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THE NEWS
February 2, 2012
Ground breaks on groundbreaking new facility Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport to complement Varsity AC Yukon Damov The University of Toronto keeps rising. And the surge of construction projects dotting St. George Campus continues unabated. It was announced on Tuesday that the Faculty of Physical Education and Kinesiology has broken ground on the $58 million Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport, which is expected to be completed in 2014. Ira Jacobs, who has overseen significant change at the Faculty since he became dean last year, said the project will create new facilities to address the dearth of spaces for physical activity and sport while also generating sports and health research.
Situated on Devonshire St. opposite Varsity Stadium, the Goldring Centre is the final phase in the Varsity Centre complex renewal program. The new centre will house international-level volleyball and basketball courts, various sports research laboratories, strength and fitness facilities overlooking the stadium, and an expanded sports medicine clinic. Goldring will be the only university centre in Ontario dedicated to sports science. Research at the centre will include sport nutrition, developing training strategies that affect physiological systems, kinetics, and biomechanics (the laws of mechanics applied to the athletic body).
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the newspaper the newspaper is the University of Toronto’s independent weekly paper, published since 1978. VOL XXXIV No. 17
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While such research might seem highly specialized, President David Naylor sees it as having a wide application. “The research into the field of sports science is still limited. There’s huge potential because it relates more broadly to wellness. With an aging population, you want people to be active as long as they live,” he said. “Even though this is a centre for high-performance, it will increase the amount of space for the general population, ” said Townsend Benard, co-chair of the Council of Athletics and Recreation, which is responsible for overall athletics and recreation policy. “It will allow high-performance to move out of the Athletic Centre and move to this building, completely opening up the
AC for the recreational user.” Specifically, recreational users and intramural programs will not have to work around the Varsity teams’ schedules for access to the AC’s track, courts, or fitness facilities. Benard said that the current programming arrangement at the AC will likely transfer to Goldring, and time not reserved for high-performance sports will be set aside for drop-in programs. Benard, President Naylor and Jacobs all emphasized that the Centre will help to alleviate constraints on the intramural program by allowing it to expand, decreasing or eliminating waiting lists. Though the groundbreaking ceremony is behind us, there are still details to be sorted out. The estimated cost of Goldring
is $58 million. But after a $22.5 million gift from the Province and $28.5 million already given from private donations, there remains a $7 million funding gap. At the groundbreaking event on Tuesday, City Councillor Adam Vaughn told the newspaper that the project is “a welcome addition to the neighbourhood,” but it is still awaiting the City’s final approval. There are no significant issues with the building, but Vaughn noted that its design has raised questions about how it fits into the surrounding historical heritage. Neither the funding gap nor the pending City approval is expected to jeopardize the project.
from ‘day of action’
line for February 24. “The Administration is not taking the negotiation process seriously,” said Nugent, explaining that the university does not recognize tutorial size as an issue. With a quarter of tutorials at U of T containing over 50 students, instructors cannot provide them with sufficient support, especially when they must concentrate on the research that brought them to the institution in the first place. “We get the same amount of pay, but they [U of T] are asking us to do hundreds and hundreds of hours more.” “What they [the provincial government] worry about is access, not quality,” said President of the U of T Faculty Association (UTFA) Professor George Luste, who expressed concern about the stagnant number of faculty positions as university enrollment continues to grow. “The students and the faculty are all in this together . . . to teach and
to create research,” he said. Despite support from the UTFA and a letter from the Office of the Vice Provost for Students— which called on professors to excuse participating students from academic engagements “when possible”—the number of students only amounted to a fraction of the total university population. Hudson claimed, “We had a whole bunch of people who were scared to leave class or who had part-time jobs who couldn’t make it.” According to Shepherd, “We actually came close to 5,000 [students]; enough students to fill the circle at Con Hall.” Shepherd attributed the relatively low turnout to a lack of “strong campus life,” and believes the next step is to get more students involved in talking about the increasing price of post-secondary education.
Access Fee (AAF). While U of T, with its annual libraries budget reported to be in the neighbourhood of $72.5 million, can afford such financial costs rather easily, smaller institutions must devote a considerable share of their budgets to such online resources. But McKenna generalizes and oversimplifies. “The situation is more complex than she presents it, and perhaps worse than she allows,” said Dewar. Upon reading McKenna’s claim that “faculty are given course release time to edit the journal and a small stipend,” Dewar snorted out loud. “Far from ever receiving a single moment’s course release let alone a penny of stipend, I do not receive any roy-
alty payment if someone uses JSTOR to read something I myself have published in, say, Classical Quarterly,” he said. McKenna may take issue with how JSTOR and services similar to it function, but regardless of their faults, they remain a pleasant and useful service for both students and professors alike. “I can obtain without leaving my office much that would previously have been available to me only if I hiked over to Robarts,” Dewar concluded. “I’m personally much more concerned by the degradation of undergraduate teaching in our public universities than by the ways in which any of the research they produce is turned into a commodity.”
fund post-secondary education are roughly $1.3 billion short of the level of funding two decades ago. However, the provincial government may not be the only party implicated in the increasingly high fees, as the university administration also bears some responsibility in the issue. “I want to see them [the University] lobbying for more public funds,” said Shepherd. “We’re not just talking about accessible education, we’re talking about quality education,” said James Nugent, chief spokesperson of CUPE 3092, the trade union that represents the university’s education workers. Members of CUPE 3092 saw the National Day of Action as a platform to address their concerns. The union, which has been in negotiations with the university administration over the past seven months, set a strike dead-
from ‘firewalled’ yet less time spent on my own scholarship,” he said. After the exhaustive process of polishing and compiling a journal, its editor sends the final product to a for-profit publisher to produce the physical issue. Publishers then often sell their content rights to companies such as JSTOR in order to cover their expenses, who digitize the material for sale online. “Universities that created this academic content for free must pay to read it,” wrote McKenna. The privilege of accessing JSTOR’s Arts & Sciences I collection, for example, costs U of T a $45,000 Archive Capital Fee (ACF) plus an $8,500 Annual