What would Wendy Babcock make of the fact that her fellow law students raised $18,000 in her name, asked the Toronto Star April 30. That money, raised to $33,000 by the law school’s administration, will be put into the Wendy Babcock Bursary, five per cent awarded each year to a graduating student bent on a career in social justice law. “It’s become a collective student cause,” says Joey Hoffman, one of Babcock’s former classmates who helped spearhead the fund. “We all recognized we lost an important person who was going to go on and do really cool work.” Read full story.
Stock market fraud – Why Canada doesn’t scare fraudsters
Douglas Cumming and Sofia Johan, seasoned academic researchers at York University and Holland’s University of Tilburg, respectively, undertook the first effort to compare “fraud risk” among the leading exchanges in Canada, the US and Britain, reported the Toronto Star April 30.
Public sector lures business students
Joseph Palumbo, executive director of York University’s Schulich School of Business Career Development Centre, noted government institutions tend to have a muted impression on students, who prefer to be wooed by aggressive recruiters,” reported the Financial Post April 30. “What I find is that our students need more attention and more employers in front of them and wanting them; they want to feel like they’re being recruited,” he said.
Nazis and the CCF
“In his pacifist opposition to the [Second World] war as such, party leader J.S. Woodsworth was largely isolated within the CCF National Council, as he subsequently was in the House of Commons,” wrote Michiel Horn, history professor emeritus in York’s Glendon College, in a letter to The Globe and Mail April 30. “Citing Woodsworth’s stand as part of an effort to discredit the current NDP is, at best, historically irrelevant and, at worst, contemptible.” Read full story.
Reading fiction is a good way to put a spark in brain activity
Need more reasons to read fiction? Apparently fiction readers enhance their ability to “construct a map of other people’s intentions,” reported the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner April 30, in a column about a New York Times story by author Annie Murphy Paul. Paul reports that researchers at Canada’s York University [Faculty of Health] found that “individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels.” Read full story.