July 6, 2011

If you only understood peak oil since 1918

the ubyssey

July 6, 2011 summer volume 28, number 5 room 24, student union building feedback@ubyssey.ca

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2 / u b y s s e y. c a / g a m e s / 2 0 1 1 . 0 7. 0 6 july 6, 2011 summer volume xxviii, no v editorial coordinating editor

Games CROSSWORD (CUP.ca)

Justin McElroy: coordinating@ubyssey.ca

managing editor, print

Across

Down

managing editor, web

1. Actress Ruby 4. Hoist 9. One of the Simpsons 13. Sick 14. Approvals 15. Fable 16. Dress with too much formality 18. Unit of volume 19. Furnishings 20. Surgical cutting of a tendon 22. Tidal river 25. Centrepiece of the human face 26. Early computer 28. Story in installments 32. Fleur-de.___ 35. Fortune.telling cards 37. Grass-like plant 38. Archipelago part 40. Growl angrily 42. Interpret 43. Sweatbox 45. Purge 47. Madrid Mrs. 48. Corpulent 50. Law of Moses 52. Footnote abbr.

54. Teacher 58. Dauntless 62. Satirical dialogue 63. Like some stadiums 64. Receptacle 67. Muse of lyric poetry 68. Distinguishing characteristic 69. Seine contents 70. Numerous 71. “Forbidden” fruit 72. ACLU concerns

1. Part of LED 2. Santa’s aides 3. Choose 4. Water faucet 5. Alway 6. Enzyme ending 7. Sleeveless garment 8. Ruhr city 9. Vagrant 10. A big fan of 11. Flower part 12. Ethereal 15. Shuts 17. Libertine 21. Figs 23. Narrow inlets 24. Tall tales 27. Do something together 29. March time 30. Culture medium 31. Moon of Jupiter 32. Speech issue 33. Golfer Aoki 34. Insult 36. Band 39. Completeness 41. Decoy 44. Percentage of light reflected by a planet 46. Proceed in rays 49. Bark sharply 51. Mata 53. Judicial rulings 55. Dead duck 56. A time 57. Convoluted fold of the brain 58. As previously given, in footnotes 59. Asta’s mistress 60. Counterfeiter catcher 61. A small town 65. Doze 66. “... ___ the cows come home”

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virginie menard bryce warnes

Sodoku by Krazydad

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News

editors KALYEENA MAKORTOFF & MICKI COWAN » news@ubyssey.ca

Rumana Monzur returns to Vancouver UBC pledges to fully support student who was blinded in assault in Bangladesh Kalyeena Makortoff news@ubyssey.ca Rumana Monzur, a UBC student who was brutally attacked and blinded by her husband during a visit to Bangladesh in June, returned to Vancouver yesterday.

Monzur arrived at YVR Tuesday with her father. She was immediately transported to Vancouver General Hospital where she was set to receive treatment and consultation with what Janet Teasdale, acting UBC VP students, called some of the “best medical care available.”

At a press conference Tuesday morning, Teasdale said that the university has been in direct contact with Monzur.

“In the last ten days, Rumana made it clear that she wanted to return to Canada and she was interested in additional medical treatment and in finishing her degree,” she said.

“The university stands fully prepared and ready and has made some extraordinary efforts to support the return of Rumana and her family to Canada.”

Teasdale said that Monzur and her father have been reserved a space at St John’s College in family housing and extended thanks to Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Canada for the work on Monzur’s visa, which is expected to last at least six months.

Monzur had a draft of her thesis prepared before going to Bangladesh and was nearing the completion of her degree. Teasdale said the university would provide

Supporters gathered downtown to protest the violence against Rumana Monzur last Sunday. Edward Budiman photo/The Ubyssey

the support necessary for Monzur to receive her PhD. “The department of political science and her supervisor stand ready to provide both financial and scholarship support so that she can continue to study and additional resources for a woman who, at this time, cannot see.”

Teasdale could not comment on speculation that a UBC-based optomologist would be part of Monzur’s assessment. “I think what we can say is that the university has the resources with respect to understanding issues like this and we can call upon those resources.”

Monzur’s friends said they had been in contact with her sporadically in the month leading up to the attack.

“We’ve been very cognizant of not directing too much communication at Rumana,” said Priya Bala-Miller, Monzur’s friend and a PhD student in political science. “This is a really difficult time for her and her family. It was heartwrenching to see her in the media so vulnerable and so exposed in terms of what she’d been through, so as a friend that was extremely difficult to watch.”

UBC law student Sotonye Godwin-Hart, another of Monzur’s friends, described her emotions as she prepared to meet Monzur upon her arrival at YVR. “I actually have mixed feelings. I’m very excited but I’m also nervous and worried because she’s my very close friend. She’s still the same person but it’s not the same, so I really can’t say...until I get to see her.”

From fund raising and over 550 individual donations, UBC has collected over $41,000 to support Monzur’s family, and would cover living expenses.

However, they are calling for at least $70,000 in funds to support her family over the next six months.

Bala-Miller said a petition is circulating that asks that justice be served for Monzur’s attacker. It has been signed by over 500 people and is directed at Canada’s high commissioner for Bangladesh. “I want to commend them for speaking to the media and asking for exemplary punishment in this case.” U Donations for Monzur can be made at rumana.givecentre.com

Perennially shaky, AMS Whistler lodge on thin ice Micki Cowan news@ubyssey.ca

photo Courtesy of Michael Kingsmill/Flickr

The AMS is seeking consultations to decide the fate of the AMS Whistler Lodge, a student service that AMS executives have said is draining money from the student society.

The troubles began after a large amount of lodging options became available following the 2010 Olympics. A leaky roof that could cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair and a lowered number of bookings, attributed to the recession, led to a review of the financial feasibility of maintaining the AMS Whistler Lodge.

The lodge, a popular option for students heading up to hit the slopes, lost nearly $30,000 last year.

AMS VP Finance Elin Tayyar said that the real loss from the lodge may be even greater, considering the projected gain was $56,000, resulting in $85,000 less earnings than expected.

“If we didn’t have the Whistler Lodge, that [deficit] problem would have been gone,” said Tayyar

From 2005-2010, the Whistler Lodge brought $375,000 in revenue, but expenses during that period reached $500,000.

Despite the losses, the AMS says it recognizes that the lodge is a service to students. “It’s a big part of the AMS, a massive asset of ours. And it’s an important one,” said Tayyar.

Charlott Sandor Johansen, former president of the UBC Ski and Board Club, says her club relies heavily on the spaces that are specially reserved for UBC students.

“As a club, we do use the UBC Whistler Lodge a lot. When we have sign-ups for the lodge for Christmas and reading break we generally have a line-up out of the door. The AMS lodge is pretty integral in our lodging options for our members.”

Sandor Johansen did say that some improvements could be made, including general renovations and lowering the age limit to 18, which would allow first-year students to take advantage of the facilities.

VP Administration Mike Silley, the AMS executive member in charge of the lodge, said that

AMS Council had approved consultations on whether to keep the lodge “What we passed in council was $40,000 to hire consultants to look into what our options are—whether it be build a new lodge, restructure the business model, whether it be to move, shut it down or sell the lodge all together,” said Silley “There are quite a few students on campus that we felt needed the service, so we didn’t want to arbitrarily cut it.

“That was a precursor to our decision to…hire consultants to give us a better picture of what’s happening.”

Tay ya r wa s cer t a i n t hat change would come out of the consultations. “We’re starting a big process of reviewing the lodge: the past, the current market and what we want for the future. What I can say is we won’t be looking at continuing in this trend.”

Regardless of the decision that is made, students can expect to find out the results of these consultations—and the fate of the lodge—come September 2011. U

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David Johnston, Waterloo $1,041,881

Prez paycheques

Mahdouh Shoukri, York $480,030 Indira Samarasekera, Alberta $479,000 Alastair Summerlee, Guelph $440,590 Stephen Toope, UBC $483,418 David Turpin, Victoria $417,075 Michael Stevenson, SFU $398,876 David Naylor, Toronto $380,100 David Atkinson, Kwantlen, $235,274 Roger Barnsley, Thompson Rivers $240,662 Greg Lee, Capilano $190,105 Mark Evered, Fraser Valley $160,719

Salaries by dean

Gavin Stuart, Medicine $431,451 Daniel Muzyka, Sauder $413,010 Mary Anne Bobinski, Law $283,784 Charles F. Shuler, Dentistry $255,623 Simon M. Peacock, Science $255,219 Robert Sindelar, Pharmacy $250,932 John N. Saddler, Forestry $250,729 Nancy Gallini, Arts $249,816 Tyseer Aboulnasr, Applied Science $244,550 Jon E. Shapiro, Education $210,247 Murray Isman, Land & Food Systems $208,334 Barbara Evans, Graduate Studies $203,943

Gender divides professor pay Perhaps the most glaring discrepancy in the breakdown of salaries at our university is between genders.

Of UBC’s top 20 earners in 2009/2010, none were women.

Of the top 100, only 11 were women and even when expanded to the top 1000, only 223 were female.

“I think the issue…of greatest concern to the Faculty Association right now would be gender equity and pay, so we’re working with the administration to see what can be done on that issue,” said Faculty Association President Nancy Langton.

“We have concern at two levels. One, are women being systematically paid less than men for doing comparable work? Research reports point to some systemic discriminating. But the other issue is, are women being promoted at the same rate to senior administration that men are?”

A 2009 Statistics Canada report on salaries across all Canadian universities showed that the average male professor earned $123,702, compared to $107,143 for females.

The Faculty Association also released two reports in conjunction with the Provost Office on the subject.

Langton stressed that general awareness among senior administrators would be a key step to combating gender equity, but also noted that when tenured professors originally set their salaries with UBC, men tend to negotiate a higher salary rate.

“I think we need more awareness of how salaries get set at the beginning. There is research evidence that women don’t negotiate salaries as well as men do. If there was more information...potential new hires could look at that,” she said.

—Justin McElroy

Paying The ProfeSSorS Which UBC employees are paid the most, and why?

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How Profs get paid

1 Each year, UBC sets the budget that each faculty can spend on professor salaries. This budget is jointly negotiated between the VP Finance, Provost and respective Dean’s offices.

2 When a new professor is hired or receives tenure, the faculty and professor jointly negotiate their starting salary. What an average starting salary is varies greatly across departments. “Different faculties have different salaries, so a finance professor is paid considerably more than an English professor and that has to do with market pressures,” explained Langton.

3 Once in a tenure position, there are no automatic raises—at least in the current two-year agreement which expires in 2012. Instead, increases happen as a result of “Career Progress Increments” and adjustments made based on merit (a one-year measurement of research, teaching and service accomplishments) and performance salary adjustment (a three-year measurement).

4 While full-time tenured faculty cannot hold another job with a different institution, there are alternative ways for professors to earn extra income, including being named a research chair, publishing a book or giving “executive education” lectures to middle and senior management at various institutions. However, much of this income may be paid to a separate business set up by the professor, and thus would not be included in the Vancouver Sun’s calculations. the top 1000 paid people at ubc in 2009/2010, broken down by department Medicine-256 Science-178 Arts-113 UBC-110 Sauder-97 Applied Science-66 Education-36 Law-27 School of Human population and public health-16 Pharmacy-16 college of Interdisciplinary Studies-16 Forestry-14 Dentistry-12 Land and Food Systems-12 school of Architecture-4 Human Kinetics-7 Nursing-7 School of community and Regional Planning-4 Environmental health-2 UBC Library Department-2

L

ast month, The Vancouver Sun released their annual database of publicsector employees in British Columbia who make at least $75,000. Because of the length of time it takes for various public bodies to release their information, the salaries listed were from the 2009/2010 year—where 3504 people were paid more than $75,000 by UBC. Naturally, the raw numbers provoke interest. How much does my favourite professor make? Which dean makes the most? What sort of gap is there between males and females?

We’ve charted out some of that information here.

At the same time, the basic data can paint a confusing picture. Severance and administrative leave packages can skew numbers and faculty often have secondary sources of income which aren’t publicly released.

How much a professor makes has as much to do with their negotiating skills as it does their talent. And of course, the figures are out of date by as much as two years.

Still, the information is revealing. We’ve spoken wit h members of the UBC Faculty Association—the body that represents all UBC faculty—to get a better sense of what the numbers mean.

college of health disciplines-1

Sessionals get short end of salary stick Because of the flexibility and lower salary inherent in sessional rather than tenured positions, many cash-strapped faculties have opted to use more sessionals over the last decade and UBC is no exception.

“It’s a problem,” admits Langton. “Salaries for sessionals are considerably lower than those for tenure-stream faculty...sessionals are paid less at UBC, on average, than they are at some colleges.” The faculty association

pushed for changes to their agreement, but were rebuffed in the most recent round of collective bargaining last year.

Faculties are required to pay sessionals a minimum salary that is on a sliding scale, based on credits taught per-term and an eight step scale that every lecturer is placed on which reflects seniority and other factors.

Newly hired sessionals are automatically paid the rate of the lowest step when they begin.

You can find the exact calculations online, but a professor at the first step, teaching 9 credits every semester, makes $53,730 in a year.

In 2009/2010, t he h i g hest paid sessional lecturers at UBC were Chuck Campbell in the Sauder School of Business ($164,941), followed by Economics Professor Robert Gateman ($139,494).

—Justin McElroy

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sports & CulturE

editor Drake Fenton » sports@ubyssey.ca editor GINNY MONACO » culture@ubyssey.ca

Cyclists converge at UBC for first Grand Prix Drake Fenton sports@ubyssey.ca BC cycling enthusiasts might want to Tivo the tour July 12, as UBC campus hosts a number of high octane pro/am races.

The inaugural UBC Grand Prix, hosted by Mahoney & Sons, is one of four races in the B.C. Superweek cycling series. The race will be broken down into four different categories: men, women, kids and corporate teams. Participants will race on a 1.35 kilometre, four-cornered circuit that begins and ends at University Boulevard, near the parking lot of the bookstore.

The Grand Prix is a criterium race. In cycling jargon, this means that competitors will race continuously for a set amount of time on a short closed-circuit course. The first person to finish is the winner. Though there is a single winner, the race is far from an individual event.

Dr Jack Taunton, the co-founder of the Vancouver Sun Run and the leader behind bringing the Grand Prix to UBC, explained that in a criterium race, teamwork is a necessity for victory.

“If you are in there as an individual rider, rather than with a team around you, it’s very difficult to win,” he said. “If you were to go off on your own then I would send one of my teammates up to slow you down, while I would

Cyclists rounding the corner in the Tour de Delta. PHOTO Courtesy of Turbulentflow/Flickr

not be working and saving energy for a sprint.”

When the race has finished, teammates split whatever prizes the members have won.

Race director Mark Ernsting said that the course is technical and challenging.

“The left hand turn at corner number four, going into the finish line, will be about a 60-kilometre an hour corner,” he said, referring to the left turn on to

Case, Mangan and Spirit of the West perform this week park and secured valet bicycle parking will be provided.

“There is such a vibrant arts and culture community and sometimes there’s barriers for people to really enjoy it,” said Specht.

“Sometimes it’s money or sometimes it’s accessibility… We wanted to eliminate those barriers.”

Ginny Monaco culture@ubyssey.ca The last time Vancouverites got together it ended with destruction.

Next week, when several thousand Vancouverites converge in Stanley Park for a series of free concerts, the city hopes for celebration.

Summer Live, part of the Vancouver 125th anniversary celebrations, will take over Stanley Park with free performances by Dan Mangan, Neko Case and Spirit of the West, among others. The shows run July 8-10 at Brockton Point. “[The lineup highlights] the sensibilities that reflect Vancouver,” said Margaret Specht, the Vancouver 125 Project Director. “People like Neko Case who weren’t born and bred here have established deep connections here. This is a celebration of Vancouver arts and culture and what citizens and visitors identify with.”

The organizers wanted to make sure that the event was accessible, said Specht. There will be shuttle busses running every 15 minutes from Waterfront Station into the

“Security will be much more rigorous than we might have planned for two weeks ago.”

Margaret Specht Summer Live Project Director

For Specht, the spirit of Vancouver was not seen during the riot on June 15, but in the aftermath.

Specht said not much has changed because of the riots and that most of the effects will be seen at the beer and wine garden. “The security will be much more rigorous than we might have planned for two weeks ago.”

“I don’t see any of the music or any of our programming attracting an element that would want to do anything but enjoy themselves,” said Specht. U For more informat ion on Summer Live visit celebratevancouver125.ca/2011/01/ summer-live-july-8-9-10-2011

University Boulevard from East Mall. “That is definitely going to be a corner that causes some accidents,” he added.

The Superweek cycling series include three other events around the Lower Mainland. From July 8-10 there will be the Tour de Delta, a three part race. On July 14, there will be the Giro di Burnaby and from July 15–17 White Rock will host the Tour de White Rock, another three-part race.

With its deadly corner number four, UBC’s Grand Prix may end up being the most technically challenging of the four competitions, but the risk should be well-worth the reward.

Between the male and female events there is more than $10,000 in prize money.

In order to maintain a level of competition between the large number of contestants in the criterium race—the men’s will have between 90 to 100 riders—there are prizes

called primes. Primes are small purses and at the Grand Prix they may range from $250 to $1,000.

They are awarded to riders who win certain laps within the race.

Taunton explained that if three riders had broken away from the main group, over the next few laps a small prime would be awarded to the rider that closed the gap between the group and the riders in the lead.

Primes keep the pace of competition at a high speed and let multiple riders or teams win money.

They prevent one rider from conserving energy for the entire race before making a breakaway sprint near the end.

One team to keep an eye on at the Grand Prix will be Canada’s newly created men’s national team, SpiderTech. The team has not yet finalized its roster, but they have been a force in multiple competitions in the European pro race circuit, including a second-place finish this year by team member Will Routley at Tro Bro Leon, a one-day road race in Brittany, France.

The UBC Grand Prix will begin at 4:30 pm with the corporate challenge race.

The kid’s race will be at 5:30 pm, the women’s pro race will be at 6:30 pm and the men’s pro race will begin at 7:45 pm. U For more information on the UBC Grand Prix visit ubcgrandprix.com.

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opinions

do you care? WRITE US A LETTER » feedback@ubyssey.ca

editorial Riot demonstrates need for Metro Policing Vancouver and Victoria are in many ways outliers among Canadian cities. Residents of both cities are more likely to own rain boots than snow gear and in both you’re more likely to hear a few lines of Cantonese than any ‘bonjours’ or ‘mercis.’

But Vancouver and Victoria are different in another way as well; they’re the only major Canadian cities that don’t have metropolitan police forces.

Unlike the Toronto Police Service (TPS) or the awkwardly-named Service de la Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), the VPD and VICPD only have authority in their city proper. The problems associated with the limited reach were never as clear as during last month’s hockey riot.

The relief units from the suburbs arrived in an hour-and-a-half, just enough time for some post-game hooliganism to turn into a full-blown riot. It demonstrated a lack of coherent planning amongst the various departments and the inability to respond to large-scale problems of policing.

NPA mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton called the riot “a very good argument in favour of a regional police force.” We agree.

The principle of a metro force is already working in Vancouver. The Integrated Gang Task Force was set up to respond to a rash of gang shootings in 2007. It’s been an immense improvement over the fragmented approaches of earlier years to a problem that crosses municipal boundaries.

Applying the same principle across all facets of policing in Metro Vancouver could reduce redundancies and maybe even renew confidence in policing that has taken some blows recently.

See: Surrey Six. Police work doesn’t follow the same neat borders that the cities and municipalities in Metro Vancouver do. It’s time Vancouver followed the rest of Canada’s lead. U putting their money where their mouth is Last month’s release of public-sector salaries over $75,000 in British Columbia confirmed what any Arts student enjoying the Buchanan renovations, while seeing $100 million buildings spring up everywhere else, already knows: at UBC, all students are equal, but some get nicer buildings and better-paid professors.

Of the 1000 highest-paid employees at UBC in 2009/2010, over 80% were from two faculties— Commerce and Medicine—which host less than 10% of the student population. That’s to be expected for many reasons, including that these professors need to be compensated at a higher rate because they might find more lucrative options at other institutions.

However, areas in which UBC is less competitive globally (namely, undergraduate teaching and the student experience) aren’t seen as priorities, at least if you look at the compensation breakdown, or the number of highly-compensated teaching-focused professors. The university will say they do care about these issues, but this is only partly true.

UBC has the money to go above and beyond pay rubrics if they felt these areas were a real priority.

Heck, they’ve done it in the past. In 2007, when President Toope expressed concern with survey results showing low satisfaction with teacher engagement in the sciences, they hired Nobel laureate Carl Wieman to overhaul teaching methods in certain departments, giving him millions worth of research money and a hefty salary to boot. While the results aren’t revolutionary, teaching methods and student engagement have improved over the last four years and not just because of iClickers.

But in the Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of Science, in housing and food services, in student development, you can count on three hands the number of people UBC pays $200,000 a year to (seriously, it’s a grand total of 13). These are the segments of the university that more students directly participate in than any other, but while UBC can’t go out and hire a renowned expert in these fields, millions can be spent on professors in Commerce and Medicine and in research facilities for much more.

In a university striving to become internationally lauded, this is perhaps inevitable—that’s where the money, donors, and international rankings respond to. For those of not part of that minority, it’s a stark reminder where UBC’s highest priorities ultimately lie. U

Virginie Menard graphic/the ubyssey

opinions

UBC making the ranks, but at what cost? arshy mann webeditor@ubyssey.ca Everyone likes a good ranking list.

Baseball fanatics spend hours debating whether Roger Clemens’ fastball had more fire than Nolan Ryan’s. Music aficionados similarly pick and preen over the 19th best Lou Reed track. In more serious arenas, economists and policymakers compare the GDP, GNP or HDI of developing countries, watching with great interest as they rise and fall relative to one another. In this way, the world of academia is no different.

But university rankings are a relatively new phenomenon. Although the Maclean’s University Rankings have been around since 1990, it was only in the early 2000s that rankings went worldwide and mainstream.

Since then, they’ve become an omnipresent (and some might say omnipotent) reality of post-secondary education.

Students vex over them when deciding which university to attend and politicians point to them as either a source of pride or a reason to prod a university to improve. Most dangerously, universities have begun to adjust their behaviour to receive better scores.

Conventional wisdom is that these rankings emphasize excellence in research above other aspects such as teaching or benefiting the local community and a new report by the European University Association confirms that the conventional wisdom is as much for a reason.

“Global university rankings reflect university research performance far more accurately than teaching,” the report declared.

Not only is research most heavily measured, but certain types of research, especially medicine and natural sciences, are held head-and-shoulders above the rest.

Fields where most findings are published in peer-review journals, as opposed to books, get much more weight in these rankings. That means that disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and some applied sciences get short shrift—which should come as no surprise to an Arts student at UBC. The fact that the rankings are flawed is no big news, but a problem arises when both the public and universities start viewing them as definitive reflections on institution-wide performance.

These rankings create incentives for universities to improve very specific metrics instead of actually improving quality and, in some cases, it

also pushes them to actually manipulate statistics and lie. Don’t think this happens? Well, in 2004 the National Post obtained internal memos from UBC administrators that showed they “pressured faculty members to manipulate enrollment and in some cases capped class sizes” in order to improve UBC’s rankings in Maclean’s annual supplement.

Fans of The Wire will know this better as ‘juking the stats.’

Rankings are insidious in other ways as well. Employers start to look at them to see how well-educated a student is (which it doesn’t measure). A humanities student from SFU who may have a better education than a UBC student may be less likely to get a job because, essentially, UBC has a higher ranking due to its medical research program.

That seems truly perverse.

Universities are multi-faceted institutions with a variety of missions, research being just one of them. We need to find better ways of explaining that.

In an ideal world, there would be prestigious ranking systems that accurately measured teaching or ways that universities promote social mobility. Instead, we’re stuck with one where research appears to trump all. U

Oxford Commas: Smart, sensible, and sadly dying Brian Platt features@ubyssey.ca In general, humanity can be trusted to make simple things much more complicated than necessary. A straightforward rule or principle will inevitably become bogged down in countless caveats and exceptions. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to fight against it. The stronger among us must stand for clarity and steadfastness.

The issue of whether a comma should be placed before the final item in a list exemplifies this battle.

Hilariously, those who advocate elimination of the serial comma claim they are standing up for simplicity.

“Get rid of excessive punctuation!” they cry out, unaware that they are complicating our list-making grammar. Unfortunately, the anti-comma faction was given an unwarranted boost in confidence last week.

The serial comma is often referred to as the Oxford comma (though the reason is unclear to me because almost all universities call for it to be

used). On Wednesday, it emerged that a new Oxford style guide advised readers to, “as a general rule,” avoid the serial comma. Much rejoicing ensued among my enemies. Later it emerged that this was only a branding guide for the university; the Oxford University Press has officially stated that it still calls for the serial comma to be used.

That this has been largely missed by the comma eliminationists is not surprising, as they are a reliably lazy lot.

The only reason why this fight continues is that the print media has declared a vendetta against the serial comma. Self-aggrandizing copy editors feel that the comma slows down the reader, which apparently overrules constructing sentences that are grammatically logical. The Ubyssey follows the Canadian Press style guide, which means that my otherwise pristine, smooth, and poetic prose in these pages is mutilated by a nonsensical rule imposed by smarmy anti-commites.

When we say a list of three or more items out loud, we put a pause between

the items to avoid sounding like a mental case. Think of the phrase “a government of, by, and for the people.” Try saying that without the pause after “by.” It’s pretty obvious which one is the correct form, no? But that doesn’t matter to the copy editors. Can you think of any other case in which we remove the punctuation, and instruct readers to pretend it’s still there when they read it out loud?

It will never make sense to me why any editor thinks that the “and” between the last two items serves as a replacement to the comma, rather than the independent function of simply indicating the end of the list.

Don’t bother arguing about it, though; they’ll just spew out a stream of irrelevant comments and schoolyard insults until you give up waiting for an actual argument.

So, for now, those of us writing for newspapers have to submit to this weird exception to the otherwise straightforward grammar of lists.

But the stronger among us must fight on. Common sense must prevail. U

8/ubyssey.ca/our campus/2011.06.21

our campus Kalyeena Makortoff news@ubyssey.ca Ah, the joys of parking at UBC. If you’re not one of the lucky people commuting or walking to campus, you must be all too aware of the dread that a parking ticket brings. Especially at UBC, which has the fourth most expensive parking of any Canadian university. Apparently, even if you’re not doing something wrong, someone’s assuming you’re at fault.

The owner of this fine motor vehicle was as legal as can be, but aside from displaying a parking pass, still needed to make it clear. We feel your pain. U

geoff Lister Photo/the ubyssey