What’s Wrong with University? Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis
Thursday, September 27, 2007 @ 7:30pm
Hart House Library
(7 Hart House Circle)
FREE
Hart House Library
(7 Hart House Circle)
FREE
Join us for an evening of conversation about the problems that plague the university system and all of the people that attend and work at them.
The university system has its problems. Students invest a lot of time and money in education but all too often don’t get what they came for.
In What’s Wrong With University, Jeff Rybak addresses the most pressing concerns for undergraduate students, and helps them cope with the university system.
He illustrates the university as having five distinct functions, which are often in conflict with each other. Students often find themselves at cross purposes with those with different goals and motivations, and also with institutional features designed around the needs of those other students. As a result they are frequently frustrated by their experiences, lost in a system that isn’t suited to them. Jeff explains how university really works, and provides advice on how all students can overcome these internal conflicts to get what they most want from the university experience.
The present state of the university is a difficult issue to comprehend for anyone outside of the education system. If we are to believe common government reports that changes in policy are somehow making life easier for university graduates, we cannot help but believe that things are going right and are getting better in our universities. Ivory Tower Blues gives a decidedly different picture, examining this optimistic attitude as it impacts upon professors, students, and administrators in charge of the education system.
Ivory Tower Blues is a frank account of the contemporary university, drawing on the authors’ own research and personal experiences, as well as on input from students, colleagues, and administrators. James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar offer an insider’s account of the university system, an accurate, alternative view to that overwhelmingly presented to the general public. Throughout, the authors argue that fewer and fewer students are experiencing their university education in ways expected by their parents and the public. The majority of students are hampered by insufficient preparation at the secondary school level, lack of personal motivation, and disillusionment. Contrary to popular opinion, there is no administrative or governmental procedure in place to maintain standards of education.
Ivory Tower Blues is an in-depth look at the crisis facing Canadian and American universities, the factors that are precipitating the situation, and the long-term impact this crisis will have on the quality of higher education.
Jeff Rybak graduated in 2006 from the University of Toronto Scarborough, where he served in the students’ union as Vice-President Academics and within campus governance as Chair of the Academic Committee. He spent many hours counseling students on how to deal with all aspects of university, and was responsible for the production of several resources for students, including three editions of the campus Anti-Calendar. Jeff is currently a director on the board of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), and lives in Toronto.
James E. Côté is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario.
Anton L. Allahar is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario.
Jack Kerouac and a Skateboard-punk: An Evening of Fiction with Ray Robertson and Jeff Parker
Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 7:30pm
Hart House Library
(7 Hart House Circle)
FREE
In collaboration with the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, Thomas Allen & Sons Ltd., and Publishers Group Canada.
Join us for an evening of the fiction of Ray Robertson’s new book What Happened Later and Jeff Parker’s Ovenman.
Jeff Parker’s uproariously funny debut novel follows When Thinfinger—skateboarder, pizza-slinger extraordinaire, and general ne’er-do-well with a slightly tarnished heart of gold—through his travails in a small town in Central Florida. He is a singer in a local band, but his band-mates only let him sing their name, “Wormdevil.” He has a girlfriend who dreams that he murders her and decorates their apartment with the skulls of small animals. His mother and stepfather haven’t spoken to him since he covered his arms in bad tattoos, and his newly surfaced Bio-dad sends mysterious letters full of lies. But after being fired as a cook at the local barbecue and landing a job at the hippest pizza joint in town, When becomes the leader of a disheveled crew and seeks a new nirvana in mopping floors, tossing dough, cleaning ovens, drinking too much beer, and stealing just enough from the Man. When’s philosophy is that anything worth saying should fit on a Post-It note and, following his beer-soaked nights, he learns to rely on nightly notes to himself to serve as memory. It doesn’t take long before things really heat up for Ovenman.
Poetic, poignant and clever, What Happened Later is a unique and engaging story of two lives that were forever changed by one book.
In 1967, only ten years after the sensational success of On The Road, Jack Kerouac was a physically broken, spiritually lost man. Late that summer, accompanied by his friend, Joe Chaput, Kerouac set out for Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec, on a spiritual quest to connect with his French-Canadian roots. Predictably, the trip was a drunken, chaotic disaster, and a little more than two years afterward, Kerouac was dead.
Fifteen years later, after falling under the spell of the larger-than-life myth of Jack Kerouac, a working-class, small-town Ontario teenager named Ray Robertson embarks upon his own quest – to own a copy of On the Road. Rebuffed at every turn in his attempt to possess the elusive novel, Robertson nonetheless slowly begins to recognize the existence of a world beyond the factories, hockey rinks and suburbs of his hometown, while also beginning to comprehend his own French-Canadian heritage.
Taking its title from Kerouac himself – What Happened Later was the title of his proposed sequel to On the Road – this novel tells the story of what happened after the fame generated by Kerouac’s celebrated book and what happened next in the life of a young man infatuated with the legendary author.
Interweaving the story of one man’s slow decline with one boy’s coming of age, What Happened Later explores the ever-shifting dualities of myth and reality, loss and hope, innocence and experience, endings and beginnings.
Jeff Parker’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Best American Non-required Reading, Hobart, Ploughshares, Tin House, and other journals. He teaches at the University of Toronto and is the program director of Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Ray Robertson is the author of the novels Home Movies, Heroes, Moody Food and Gently Down the Stream, and a collection of non-fiction, Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing. He is a contributing book reviewer at The Globe and Mail.
An Evening of Conversation and Visuals with The Dinner Party’s artist Judy Chicago
Monday, September 10 at 7:30pm
Walter Hall (80 Queen’s Park
Join us for an evening of conversation and visual presentations with artist and author of The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation, Judy Chicago, interviewed by Sara Diamond, President of the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD).
Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career now spans four decades. Her work and life are models for an enlarged definition of art, an expanded role for the artist, and a woman’s right to freedom of expression.
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M. G. Vassanji and the Assassin’s Song
Monday, September 24 @ 7:30pm
Robert Gill Theatre (214 College St., 3rd floor)
FREE
Two-time Giller-winning author M. G. Vassanji, author of When She Was Queen (stories), The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, Amriika, The Book of Secrets, No New Land, Uhuru Street (stories), and The Gunny Sack, joins the Reading Series for an evening of discussion about his magnificent new novel, The Assassin’s Song.
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