Santa soliciting Shell divestment petition signatures

Today, we collected more than 200 petition signatures calling on the University of Toronto to sell their stock in Shell:

I am thoroughly appreciative to the Toronto 350.org volunteers who organized the whole event and then pulled it off today.

We will be building up our divestment campaign by seeking more signatures, including from campus groups and prominent alumni.

Both those associated with the University of Toronto and outside sympathizers are asked and encouraged to sign our petition. We are hoping to get thousands of names on it before we present it to the president of the university.

PhD status – November 2012

For tomorrow, I have hundreds of pages to read on regionalism and provinces in Canada. I also have a paper to finish and a slideshow to complete for the Massey coffeehouse. Upcoming, I have two presentations: one on climate change for my environmental politics course, and another on citizen engagement and civil society for my Canadian politics seminar. I have reading to do to prepare for tutoring on Sunday, sixty undergraduate international relations papers to grade, a divestment campaign to plan for Toronto 350.org, books to finish and review, piles of unanswered electronic and physical correspondence, and (at least theoretically) doctoral research to work on, along with two term papers.

I left the civil service largely because my time was used so badly there, with government attention rarely being devoted to matters of importance. School does still involve some trivial busy work – along with tasks that are necessary only for financial sustenance rather than intellectual advancement. Still, the ratio between time spent working on matters of importance and time spent on meaningless nonsense is a lot better as a PhD student than as a civil servant.

That said, I can’t say I am totally sure that a PhD program is an intelligent way to use five years of one’s life. The social interaction at Massey College has definitely been the best part of the doctorate so far. The continued opportunity to get to know Massey people is probably the strongest factor motivating me to continue with the degree at this point.