WLUExposed.org

November 30, 2006

From this week’s Cord:

Property Damage Reported: November 21, 2006 Time: 1924 hrs Special Constables investigated a report that an unknown culprit wrote “WLU BLOWS” in the fresh cement in the Dining Hall Quad area. The contractor came to the site and repaired the cement and then covered the area to prevent any further damage.

Hmm…

August 31, 2006

Since a new school year is starting up, we are looking for fresh WLU-related blogs and photostreams. Submit your links here. As always, we are also looking for on-campus contributors.

August 25, 2006

The appointment of Virginia “Ginny” Dybenko as the new Dean of the School of Business and Economics confirmed all of our secret fears: “business” is nothing but a vocational trade masquerading as an academic discipline, and should be banished from universities.

I’m in no position to comment on Ms. Dybenko’s academic qualifications, because she doesn’t have any — no PhD, no academic research. What little academic training she had doesn’t even pertain to the field of business or economics. Instead of being hired for her academic work, WLU hired Ginny for her “leadership abilities, coupled with her enthusiasm and vision.”

“I intend to help build strong partnerships and a mutually-beneficial dialogue between the corporate community and academia,” she said. Holy buzzwords!

However, WLU’s buzzword-filled press release doesn’t explain that this person will be in charge of an entire academic community, even though she’s eminently unqualified for it. Unlike your local Chamber of Commerce, a university should be place where real academic research and debates should be conducted. I find it hard to believe that a person who spent her entire life in corporate boardrooms gets to control the academic pulse of an entire institution.

In fact, Ginny doesn’t even seem to care about petty things like research and independent inquiry — she’s all about “the real world.” “The connections I’ve made with corporate executives across the country and internationally will help me bring the real world in.”

Indeed. If there’s one thing we’ve all be clamouring for, is more corporate interference in academia.

We always made fun of business students for, well, being nimrods with an inflated sense of self importance. For years, the most academically rigorous exercises done by business students consisted of group work and PowerPoint presentations, and even with these lax standards the School of Business and Economics was frequently rocked by repeated allegations of massive academic misconduct. Thus, this appointment will simply reinforce all of our negative preconceptions about Business as a discipline, and it will ultimately be detrimental to both the university and the School of Business and Economics.

But despite all this, there is still a a saving grace. Ginny makes warm, meaningless statements about students “they are the real heart of the school.” And she also wears some bitching turtlenecks … in every single picture taken of her. Yay.

March 17, 2006

Today, Wilfried Laurier University celebrated Laurier Day by unveiling its secret recruitment strategy: pretend we’re a small, close-knit community.

“The academic quality goes hand in hand with the small class sizes,” says the press release posted today on wlu.ca. “The best thing about Laurier is how small the campus is,” says Diaz, one of the students quoted in the article. She added, “It’s nice when professors actually recognize you.”

The ideas of “smallness” and “close-knitted” are repeated 12 times in the relatively short article. This repetition is misleading at best, and malicious at worst. Laurier is not a small school — it hasn’t been a small school in years. The student population nearly doubled in the past seven years, and right now over 10,000 undergraduate bodies collide every day on the main campus alone.

Any school with over 10,000 students is no longer small. To put it in perspective, University of Waterloo, the “big” school, has an undergrad population of 17,000 students — we are definitely catching up.

To claim that Laurier offers a “smaller” community ignores the reality students encountered every day. For instance, first year classes have ballooned over the previous years. I’ll venture to guess that the average first-year lecture at Laurier has well over a 150 students crammed in a tiny space. Laurier has fully embraced mega-lectures, and as a first year student you’ll be as anonymous if you go to Laurier as everywhere else.

Of course, things look different in a press releases. Officially, the student-teacher ratio at Laurier is 24-to-1. This ratio is kept artificially low because grad students (and tutorials) are included in the count (and some grad courses have only one or two students enrolled). The 24:1 ratio is not something that first year students will ever get to experience.

Instead, first year students will experience crowded classrooms, constant line ups, crowding, and extremely little interaction with their instructors. In this way, Laurier is no different than any other university in Ontario that has had its budget savaged by deep government cuts.

It’s disingenuous to suggest that Laurier is “small,” even though it’s true that 10,000 bodies are crammed into a very small space. The only reason the community is so “intimate” is because the campus is so crowded you’ll have a hard time moving from one end to the other without rubbing against everybody else. Laurier is “intimate” in the same way a packed subway car is “intimate.” And that is nothing to brag about.

March 15, 2006

I somehow missed this gem of an article in the Imprint until the inimitable Mark Ciesluk brought attention to it in yesterday’s Cord. “Just because [Waterloo] girls have brains, doesn’t mean they can’t be ridiculously attractive young ladies,” writes Landon Mitchell, who’s on a desperate quest to get laid (he concludes the article by begging for a date). I find all this deliciously amusing. Others do not.(link).

In other Laurier news, the furror over Faqiri continues. Infidels! When Faquiri will take over WLU next year, the Cord writers will be the first up against the wall. And that Laura Gray woman.

Lastly, someone finally questions the wisdom of hosting an Open House at Laurier on St. Patrick’s day, when everybody’s crazy-drunk. What the hell were they thinking?

March 09, 2006

This week’s Cord brought us not one, but three fantastic stories that got us shaking our head:

First, Yusuf Faqiri, Laurier’s most ineffective director, was asked to resign after missing over 60 percent of this year’s board meetings and looking horribly bored at the other 40 percent. “I will not,” he said, and best of all, nobody can make him.

Faqiri will also “serve” on next year’s board of directors, demonstrating his committment to act like a painful, reccuring sexual disease (link).

Second, a fantastically inept review of Fringe appeared in The Cord. The best quote was about Corwin’s videos:

Giant Robots are Key was a low-budget film of a guy wearing aviators and a helmet, talking about how he will use robots to take over the world. Repetition of certain phrases, such as “Giant robots are key” made this film confusingly funny.

Low budget. Ahem. That’s pretty much the main idea of Fringe. The man with the aviator glasses will no doubt extract cruel revenge on the writers of the article.

And last, The Yes Men came on campus. Jason Shim, one of the organizers of the event, has an entire photoset up on flickr.

March 07, 2006

Laurier Fringe happened. And everybody is writing about how great it was. Check it out:

• We Are Fringe (Tudor’s post)
• Fringe Update (Phil speaks of awesomeness)
• The epic of Fr!nge (Amy’s post)
• I Still Have Time to Punch that Homeless Guy in the Face (Sherry’s post)
• Thing Our Thong (Corwin’s mean reviews)
• I Can Program A VCR (Corwin’s post)
• Free Anarchy (Corwin’s Fringe videos)
• My Fringe photos
• WLUSP Fringe photos

And now we can talk about your favourite plays.

March 03, 2006

The Cord just came up with 101 things to do in the Waterloo region. Some suggestions are good (build a snow penis on Willison field), some are questionable (do a keg stand), and others are just illegal. As to those suggestions given by Dr. Rosehart, well, they just sound wacky (“see the Mennonite culture in full effect”).

Here are some of my favourite suggestions from the list (accompanied by photos where necessary):

• See at least one movie you’ve never heard of at Waterloo’s Princess Cinema
• Go to the Waterloo Busker Carnival in the summer.
• All that mud that covers Willison Field in the Spring? Throw on your least favourite sweats, get some friends, and get dirty.
• Do the Brick Brewery tour and ‘sample’ the unlimited beer.
• Have sex on campus.
• Go to Elora Gorge.
• Check out the Farmers’ Market for good deals on food and explore the town of St. Jacobs.
• Go to the Butterfly Emporium in Cambridge. (link)

And here are some of the things that are not in the list, but are enjoyable all the same:

• Pick up garbage by the river with your favourite girl.
• Make mad, passionate love near the sewage treatment plant.
• Drink red, red wine at poetry readings and collapse into a tender mess.
• Drift down sewage channels in a rubber boat.
• Find a rusty bridge to fall in love on.
• Get your nipples pierced in shady parlours.
• Grope your half-naked friends on a rubber mat on the hallway leading to the cafeteria.

What would you add to the list, Laurier?

(Link)

February 15, 2006

Laurier students cast nearly as many ballots for the next WLUSU president as for the Laurier Bachelorette. Terry Teixeira won the Bachelorette contest with 1,092 out of the 2,600 ballots cast. This makes him nearly as popular as Allan Cayenne, who won the WLUSU presidency with with 1,743 out of the total 2,826 votes.

Laurier’s startling enthusiasm over pop-culture games lead to speculations that next year’s WLUSU election will be replaced by a giant gameboard with contestants eliminated at various stages for lack of sexiness.

February 06, 2006

Laurier’s Fringe festival now has a blog and 10 student-written plays that will debut at the beginning of March. If this fringe is going to be anything like previous fringes, you can expect much drunkeness, poetry, and perhaps even naked men.

Perhaps you should buy some tickets.