There are nine candidates for MSU president this year which is quite a turn out compared to previous years. MacInsiders has a few threads dedicated to the election so I encourage you to check out their site for links to the candidate’s website/Facebook groups.
I attended the second MSU presidential debate yesterday at 12:30pm in Gilmour Hall 111 and took some notes on my revived Pocket PC. Here they are somewhat unedited (there were a lot of short forms so I expanded them).
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Poster welcoming Rick Mercer
Rick Mercer playing squash at McMaster
While I was filming, a girl approached me asking me who he was. I answered and also mentioned that I had seen Dr. George leaving earlier so I’m assuming he was playing squash with Rick Mercer. The conversation:
Me: I saw Dr. George leaving earlier with squash gear, I guess he was here playing against Rick.
Girl: Who’s Dr. George?
Me (trying not to sound condescending): Ummm… the president of the university.
Girl: Oh *giggle* I don’t know this stuff. I just pay them money.
Not impressed :-/
The time when McMaster University students try to change or add courses to their timetables and are locked out because the server cannot handle more than X connections.
At least they have a warning message unlike previous years. Why can’t this university’s IT department get its act together? How many students could there possibly be connected at one point? (BTW, if they’re really cutting off students based on number of connections, it’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard. Shouldn’t they use server load as a determinant?)
…Homelessness
McMaster students are once again embarking on the pointless exercise of sleeping outside the McMaster University Student Centre for a week. In an effort to “draw their fellow students’ attention to the fact that true homelessness is a serious problem in Hamilton and across Canada,” (read: add to their resumes that they camped out, the poor dears) four commerce (but of course) students will be spending the week outside of the student centre.
“[T]hey are to live only on donated food and without the benefit of showers.” NO SHOWERS? How will they EVER survive without pampering their spoiled asses with baby powder every morning. There ARE other ways to keep clean, they’re called sinks. You know, those things you stand in front of in the morning when you spend half an hour fixing your hair JUST right or you don’t go to school because of a bad hair day.
This kind of stuff really pisses me off. It’s all for show, and nothing for the cause. Sure the team “is collecting donations of cash, clothes, non-perishable food and bus tickets for donation” to various charities but they could do it without mocking the hardships those who really have to live on the street every day go through.
If you REALLY want to experience what homelessness is like, go to another school’s campus, somewhere where your friends and family won’t be giving you food and where people don’t know what you’re doing, who you are and why you’re there. Face their looks of disapproval and disgust like many homeless have to every day and only then you will come close to not feeling “privileged, even “spoiled,” to use [Nicole's] own word.”
…Elections and the democratic process
In what is (I hope) an attempt to prove that the US isn’t the only place where the people vote for a president and a month later still not know who actually won the election, students still don’t know who the future president of the McMaster Students’ Union will be. During the course of three (that’s right three) recounts, the number of votes cast and counted has changed three times.
February 9th: 4217 votes cast; Jerimi Jones president
February 27: 4139 votes cast; Azim Kasmani president
March 5: 4238 votes cast; Jerimi Jones president
Now it seems that there will be another recount because a candidate who had been disqualified previously has won his appeal this past Friday, March 7th. The Election’s Committee, in all their wisdom, decided there was no reason to see how many votes he had since he was disqualified. Guilty until proven innocent, eh guys?
At this point, as a student, I don’t know what to think any more. Whoever is finally chosen as the president will have his term tainted by this ugly business. What a mockery!
I’ve created a Facebook Group to facilitate discussion since the previous one was closed for some odd reason. The discussion also continues in a MacInsiders.com thread.
Technorati Tags: mcmaster university, mcmaster students union, elections, msu, student politics
McMaster University is always fun to write about. McMaster administration is a veritable collection of stooges (and in my mind they walk in packs of 3 and look like Larry, Moe and Curly but you know, more than three).
In June 2007, the Board of Governor’s approved a fee of $40 to be charged to students eligible for graduation. This fee would cover the rental of the Academic Regalia (i.e. gown and hood) for those attending convocation. If students elect to have the diploma mailed to them the fee is $25 and if they pick it up themselves it’s free. The legality of this fee is debatable, and it has been debated by Maclean’s and McMaster’s Joey Coleman (I couldn’t find the exact articles on the Maclean’s site but trust me, he did make mention of the fee).
In the grand scheme of things $40 is not that much and students would pay (admittedly grudgingly) it because after all, graduation is a momentous occasion (administration obviously knows this). Most students (at least according to the Facebook group “Concern for the McMaster “Graduation” Fee“) did not know there would be a fee until they saw a charge on their account for $40. One student “was charged the fee on December 19th 2007. Two months before [she] filled out [her] grad card to even indicate [she] was graduating.” Since the charge was made on the account in December, interest has been charged on accounts with the new $40.00 owing balance since then, about $0.50 per month.
Students were of course outraged by this behind the back charge. In a statement to be emailed to the “charged” tomorrow morning, the Acting Registrar Patricia Harris apologizes for “any anxiety or inconvenience that our initial collection process may have caused.” According to her, “[t]he initial implementation plan was to charge automatically all final year students the $40 fee and then to issue the appropriate refunds, once all of the Spring convocation ceremonies were over and the
pick-ups were complete.”
Oh that’s a great plan guys! Let’s put this on your account, not tell you, charge you interest, and then have the power to withhold your diploma or transcripts because you have a balance owing on your account of which you knew nothing about in the first place. That is wonderful! In the mean time your money will be sitting in a fund somewhere, probably at a bank, earning the university interest. But we’ll refund you after everything is done (it would probably be around July that the cheques would be rolling in).
You will be glad to know that the administration “due to the substantial feedback that [it has] received from students regarding this method of ‘collecting’ the new graduation fee” has changed the process. Surprisingly to one THAT MAKES SENSE:
The Registrar’s Office is implementing a “pay for service” process for the collection of the graduation fee. When you complete the on-line Graduation Response Form you will only be charged for the option you select (as noted above).
Wonderful. Late. But wonderful. Here’s a few things I’d like to know:
I call on McMaster University to issue a public apology to all of its students for this kind of unethical and despicable behaviour.
Full text of the email to the “charged” after the jump.
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