Tag Archives: law

Financial Corruption and Value Dilution in Higher Education

I’d been brows­ing through the news recent­ly for a col­lec­tion of arti­cles to share on a rather broad top­ic: the influ­ence of mon­eyed inter­ests on the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem. This is a long­stand­ing inter­est of mine, hav­ing grown up dur­ing a time when a year in uni­ver­si­ty cost about $1,200, and hav­ing watched tuition rates and liv­ing costs bal­loon expo­nen­tial­ly ever since. But what shocked me into get­ting the links to this post up that much soon­er is this emerg­ing sto­ry from the US:

The Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion on Tues­day said it brought fraud charges against ITT Edu­ca­tion­al Ser­vices Inc. and two of its top exec­u­tives, alleg­ing they mis­led investors about the loom­ing finan­cial impact of two bad­ly-per­form­ing stu­dent-loan pro­grams on the for-prof­it edu­ca­tor. […] ITT formed the stu­dent-loan pro­grams to pro­vide off-bal­ance-sheet loans for ITT’s stu­dents in the wake of the finan­cial cri­sis, when the mar­ket for pri­vate stu­dent loans dried up and for-prof­it schools cre­at­ed new ways to help stu­dents pay their tuition bills.”

source: Wall Street Journal

Let us fur­ther expand on the dia­logue sur­round­ing mon­ey in edu­ca­tion for the ben­e­fit of those who haven’t been as immersed in the debate:

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The Canadian Parliament Attack and its Aftermath

On Octo­ber 22nd, gun­shots rang out on Par­lia­ment Hill as a sin­gle gun­man, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, attacked a group of sol­diers on cer­e­mo­ni­al duty at the Nation­al War Memo­r­i­al, caus­ing the death of Cpl. Nathan Cir­il­lo. The gun­man then pro­ceed­ed indoors at Cen­tre Block, where at the time cau­cus­es were still in ses­sion, and fired sev­er­al more rounds before being engaged and killed by House of Com­mons Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers.

While the scene ini­tial­ly unfold­ed like the wild script of a Call of Duty game, with the added hor­ror and pan­ic among a mul­ti­tude of onlook­ers, the dif­fi­cult real­i­ty began to sink in as the events left a strong impres­sion on our nation­al psy­che. Since that day, Cana­da as a nation and as a cul­ture has been left to wres­tle with the high­ly nuanced cir­cum­stances of these events and the inci­dents lead­ing up to them.

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SCC to Parliament: Struck Down, Try Again! … and Other Adventures in Law Making

This post fol­lows a response to the Ottawa Cit­i­zen arti­cle from ear­li­er today:

[ Pun­ish the Clients, Not the Pros­ti­tutes ]

… which, in turn, fol­lows this his­toric Supreme Court rul­ing from last year:

[ http://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/13389/index.do ]

So here’s the TL;DR for any­one who’s not been fol­low­ing the issue: the Bed­ford case end­ed with a rul­ing by the Court that Canada’s cur­rent laws address­ing 3 key aspects of pros­ti­tu­tion are uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, and that they, in and of them­selves, have the effect of cre­at­ing gross­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate safe­ty risks and oth­er prob­lems for the pros­ti­tutes them­selves. The SCC struck down the laws and gave Par­lia­ment 12 months to rewrite this legislation.

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Legal Self-Exemption Deconstructed

This evening, I was doing some research about a group call­ing itself “Freemen on the Land.” For those who haven’t heard of them, it’s a fringe move­ment that oper­ates on the erro­neous belief one can remove him­self from the rule, reach, and juris­dic­tion of his nation’s law.

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