Education
Red Deer Polytechnic Board introduces new President
President begins role at pivotal time for institution
Red Deer Polytechnic’s Board of Governors is pleased to announce that Mr. Stuart Cullum has been appointed as the institution’s 12th President. Stuart Cullum will begin his role starting on August 2, 2022.
With a proven record as a collaborative and innovative post-secondary leader, Cullum was selected by the Board to guide Red Deer Polytechnic on its path forward as a polytechnic institution, serving learners, industry and communities with a growing breadth of credentials and programs that meet central Alberta’s needs.
“We are thrilled to welcome Stuart as our next President,” says Guy Pelletier, Chair of the institution’s Board of Governors. “His enthusiasm and experience will help position Red Deer Polytechnic as a leader in the post-secondary sector and his passion for central Alberta, coupled by his vision for polytechnic education, will serve both our region and our province very well in the years to come.”
Mr. Cullum’s appointment as President comes after the Polytechnic’s Board of Governors embarked on an extensive national search and careful consideration of many outstanding candidates during the past months.
With a passion for life-long learning, Mr. Cullum is driven to contribute toward academic excellence and student success. He is pleased to begin his new role in August 2022, leading the institution as it will begin its second full year as a polytechnic institution.
“Red Deer Polytechnic is on an exciting trajectory and is well-positioned to lead in this province,” says Stuart Cullum. “I am excited to join at this critical time and I look forward to working with all of its dedicated employees and students, as well as with industry and community to build upon the great work taking place in Red Deer and central Alberta.”
Stuart Cullum joins Red Deer Polytechnic from Olds College where he has served for six years, from 2016 – 2022, including the past five years as President. Under his leadership, Olds College has achieved a bold vision that has led to unprecedented success on a national scale. This includes a 12 per cent increase in enrolment, more than $23 Million in applied research funding, a doubling of international enrolment and the development of key action plans including the College’s first Indigenous Relationship Building Strategy and Action Plan. He has been instrumental in establishing the Olds College Smart Farm, a leading hub for innovation, training and applied research that has attracted more than 100
partners globally and more than $40 Million in investment.
Prior to Olds College, Cullum served in executive positions at Lethbridge College, Northlands, NAIT, AVAC, and WestLink Innovation Network. As a former teacher, he taught high school in Three Hills, Alberta, prior to pursuing an opportunity to work for the University of Alberta in their Industry Liaison Office, which began his post-secondary career.
Mr. Cullum currently serves as Chair of the Post-Secondary International Network (PIN) and Campus Alberta Central, a joint long-term partnership between Olds College and Red Deer Polytechnic. He has held numerous professional board and advisory appointments across Canada, including with Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICan), Canadian Agri-Food Automation and Intelligence Network (CAAIN) and THRIVE Canada Accelerator.
Stuart Cullum holds a Bachelor of Arts (History) and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Lethbridge, as well as a Master of Business Administration (Technology Transfer Specialization) from the University of Alberta. He is an Accredited Professional Director (ICD.D) and has completed the Executive Program with Singularity University and the Institute for Educational Management Program at Harvard in Boston.
Stuart Cullum was born and raised in central Alberta. He currently lives in rural central Alberta with his partner Carrie. His two adult children attend post-secondary in Alberta, including a son who currently attends Red Deer Polytechnic in the Visual Arts program.
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Race- (and other-) based admissions will inevitably pave the way to race- (and other-) based medical practices, which will only further the divisions that exist in society. You can’t fight discrimination with more discrimination.
Perhaps it should be expected that a so-obviously ‘woke’ institution as the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) would toss aside such antiquated concepts as academic merit as it prepares to open its new medical school in the fall of 2025.
After all, until recently, TMU was more widely known as Ryerson University. But it underwent a rapid period of self-flagellation, statue-tipping and, ultimately, a name change when its namesake, Edgerton Ryerson, was linked (however indirectly) to Canada’s residential school system.
Now that it has sufficiently cleansed itself of any association with past intolerance, it is going forward with a more modern form of intolerance and institutional bias by mandating a huge 80% diversity quota for its inaugural cohort of medical students.
TMU plans to fill 75 of its 94 available seats via three pathways for “equity-deserving groups” in an effort to counter systemic bias and eliminate barriers to success for certain groups. Consequently, there are distinct admission pathways for “Indigenous, Black and Equity-Deserving” groups.
What exactly is an equity-deserving group? It’s almost any identity group you can imagine – that is, except those who identify as white, straight, cisgender, straight-A, middle- and/or upper-class males.
To further facilitate this grand plan, TMU has eliminated the need to write the traditional MCAT exam (often used to assess aptitude, but apparently TMU views it as a barrier to accessing medical education). Further, it has set the minimum grade point average at a rather average 3.3 and, “in order to attract a diverse range of applicants,” it is accepting students with a four-year undergrad degree from any field.
It’s difficult to imagine how such a heterogenous group can begin learning medicine at the same level. Someone with an advanced degree in physiology or anatomy will be light years ahead of a classmate who gained a degree by dissecting Dostoyevsky.
Finally, it should be noted that in “exceptional circumstances” any of these requirements can be reconsidered for, you guessed it, black, indigenous or other equity-deserving groups.
As for the curriculum itself, it promises to be “rooted in community-driven care and cultural respect and safety, with ECA, decolonization and reconciliation woven throughout” which will “help students become a new kind of physician.”
Whether or not this “new kind of physician” will be perceived as fully credible, however, is yet to be seen. Because of its ‘woke’ application process, all TMU medical graduates will be judged differently no matter how skilled they may be and even when physicians are in short supply. Life and death decisions are literally in their hands, and in such cases, one would think that medical expertise is far more important than sharing the same pronouns.
Frankly, if students need a falsely inclusive environment where all minds think alike to feel safe and a part of society, then maybe they aren’t cut out to become doctors who will treat all people equally. After all, race- (and other-) based admissions will inevitably pave the way to race- (and other-) based medical practices, which will only further the divisions that exist in society. You can’t fight discrimination with more discrimination.
It’s ridiculous to use medical school enrollments as a means of resolving issues of social injustice. However, from a broader perspective, this social experiment echoes what is already happening in universities across Canada. The academic merit of individuals is increasingly being pushed aside to fulfill quotas based on gender or even race.
One year ago, the University of Victoria made headlines when it posted a position for an assistant professor in the music department. The catch is that the selection process was limited to black people. Education professor Dr. Patrick Keeney points out that diversity, equity and inclusion policies are reshaping core operations at universities. Grants and prestigious research chair positions are increasingly available only to visible minorities or other identity groups.
Non-academic considerations are given priority, and funding is contingent on meeting minority quotas.
Consequently, Keeney states that the quality of education is falling and universities that were once committed to academic excellence are now perceived as institutions to pursue social justice.
Diversity is a legitimate goal, but it cannot – and should not — be achieved by subjugating academic merit to social experimentation.
Susan Martinuk is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and author of Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health-care Crisis.
From the Fraser Institute
The Waterloo Region District School Board recently announced it would remove garbage bins from classrooms, before suddenly reversing itself.
Strange as it sounds, the school board planned to replace classroom waste bins with larger bins in common areas outside of classrooms, ostensibly to reduce the amount of waste produced by schools. Apparently, the facilities superintendent and senior facilities manager (the people behind this idea) think garbage magically appears when garbage bins are in classrooms and disappears once you get rid of these bins.
Of course, reality is quite different. Students still must dispose of dirty Kleenex tissues, empty pens and used candy wrappers. The aborted plan gave students a ready-made excuse for extra hallway trips. To prevent this from happening, teachers would have to provide makeshift garbage bins of their own.
This is a prime example of administrators trying to impose impractical directives on teachers for the sake of virtue signalling. No doubt Waterloo school board officials wanted to be recognized as environmental leaders. Getting rid of garbage bins in classrooms is an easy and effortless way to look like you’re doing something good for the environment.
Indeed, teachers typically bear the brunt of bad ideas imposed on them from above. As another example, British Columbia K-9 teachers must now issue report cards with confusing descriptors such as “emerging” and “extending” rather than more easily understood letter grades such as A, B and C. A recent survey revealed that most parents find the new B.C. report cards hard to understand. While most had no trouble interpreting letter grades such as A, less than one-third could correctly identify what “emerging” and “extending” mean about a student’s progress.
While the B.C. Ministry of Education claims these new report cards are built on the expertise of classroom teachers, its own surveys found that 77 per cent of teachers were unhappy with the grading overhaul. Of course, their feedback was ignored by education bureaucrats, which means teachers must implement something most disagree with, and then bear the brunt of parental frustration.
And one can never forget the nonsensical “no-zero” policies imposed on teachers in every province, which prohibit teachers from giving a mark of zero when students fail to hand in assignments or docking marks for late assignments. The reasoning behind no-zero policies is that zeroes have too negative an impact on student grades.
Fortunately, no-zero policies have become less popular in Canadian schools, particularly after Edmonton physics teacher Lynden Dorval was fired for refusing to comply with his principal’s no-zeroes edict. Not only did the public overwhelmingly support Dorval at the time, but the Alberta Court of Appeal upheld an arbitrator’s ruling that Dorval’s firing was unjust. In the end, taxpayers were on the hook for paying Dorval two years of salary, along with topping up his pension. But this doesn’t mean no-zero policies have disappeared entirely. Plenty of assessment gurus hired by school boards still push them on gullible administrators and unsuspecting teachers.
Finally, there are the never-ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training sessions—possibly the worst fads ever imposed on Canadian teachers. In an obvious desire to justify their jobs, DEI consultants provide many hours of professional development to hapless teachers who have no choice but to attend.
When teachers push back, as Toronto principal Richard Bilkszto did during a DEI session a couple years ago, they’re subjected to harassment and derision. In this case, the social impact on Bilkszto was so negative he eventually and tragically took his own life.
The Bilkszto case had a chilling effect—teachers should go along with whatever they’re told to do by their employer, even when a directive doesn’t make sense. This is not healthy for any profession, and it certainly doesn’t benefit students.
Classroom teachers have far too many bad ideas imposed on them. Instead of making teachers implement useless fads, we should just let them teach. That is, after all, why they became teachers in the first place.
Author:
Canada’s struggle against transnational crime & money laundering
Trudeau Government Capping the Canadian Economy (and Energy Industry) Just to Impress International Agencies
Even before taking office, Trump puts Mexico on spot — stop the caravans now
How the Trump-RFK Jr. coalition could realign US politics against Big Pharma and Big Food
-
Digital Currency2 days agoConservatives urge Canadians to reject mandatory digital IDs proposed by Liberal gov’t
-
Canadian Energy Centre1 day agoIgnoring the global picture and making Canadians poorer: Energy and economic leaders on Ottawa’s oil and gas emissions cap
-
Daily Caller1 day agoPresident Of Country Hosting UN Climate Summit Defends Fossil Fuels, Slams Media And Green ‘Hypocrisy’
-
Energy2 days agoFederal government’s ’carbon-free’ electricity target far-fetched
-
Alberta1 day agoNew red tape reporting website will help ramp up housing construction in Alberta
-
espionage1 day agoBreaking: Hogue Commission Will Hear From New Safety-Protected Witnesses On PRC Targeting of Chinese Candidates
-
Disaster2 days agoFEMA skipping homes in disaster areas lures calls for federal probe
-
Daily Caller2 days agoClimate Change Fanaticism Was The Big Election Loser