On Feb. 23 the University of Prince Edward Island Faculty Association submitted its application for certification to the provincial Labour Relations Board. Don Gillis, president of the faculty association, said a 30-member organizing team signed up an overwhelming majority of the 300 full- and part-time faculty members during a three-month organizing campaign.

In an unprecedented move, the government of Alberta has granted the DeVry Institute of Technology, a for-profit US-based corporation with 21 campuses across North America, the right to grant academic degrees.

In a decisive victory, the University of British Columbia Faculty Association has gained the right to represent all faculty members at UBC.

Academics are nothing if not totally absorbed in their work, be it research, teaching, or ideally, both. Historically, universities provided a nurturing environment for these dedicated people, offering room, board and a modest salary while largely leaving them alone to think their great thoughts and instruct the next generation of geniuses (as well as common mortals). By all reports this system worked quite well, and many of the world's greatest minds were fostered in the classic European universities and colleges of the last millennium.

March 21 has been recognized since 1966 by the United Nations as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Canada was one of the first countries to support the UN initiative and in 1989 responded with an annual March 21 campaign.

International Women's Day on March 8, 2001 will celebrate the second Global Women's Strike. Last year, women in 64 countries on every continent took what time they could away from waged and unwaged work in the first-ever global strike "for a millennium which values all women's work and all women's lives" and "an end to no pay, low pay and too much work."

After several months of e-mail communication, the CAUT executive's committee on equity had its first conference call meeting Feb. 9. The seven-member committee created last fall will provide advice to the executive on equity concerns, including CAUT issues which have not previously been identified as having an impact on diversity interests.

The legal and moral duty of university administrations and faculty associations to disabled academic staff members was under the spotlight recently at CAUT's annual grievance arbitration conference.

Affirmative action programs have successfully redistributed education and economic resources to women and minorities without serious consequences to efficiency, say two noted economists writing in the September 2000 issue of the Journal of Economic Literature. In "Assessing Affirmative Action," authors Harry Holzer of Georgetown University and David Neumark of Michigan State University, provide an exhaustive review and analysis of more than 200 scientific studies of affirmative action.

In an unprecedented move, the Concordia University senate voted to accommodate students who want to defer writing final exams so that they can demonstrate at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City Apr

The Nipissing University Faculty Association (NUFA) has certified a new bargaining unit of contract academic staff

CAUT along with hundreds of national and international counterparts will soon be signatory of a joint declaration for democratic education

On Jan

CAUT has appointed Larry Dufay to the newly-created position of senior research officer

Although academic dispute persists, many historians agree that International Women's Day was first observed in 1911 as a day of protest over women's working conditions. In 1977, the United Nations invited all member states to designate a day as International Women's Day. In Canada, as in most countries, it is now celebrated on March 8 and March 8 to 14 is designated International Women's Week.

Police forces in Peterborough intervened early on the morning of Mar. 1 to remove students occupying the offices of the academic vice-president and the dean of arts and science at Trent University. The eight women, living in the offices since Feb. 26, were demanding among other things that the university's two downtown colleges remain open.

The National Graduate Council gears up to expose the dangers of corporate funding of university research. Dr. Nancy Olivieri will deliver the keynote address.

I could have written this book for Margaret Somerville. The Ethical Canary focuses on such controversial topics as euthanasia, human cloning, and xenotransplantation (transplanting animal organs and tissues into human beings). All these issues she and I have debated often — on radio and TV, in the press, and at scholarly conferences. So often in fact that, notwithstanding the fact that we have rarely agreed about anything, I feel I know what her position on any issue will be even before she herself does. It will be the opposite of mine.

At one time or another, not just left-wing political groups, trade unionists, and Quebec sovereignists, but also universities, gays and lesbians, feminists, consumers' associations, First Nations people, and Arab Canadians have been viewed as security threats and targeted for surveillance. RCMP security operatives also turned their intrepid gaze on the activities of CAUT. The establishment of a tenacious Canadian security state came as no accident. On the contrary, the highest levels of government and the police, along with non-governmental interests and institutions, were involved in a concerted campaign. The security state grouped ordinary Canadians into dozens of political stereotypes and labelled them as threats. Whose National Security? probes the security state's ideologies and hidden agendas, and sheds light on threats to democracy that persist to the present day.

Illusory Freedoms brings together social and educational theory. Its practical focus is the recent neo-liberal approach to the ordering of society and education, analysed here not as direct challenge to the post-war settlement but as the terminus of a neutralist liberalism which understands social good as the maximal exercise of individual autonomy. In showing that public education, as site for the formation of personal aspiration and social possibility, must represent the limiting case for the distribution of collective goods by market principles, Jonathan's analysis turns to relations between freedom and equality, individual and social well-being, the public and the private spheres, the parameters for personal autonomy and the permissible role of the state. This study of the interface between education, politics and society suggests that the unresolved problems of educational theory and policy both require and lend support to an ethical interpretation of liberalism.