University Senators eyeballing the list would wonder about the merits of open access: if it was so good for dissemination why hadn’t everyone joined the bandwagon? Was there a catch? Where was McGill or the thousands of other US universities?

There’s no catch, of course—only ignorance about the benefits of open access, or resistance based on arguments coming from the publishers’ lobby. Look, we all benefit from more popular forms of open access everyday—and everytime we browse the NY Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, the Globe and Mail, and so on. How is it that our scholarly and creative work is so restricted, still so inaccessible in this day and age?

When the motion passed in Senate I felt like applauding. But the agenda quickly rolled on and with the exception of our Librarian no one seemed to mark the occasion as significant. It was. Although it’s a soft encouragement to the university community to start sharing work, making it accessible to all, this motion is a big step in the right direction.

Maybe I’m just getting old and conservative but I am having a really hard time sympathizing with the student protests in the province of Quebec. Every time I think that I also keep in mind that I probably would have joined them out on the streets, blocking traffic and irritating the hell out of hard-working citizens if I were their age. I grew up in Montreal, went to McGill, and spent a fair amount of time marching and occupying the Vietnam War era. I was in very good company. It felt good to be part of a huge mass of peers, having our emerging identities shaped by waves of solidarity and a strong sense of purpose. It wasn’t very difficult to catch the wave, to join up with the leaders of the protests movements, skipping classes in order to stop a war—or acknowledge the French fact in Quebec.  It felt unequivocally like the right and proper thing to be doing. And when you are young there’s nothing more satisfying than transgression, especially when there’s safety in numbers. Joining thousands of your peers is a lot less brave than facing down a tank in the middle of Tiananmen Square all by yourself.

But I also like to think protests were about something big then, bigger than an additional $600 a year in tuition fees. That’s pretty much what it comes down to on the streets of Montreal and Quebec City these days, although I am sure most students would say there’s something much bigger at stake—principles of public education and access. They are partly right. But only partly. Quebec, as every Canadian knows, has the lowest tuition rates in the country. From the get-go, the protests in Quebec seem excessive in light of the enormous provincial government subsidies necessary to keep the fees down. Only Newfoundland and Labrador comes close to such rates, and we don’t have a large CEGEP, or public post-secondary college system, to finance, either. CEGEP students in that system pay virtually no tuition fees. Who is paying for all the instructors, facilities, and services at the more than 70 public CEGEPS in the province? Frankly, I never asked that question when I was a CEGEP student. It just never occurred to any of us.

The protests today are largely directed at universities, where you go in Quebec for advanced education only after you have acquired your CEGEP diploma. Universities need to pay for their own expanding plants, their increasing salary bases, their plans for the future. In Quebec, the gap between the sticker price and the actual full costs of an education is cavernous. How could it not be with such low fees?  Student leaders claim that Quebec universities have the capacity to subsidize students, but spend way too much money on staff salaries. That’s a pretty lame line, to be sure, and cheap to boot. (One wonders what these same students will be saying about salaries once they enter the workforce and become members of unions, but that’s for someone else’s longitudinal study.)

So what do they or does anyone know about the real costs of an education? I am not on top of what is circulating in the Quebec media about those real costs but to date I haven’t seen strong enough counter arguments from either the universities or the government, and so perhaps it’s no wonder the protests are gaining momentum. Certainly, we all have a right to know why education is getting more expensive. What about the costs of upgrading classrooms, the nuts and bolts of administration, research subsidies, new buildings, prestige projects, student services, and so on? If students want to rally support for low or no tuition fees then they should look to other Western nations where tuition is fully subsidized by the public. How do they do it? The debate, such as it, seems confrontational and facile at the moment, and it is not helped by the temptations of early summer which only encourages the urge to get outdoors and march up and down St Catherine Street in a t-shirt. Not that I’m envious….

The growing impasse is also really pissing off the taxpayers whose bridges and roads have been repeatedly blocked. Without the public on their side the students will be doomed: the Premier will see a surge in popularity, and fees could go even higher eventually. There is now even a threat of lost semesters. I haven’t heard a peep from Quebec professors yet, but I imagine their sympathies are divided and/or compromised. Mine would be.

It looks like a giant mess from here, and I don’t see the students winning in the end. Polls are showing the Quebec public is quite divided. More demonstrations are planned for next week. I have an uneasy feeling about all this. I’d be boarding up my storefront this weekend.

Lecture Fail? We’re all talking about it—that is, ringing out the old (the traditional one-professor lecture) to make way for the new (reliance on technology). The Chronicle of Higher Education has been doing some neat stuff around this. Earlier in the year they established a challenge to readers to defend or bash the traditional lecture format. Not surprisingly, the responses have inclined in favour of the new. It’s really well worth a visit to the Chronicle site to watch some of accumulating videos submitted by students and profs alike, each gazing into his/her webcam to respond to the question. http://bit.ly/xVHvB6

Apparently many instructors think that because they now use power point in their classrooms they are somehow hip and pedagogically innovative. The dominant complaint from students is that their professors are enacting a kind of Power Point Karaoke—with their back to the classroom they simply read the deadly bulleted text on the screen, word for interminable, forgettable word. That’s three violations right there: 1) the instructors have created slides with tediously detailed text 2) they read directly from the slides 3) they do so by turning their bodies away from the audience of students. You don’t need a degree in communications to know this is the worst possible way to teach.

I continue to see this kind of deadly application of power point at conferences and on my own campus. I just don’t understand why anyone would think this is an appropriate way to deliver information. The old power point formula, nailed in the illustration above, is even more learning-denying than the old single-prof audience-facing lecture format. The Chronicle is doing its bit to get the word out but universities really have to take more responsibility for this virus.

Memorial’s new Teaching and Learning Framework might help move that awareness along. The framework emphasises innovation in teaching delivery. It can’t mandate it, of course, nor can it compel instructors to use one form of delivery over another, but it can encourage more reward for the innovators, and, perhaps, more shame and embarrassment for those who simply refuse to adapt.

For inspiration, and for example, check out the video on the Chronicle site by David Miller at the University of Connecticut who gives two terrific examples of how he teaches using a multi-media approach. http://bit.ly/xVHvB6

I’m no scientist, but in this short demonstration I learned what carotenoid modulation of immune function and sexual attractiveness in zebra finches was.  I’m not kidding. And you, too, can learn some helpful definitions of drug action on the body. Professor Miller is amazingly persuasive. In just a few minutes he makes you want to attend his classes. If I’d had him as a prof I might have gone into Science, after all. He’s no youngster, either. You don’t have to be generation X to know how to animate your classes.

The key is translating your text into visual messages. Talk is good. In the twenty-first century talk aided by visual images is much better.

And then here’s the whole business of story-telling. A staff member in the office here in Graduate School with whom I am also talking about Power Point sent me to this link: http://bit.ly/Ahf71G

It’s all about pulling people in with story. Images and story-telling: people living in caves knew all about that. Time to go back to that future.