The Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association won a resounding victory when part-timers voted overwhelmingly to join WLUFA in a certification vote conducted by the Ontario Labour Relations Board in December.

The Dalhousie Faculty Association (DFA) signed a precedent-setting settlement last month that commits the university administration to implement a broad range of policies and practices to deal with systemic discrimination.

Picket lines around York University campus came down Jan. 9 after the university announced it had reached a tentative agreement with the CUPE 3903 bargaining team on collective agreements for both its teaching and graduate assistants.

CAUT will mark the 50th anniversary of its founding in 1951 with special events at the April council meeting. "We hope all associations will be present to celebrate this milestone in our organization's life," said CAUT president Tom Booth.

We are all aware of the pronounced demographic and academic work transformations in our institutions. Our awareness extends to the knowledge that over the past decade, university administrators have increasingly chosen to use casual labor for long term staffing requirements.

At a time when entrepreneuria zeal threatens to blur the lines between university research and product promotion, Harvard's faculty of medicine is ensuring the integrity of its medical science with tough conflict of interest guidelines for its researchers.

Much national pride has been evoked because Canada has been consistently rated as having the best quality of life according to United Nations criteria. It almost seems heretical to remind citizens that with respect to the status of women this country was rated seventh in the same comparative surveys.

Health researchers have done much positive work leading to lifesaving and life-extending discoveries. Some have also, on occasion, used methods that offend our ethical sensibilities. We do not need to revisit the Nazi concentration camps for illustrations. We have a number of striking cases in the medical history of North America — brainwashing experiments on schizophrenics, syphilis left untreated in unknowing victims, cancer cells injected into geriatric patients and so on. Little wonder that at the beginning of the 21st century there is increasing interest in having strong ethical standards apply to health research.

Some core values of academics' vocation are under siege these days, with online learning deliverable any place and any time from private universities and virtual branches of brand-name institutions.