SPEAK OUT!
Thank You to David Jackson who has informed us that the Townhall Meeting will be on Monday at high noon in room 295, North Campus Building.
again,
TOWNHALL MEETING RE: CANWEST AGREEMENT
12:00PM
NORTH CAMPUS BUILDING, ROOM 295
COME AND MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD
posted by Jeff at 10:48 p.m.
9 Comments:
The email that council got made it seem like only council is invited. Is this forum open for all students, or just grad students and council?
11:07 p.m.
This decision affects ALL of us, so, I feel we should all be. Sure they can block the door and not let us in, but, we can still make our voices heard from the hallway.
Come one, come all!
11:17 p.m.
All students! Undergrads and grads alike! Faculty (other than the three invited speakers) can come and listen - but the discussion is for students.
The council students were just the only e-mail addresses I could find (I'm only a librarian-in-training, not a fully-trained-librarian). :)
Further details (schedule and speakers) to follow. So far Dr. Catherine Ross and Dr. Nick Dyer-Witheford will be speaking...
Cheers!
11:18 p.m.
But I also want to clarify that this is not just a meeting about the CanWest deal - it's also meant to demonstrate to the department that there needs to be an avenue for student participation when these kinds of deals are being made....
11:24 p.m.
In the words of several very popular activists: "This is what democracy looks like"
See you all there!
11:28 p.m.
I won't be there, but I'd like to suggest the following:
Focus on the credibility of the department. Focus on how CanWest will be perceived to have an influence over FIMS -- regardless of any actual intervention from CanWest.
Names are powerful. What would you think of FIMS if it were renamed the CanWest Lackeys department? Well, a deal like this isn't far from that, is it?
11:30 a.m.
Toban, you raise an interesting point.
You seem, however, to have overlooked information from Don Peat's email.
The largest journalism schools in the country, Carleton, Ryerson and UBC, have ALL accepted scholarship money or endowments from CanWest and have not lost credibility as a result. Western’s public rejection of such an endowment would cause the journalism department to lag behind these schools.
As a journalism student, there are a number of points I’d like to reiterate, many of which are disclosed in Don Peat’s email (which was posted without his knowing, I might add).
Almost a quarter of the current class of journalism students recently completed internships at CanWest organizations. None of them returned with horrible tales of being bound, gag and beaten by vicious CanWest management.
As far as I’ve heard, CanWest did not force students to abandon their journalistic integrity either.
Does CanWest have problems as a media organization? Yes. Is it a completely abhorrent organization? No. There are many journalists doing valuable work at CanWest papers and televisions stations, many of who are graduates from our program. Dismissing CanWest as being only a terrible corporation is a reductive academic argument.
Consider the fact that the Canadian Newspaper Association has nominated some of CanWest's papers for awards for excellence in journalism:
http://www.cna-acj.ca/client/CNA/cna.nsf/web/NNA2004nominees
Demonizing all of CanWest is disrespectful to the journalists there who do, in fact, offer significant reporting.
I’m also curious about what impact rejecting the endowment would have for the MIT and library sciences’ programs as well. Would the loss of support for the journalism program and a journalism scholarship affect MIT and library sciences’ students? No.
It’s easy to criticize an endowment when its rejection would have little, if any, impact on your department. To me, this smacks of the worst form of ivory tower idealism.
And honestly, do MIT students and faculty think they’re so significant and dangerous that CanWest would want to indoctrinate them with its message?
What real impact would the rejection have on CanWest? Is CanWest going to go home to Winnipeg and sob into its pillow, “Those beautiful MIT students rejected me! I’m so ugly!”
Rejecting the endowment will have little impact on CanWest.
The rejection could, however, have far-reaching effects on the journalism program. To reinforce the point, the endowment does not allow CanWest to interfere in FIMS. The focus of this endowment is supporting the journalism department, echoing the support that CanWest has given to other journalism schools in Canada.
The loss of this endowment could have lasting negative effects on the journalism department that few on this blog have stopped to consider.
1:20 p.m.
Let me see if I've go this straight: Dr. Dyer-Witherford is against the deal; Dr. Ross is neutral. How come there isn't a speaker who represents the interests of the Journalism students? Correct me if I'm wong, but isn't it the journos in this building ("we share the building, we share the space" notwithstanding) who stand to benefit or lose from the deal either way?
7:05 p.m.
Thank you to everyone who showed up today at the forum, despite the overcrowding. Everyone who spoke represented their own departments very well and all the spectators who showed a great amount of support for their colleagues.
I think the sheer numbers gave a clear impression to the dean and the faculty just how committed the students of FIMS are to their programs and to the perception of their faculty within the community. While divisions are still strong, this meeting highlighted the need for student input in such decision making and hopefully forums like this will take place earlier in the process in the future.
Once again, thank you all for taking time out of your hectic end of term schedules to attend and for being respectful participants. Please pass our thanks along to your classmates who do not access this blog.
8:33 p.m.
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