Video footage of RCMP officers pepper-spraying protesters last year at the University of British Columbia has become a regular item on nightly newscasts. What has been woefully lacking, however, is any broader analysis about what these images represent.

During our recent negotiations at the University of Manitoba a sow's ear was turned into a silk purse. The administration's efforts to divide the faculty on the issue of mandatory retirement was thwarted by the faculty association's careful attention to membership process.

In an unprecedented move, the Canadian Association of University Teachers is launching a national public awareness campaign to draw attention to the worsening crisis affecting post-secondary education in Canada. At its Nov. 20-22 meeting in Ottawa, CAUT Council voted to undertake a major long-term campaign that highlights the impact of funding cuts, skyrocketing tuition fees, and growing private sector involvement in Canada's universities. The campaign will also push for changes to improve the quality and accessibility of post-secondary education.

We live in an age of statistics. More often than not, they are depressing.

Whether writing an advertisement, creating a brochure, or drafting a speech, the task usually comes with a tight deadline and not enough instructions. Get Your Message Across introduces the reader to a variety of communication formats, both written and verbal, and methods for organizing and presenting information. This handy guidebook provides the answers and tells how to quickly master the three main types of communication skills -- publications, promotional material, and presentations & events.

This book tells the remarkable story of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, based in Detroit, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, two of the most important political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s. The new edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in the League, and reflections on political developments over the past three decades by Georgakas and Surkin. The new edition includes commentary by Detroit activists Sheila Murphy Cockrel, Edna Ewell Watson, Michael Hamlin, and Herb Boyd. All of them reflect not only on the tremendous achievements of DRUM and the League, but on their political legacy for Detroit, for U.S. politics.

Computers and the Internet have acquired a central role in our lives as faculty. For many, this development is unsettling. Much thought, discussion and even anguish will ensue before computers are fashioned into productive, rewarding and comfortable extensions of ourselves.

Think of a writer huddled in an unheated apartment. By candlelight she is putting the finishing touches to a manuscript. Her work is brilliant. It has the potential to bring her fame and fortune -- unless someone floods the market with an unauthorized version. Still, the writer is at peace. She knows that copyright, the legal right of an author to control the use of his or her work, will ensure that she benefits from her efforts.

Preliminary enrolment data for 1998-99, released in November by the Centre for Education Statistics, showed an overall increase in the number of students registered for full-time study at Canadian universities, and a decrease in part-time registration.

CAUT President Bill Graham has sent a donation on behalf of CAUT to the APEC Protesters Legal Defence Fund

Construction of the Canadian Association of Emeriti and Retired Academics web site (http://caera

Members of the Brandon University Faculty Association voted overwhelmingly to accept the tentative agreement that had been reached Nov

CAUT Council adopted a strong statement about the ongoing case of University of Toronto clinician Dr. Nancy Olivieri at its semi-annual meeting held in Ottawa on Nov. 20-22.

The warning signs have been there for a long time, but many of our colleagues have regarded as unduly alarmist the argument that post-secondary education is in danger of being turned into a "commodity," that university scholarship is increasingly being shaped and directed by the profit motive.

By the summer of 1994 the University of British Columbia was faced with an escalating crisis in the Political Science Department, caused by complaints of pervasive racism and sexism lodged by a handful of graduate students. UBC appointed Vancouver lawyer Joan McEwen to investigate. In reaction to McEwen's June 1995 report, which upheld the charges, finding that sexual harassment, racism and sexism were widespread within the political science department, the university closed admissions to the graduate program. The administration made no attempt to differentiate between charges relating to matters of program governance and those relating to individual cases of sexual or racial harassment or systemic discrimination. The administration succeeded in tarnishing the reputation of an entire department, by treating the McEwen report as though it were a judicial decision, and to issue it to the world as though it was the last word rather than the first word in this affair. The McEwen Report and the university's handling of it resulted in months of damaging front-page publicity. Four years later, UBC President Martha Piper apologizes to the political science department. The following extract is from a recent article written by Professor Paul Marantz, a faculty member in the political science department, and published in the Faculty Association of the University of British Columbia Newsletter.

A bizarre hiring practice at the University College of Cape Breton has again become a contentious issue as the university college searches for a new dean of arts and letters. Ironically, it is a "letter" that sparked the controversy in the first place.