CAUT is charging that international guidelines being developed to address quality issues in cross-border higher education ignore the interests of academic staff and could promote privatization.

CAUT has launched a review of the Canada Research Chair program, now in its fifth year.

Thank you for your recent coverage of University Canada West (Bulletin, September 2004). However, I feel compelled to set the record straight.

David Strong's letter presupposes that the process and criteria used by the B.C. Degree Quality Assessment Board (DQAB) are sufficient to judge the quality of a degree program or of a new university.

Lawyers and leading legal scholars are urging Canada's Minister of Public Safety to immediately stay the removal of any person to a country where they face a serious risk of torture or persecution, and to reform the security certificate process to bring it into conformity with international human rights standards.

I was in Winnipeg recently for a western regional meeting of local faculty associations. I woke up in the Winnipeg Sheraton Oct. 15 and found the National Post at my door. I could not help but notice the front page's insistence that terrorist threats in Canada are prevalent in an article headlined "Dangers for Canada Are Real."

This article tells a story - one based on 30 years' experience teaching and conducting research at various Canadian universities, as well as one in Nigeria, and another 10 years as a student in England, Canada and France. My experience has been strengthened by the study of philosophy and its relationship to culture, education, science and international relations.

Higher education students in British Columbia honed in on the provincial government's unwillingness to reduce education costs, delivering a 38,000-name petition to the Victoria legislature last month that called for tuition fees to be reduced.

Howard Pawley was elected president of the Harry Crowe Foundation at its directors meeting in October. Pawley, a former president of the University of Windsor Faculty Association and former premier of Manitoba will head the charitable foundation set up to undertake research and education on issues of freedom of academic expression, institutional autonomy and independence of university research.

More than 60 academic staff from faculty associations across Canada will gather on Parliament Hill Nov. 25 to meet with their Members of Parliament as part of CAUT's annual National Lobby Day.

The federal government should refocus its efforts on improving access to higher education, a parliamentary committee was told last month. Appearing before the standing committee on human resources development, CAUT associate executive director, research and advocacy, David Robinson said that proposals to encourage low-income families to save for their children's education are the wrong answers to the problem of promoting access to post-secondary education.

Daniel Freeman-Maloy, the student who was summarily suspended by York University President Lorna Marsden last year, is suing the president and the university's board of governors for $850,000 in damages.

When Flora Roy accepted a teaching position at Waterloo College in 1948, she imagined it would be a temporary posting until she finished her dissertation and returned to Toronto or another large Canadian university. Little did she know that, as head of the English department, she would stay on and find herself involved in local controversies. This memoir recalls Roy's early days at Waterloo College (when its standards were still supervised by the University of Western Ontario) and traces the gradual pressures to merge with the new University of Waterloo. As history shows, Waterloo College resisted what was seen then as corporate pressure and became instead an independent and much-loved institution called Waterloo Lutheran University (which later became Wilfrid Laurier University). The story of the transformation of Waterloo College into Waterloo Lutheran University is told through anecdotes and shows that, despite its size, the small campus was very connected to the larger world.

Since medieval times universities have been teaching institutions and the rise of land grant and "redbrick" institutions in the nineteenth century saw them increase their focus on pure and applied research. That change was the subject of commentary at the time by John Cardinal Newman when he identified scholarships of teaching and research. However, it was the twentieth century work of the late Ernest Boyer that gave us a modern grounding on the various forms of scholarship we practice.

Leveling the Playing Field examines the justice in contemporary American university admissions policies. The authors argue that enhancing the educational opportunities of lower-income and minority students would make American society more just. They ask how current admissions policies affect the prospects of such students and evaluate what alternative approaches might be put in their place. The book examines legacy preference, early admissions policies, financial aid, the test-prep industry, college counseling, athletics, and affirmative action after the Supreme Court's landmark decisions of 2003 and evaluates their effects on the distribution of higher education in the United States, not only for lower-income and minority students but also for college-bound students in general.

Few policy issues generate as much passion and controversy as copyright reform. Balancing creator rights with broader societal interests presents an enormous challenge, especially when national economic policy and international treaty obligations are also factored into the equation.