For Dezsö Horváth, the dean of York University’s Schulich School of Business, there’s no small amount of irony in India’s recent decision to allow foreign universities to confer degrees in the South Asian country of 1.2 billion, reported Maclean’s Sept. 24. The widely expected but long-delayed ruling came on Sept. 10 – one week after Schulich planned to welcome the first wave of students to a brand-new, $100-million campus in Hyderabad, India. The ambitious project was put on hold last year after it became clear that the foreign universities bill, first proposed in 2010, would not be approved by this fall. Read full story.
Predistribution: The neglected side of the inequality debate
“The high-profile Toronto Centre federal byelection features two well-known opposition candidates who agree that soaring income inequality, especially the fast-rising income share of the top 1 per cent with all of its well-documented negative effects, is the defining political issue of our times. At issue is what we should be doing about it, through changes to public policy,” wrote Andrew Jackson, the Packer Professor of Social Justice at York University, in The Globe and Mail Sept. 24. Read full story.
OSC roundtable to discuss women on boards
The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) will hold a public meeting to consider its proposals that would require public companies to disclose their approach to gender diversity, reported Investment Executive Sept. 23. The OSC said Monday that it will be hosting a roundtable on Oct. 16 to further explore the issues raised in a consultation paper it released in the summer regarding the under-representation of women on corporate boards and in senior management, and possible new disclosure requirements that aim to address the issue. Osgoode Hall Law School Professor Aaron Dhir will be a panelist at the roundtable. Read full story.
Prose not Prozac
In a series of five studies published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and in The Gerontologist, researchers at the University of Alabama studied the effects of simply reading a good self-help book without any other therapy for stress, anxiety and depression. They discovered that “bibliotherapy” may be as effective as a full course of psychotherapy or treatment with the best antidepressant drugs, reported The Week Sept. 23….York University psychology Professor Raymond Mar concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals – in particular, interactions in which we are trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Read full story.