The best thing about first year is that everyone is your friend—that guy in your history class, the girl in the cafeteria, your next-door neighbour, and the security guard you high-five everyday before going to class. Being a newbie in an unfamiliar place can be scary, but it is also an excuse to approach anyone and strike up a conversation, knowing that they are just as clueless and nervous as you are. It’s a complete free-for-all: no cliques, no gossip girls, no bullies, and no crazies. Every person you see is potential friendship material.

However, not everyone can be friends with the world like Mr. Rogers or Oprah. As the year progresses, you might realize that your next-door neighbour and the cafeteria girl aren’t quite your cup of tea.  As your friend count slowly dwindles after Frosh, finding the right roommates for the next few years becomes an issue. If you just met the person, how can you know you can trust them enough to share a bathroom? After first year, you are expected to move out of dorms and into real-world apartments. By April, every freshman has to trade in their meal plans for grocery shopping lists. Next thing you know, you’re cooking yourself Kraft dinners and paying bills.

If you think picking roommates is a precarious process, what if the final living situation doesn’t work out? Who moves out and who moves in? I can tell you from recent experience that replacing roommates is as awkward as it gets. One of my roommates decided to transfer out of McGill at the end of last year, so my remaining roommate and I asked around and raided both Craigslist and Montreal Kijiji in the hopes of finding the perfect third in our trio. This sticky dilemma can definitely put a strain on friendships, so here is my guide to making the situation as smooth as possible.

Before committing yourself to your new roommates on paper, it’s always a good idea to lay down some ground rules in case of potential breakups. When signing a lease, you don’t think about the probability of one of your roommates bailing out before your apartment contract ends. In my case, this led to arguments about who would pay the remaining part of the rent each month. Make sure to settle on some agreement that all of you will pay rent until your contract ends. That way, if someone moves out, responsibility for that person’s rent won’t be yours.

If a stranger from Craigslist is not your thing, and you would prefer to move into a different apartment altogether, don’t rush into selling your place too fast in order to avoid next month’s rent. Remember, apartment hunting is a dog-eat-dog world and it’s every person for themself. I cannot stress enough the number of times an apartment was snatched out from under us last minute. Avoid the possibility of ending up homeless,  like we almost did twice. Plan in advance if you want to move out, and make sure to find people to transfer your old lease to before signing another one.

If another friend replaces your old roommate, keep in mind that this is a tricky and touchy transition. I am just getting used to the new vibe in our house. There are positive sides to this situation. A new roommate brings great new furniture for the apartment and some extra silverware you so desperately need. A new fresh face is always exciting, and in my case, we’ve inherited a great cook, which means no more ten-minute meals for me.

It’s probably best if you don’t make your new roomie feel like a fallback plan and your old one feel like they never existed. The switch is probably harder for your just-departed roommate than it is for you. A good balance of mixed emotions is the way to go when approaching this fragile situation.

Last, but not least, you’ll probably have to adapt to your new roommate’s quirks. So maybe you can’t walk around unclothed anymore because your roommate’s boyfriend is sleeping over, or maybe you’ll have to deal with your roommate’s obsession with French cheese stinking up the place. But isn’t that just part of the experience of having a roommate? Sharing your private space can get tricky and awkward at times, but as roommates come and go, the friendships you gain from the experience grow even stronger.

The Manfredi Report, made public on Oct. 10, 2012, was a direct response to the Jutras Report’s recommendation calling for a campus-wide discussion on the meaning of “free expression and peaceful assembly on campus.” It roughly outlines the escalation of our campus politics since the events of Nov. 10, and further includes his recommendations for action in this period of relative calm.

“Recommendations” have become a familiar theme at the administrative level; the Jutras Report, issued in February, made sweeping recommendations as well. It is all too easy to brush these recommendations off by arguing they don’t provide direction towards tangible progress. Important lessons go unlearnt without ascribing some value to them.  In her email on the report, Heather Munroe-Blum accepted Christopher Manfredi’s recommendations, and this project has taken on a much-extended timeline; a smart move from the McGill administration, as a means to sustain this period of calm.

[pullquote]… protestors on Nov. 10 were obviously upset with McGill’s concept of ‘protection’.[/pullquote]

In the interest of sustaining calm on campus, what is truly needed for the community right now is a chance to restore a certain level of faith in the administration. To do so, it would also be good to be reminded of the values that McGill stands for. This is why the Manfredi Report is, to a certain extent, a welcome addition to discussion of campus politics—its first two recommendations implicitly do just this. The first, which calls for clarification of terms like ‘disruption’ in the Code of Student Conduct, aims to provide a framework for how to continue living peacefully in school. By setting clear boundaries in the student code of conduct, mutual respect, understanding, and dialogue can be ensured within the context of a society that prioritizes “education, service, and social, cultural and personal opportunities” (SSMU’s Mission as stated on its website). The second, which calls for a revision to security procedures and access to the James Administration Building, demonstrates McGill’s ability to identify a source of tension in our society, and as a result, facilitate letting people feel less isolated from the senior administration.

However, there is a need to look at the third recommendation more closely. It pertains to McGill Security and the need for “reviewing our current training program for both permanents and temporary personnel” on campus. In the report, Manfredi says that McGill Security is important because “they are usually at the forefront during protest and demonstration situations, charged with protecting individual members of the community (including protestors and demonstrators) and University assets.  They are often the first to witness behavior that potentially violates University regulations.”

On one hand, Manfredi wants to ensure uniformity in Security’s reactions, and to ensure that any action against disruption they take is legitimate and based on the Code of Conduct. On the other hand, however, this is clearly a point of contention; protestors on Nov. 10 were obviously upset with McGill’s concept of ‘protection.’

Can McGill students and the McGill administration agree on a concept of protection for our community as a whole? Manfredi seems to have left this out of his report’s recommendations. Sure, McGill Security’s reactions to the student occupation in February were much more passive, suggesting a step in the right direction, but perhaps, in the interest of student politics, there is another discussion that needs to take place.

In Nassim Taleb’s book, The Black Swan, the author confidently assures his readers that, to learn anything, one must “minimize time spent reading newspapers,” and “ignore the blogs.” He argues that these outlets always try to apply narratives to what simply may be disparate facts, usually report the same sets of facts, are prone to hyperbole, and seldom correct mistakes that they make with alarming regularity.

Similarly, Nate Silver’s new book, The Signal and the Noise, warns us against relying on experts, whose predictions come about with the same regularity as if foreseen by laypeople—and are often less accurate.

[pullquote]The media also fails spectacularly in its chief goal of … reporting news.[/pullquote]

It is not difficult to see that Taleb and Silver are correct. The news media pretends to know things that are essentially unknowable. We will never know Mitt Romney and Barack Obama on a personal level, no matter how many articles are written about them. Likewise, we cannot accurately predict how the polls will turn in the upcoming weeks. We do not know for sure if Justin Trudeau will eventually ascend to the head of the Liberal Party, and if he does so, how successful he will be. We must deal with the fact that our thoughts on these issues are hardly based in anything substantive, and are often nothing more than conjectures.

The media also fails spectacularly in its chief goal of actually reporting news: remember when Osama Bin Laden was reported killed in a firefight, or the Innocence of Muslims was reliably reported as the sole cause of the deaths in the American Embassy in Libya? When swine flu was posited as capable of decimating huge swaths of the population? When new sources reported that Candidate X committed (insert gaffe), only to state hours later that the gaffe was unreasonably exaggerated?

These news organizations can argue that they are doing the best with the information they have at the time. However, this limited defense is undercut by the fact that the media presupposes there is virtue in pretending to be authoritative with limited facts. In actuality, it is doing little service to the public with its presentation of wildly misleading views.

So how do we avoid falling into the trap of listening to news that is most likely wrong, and predictions that are apt to fail? Taleb suggests reading books and media that have stood the test of time, increasing the likelihood that the information we are consuming is largely accurate.

One should also be aware of the cognitive failings to which humans are prone, such as applying narratives to nearly every aspect of our lives. Silver suggests that we act on the basis of probabilistic hypotheses, and then revise them after the truth or falsity of our actions slowly become known.

We can also start to react to the news in a more measured manner, taking everything that commentators say with a grain of salt, knowing that what they say is probably not complete and may need to be amended later. None of these things in themselves are sufficient in providing us with clarity of knowledge. Ultimately though, these small steps—relying on established forms of media, expecting future revision of all facts, and seeking out bias in narrative—are the best tools we may ever have to separate hasty conclusions from prediction based in fact.

Over the past few years, there has been an intensifying debate over the role of university education—whether universities are institutions of pure learning, or simply a place to acquire a credential after completing a certain amount of coursework. Though the topic has generated a fair amount of discussion about what universities should do to motivate learning, most of the talk about it actually misses the point. Because higher education allows—and requires—more individual choice than primary or secondary education, what really matters to this debate over learning and motivation is the individual student.

In his 2002 piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation,” Alfie Kohn argues that the entire debate over the issue of grade inflation reveals an inherent problem with grading systems at universities.  These grading scales make students focus more on the number they receive at the end of the term than the material they were supposed to be absorbing in class. Kohn proposes completely eliminating grades, allowing students to focus on the actual course material.

This “no grades” philosophy prompts the inevitable question: how, then, can we determine whether students are learning? How much was understood at the end of class compared to the beginning? Even if we assume that these concerns are valid, there remains a major tension in the “do away with grades” argument in the realm of higher education.

This is an age of easily-accessible knowledge, with full and free courses offered online by institutions like MIT and Harvard. Now that world-class institutions are making their educational material freely available online, those who want to take time off and learn without the pressure to compete for a number can do so. The movement to bring this philosophy of grade-free education to large universities, then, reflects an implicit acceptance of the importance of the degree as a “credential” certifying learning.

Some economists suggest that university completion—with a satisfactory transcript—is actually a signaling mechanism. The actual gain in hard, quantifiable “skills” (e.g. critical and analytical thinking), among university graduates is generally small. Rather, students attend university to “signal” to an employer that they were already competent in these skills—the GPA signaling their degree of competence. As economist Bryan Caplan asks, “Which would do more for your career: A Princeton education, but no diploma, or a Princeton diploma, but no education?” Signaling theorists would say the latter.

Several prominent universities, such as Hampshire College, have switched to a “narrative” method of evaluation. Instead of a numerical GPA, instructors write an evaluation of what the course was supposed to accomplish, how well the individual accomplished those tasks, and perhaps whether the student improved over the semester.  Other universities supplement their GPAs with a similar evaluation. Upon considering both of these views, what becomes apparent is that the major factor in this equation is not the university, or employers, or even the post-secondary education system, but rather the individual.

Though a cliché, one gets out of anything what one puts into it, and this happens to be especially true in the case of higher education. Many university students choose to focus simply on their attractiveness to employers, while the choice to go to an institution focused on tests, or one with narrative evaluations, is a personal one. So is the choice of one’s classes. Debating what universities should do with grading systems misses the point, because education at university is driven by the choices of the individual. Therefore, to wring one’s hands about unmotivated students at major universities would point to a problem with their mindset, not with the grading system.