Facebook has had a rough week. In the past seven days, four different lawsuits were filed against it, Sonos temporarily left its advertising program, and Elon Musk joined the #DeleteFacebook movement by removing SpaceX’s and Tesla’s profiles from the social media giant’s platform. With Facebook in the throws of a[Read More…]
Commentary
To close the gender gap, STEM fields need to change from the inside out
During a recent studying session in Trottier, my friend—a female engineering student—overheard two male students heatedly critiquing the call for women in engineering. The two students asserted that female engineers are “taking jobs away from the men who need to provide for families.” While most students today would agree that[Read More…]
Testing Quebec’s patients: Students should care about the nursing crisis
On Jan. 29, Sherbrooke nurse Émilie Ricard posted a photo of herself in tears on her Facebook page, giving a sarcastic thumbs up and smile to the camera. She captioned the photo with a diatribe, mocking Quebec’s Minister of Health Gaétan Barrette’s tweet that his government’s 2015 health care reform[Read More…]
It’s not all good in the neighbourhood: Students play a role in gentrification
The McGill Daily published an exposé on Feb. 19 of a landlord’s eviction of the residents of a Parc-Extension building in the name of a luxury apartment project. This comes at a time when Montrealers across the city are protesting gentrification in their neighbourhoods. Gentrification, a complicated process that involves redevelopment[Read More…]
Financial transparency is severely lacking at SSMU
Students are now in the homestretch of the Winter semester, but there is one obstacle: Election season. Over the next two weeks, McGill will be treated to another round of prospective Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) executives for the 2018-2019 school year. Student politicians have often tried to earn[Read More…]
Condemned to be free: Social sciences and humanities graduates on the job market
As the tired idiom goes, “freedom ain’t free.” The cost of freedom is total responsibility. It’s a cost many social sciences and humanities (SSH) students are familiar with, finding that their degree’s broad applicability is, in fact, paradoxically limiting. A February 2018 report by The Conference Board of Canada found[Read More…]
Why students don’t care about SSMU
It’s that time of year again: Your friends from rez and frosh are inviting you to Facebook events and announcing their candidacy for various Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) positions. But, despite their well-lit headshots and carefully-worded bios and platforms, voter turnout in recent SSMU elections suggests that most[Read More…]
Ontario government: Local research models matter, too
Ontario universities are currently working with the provincial government to create and fulfill Strategic Mandate Agreements, the goals of which are to “[build] on current strengths and to help drive system-wide objectives and government priorities.” Part of this process is evaluating a university’s research using bibliometrics—the quantitative analysis of journal[Read More…]
Montreal needs to improve public transit accessibility
Fifty-two years since the Société de transport de Montréal (STM)—then called the Commission de transport de Montréal—unveiled the Montreal metro, the system still excludes wheelchair users. The STM is a public corporation that runs Montreal’s public bus and metro systems. However, two thirds of commuters in the Greater Montreal community[Read More…]
Not all university degrees are equally valuable
While meandering from lecture to lecture, there is one question that has undoubtedly crossed every McGill student’s mind: Why am I here again? The answer to that question for the young philosophers at McGill is likely to be something along the lines of ‘to become a more fulfilled and learned[Read More…]
