Yesterday, Premier Kenney released the UCP’s first Alberta budget, and while I haven’t had the time yet to do a deep dive into it, I can tell you from first impressions that this is going to hurt. For those wondering, AU has announced that they’re looking at their base operating funding to be cut by 3.6% and their infrastructure maintenance will be cut by 100%. This is extremely worrisome when you think about how AU has been classifying their communications technologies as “infrastructure”. As the various technologies for mobile learning are advancing and changing by the day, the UCP government seems to have decided that AU, an institution based on that technology, really doesn’t have any need to maintain it. Let’s hope all the virus makers and hackers decide to take the next year off.
AU has noted that they’re running a 14 million surplus, so it should be possible to manage the cut, but no word on how tuition will be affected. Given previous conservative governments, I just have to say that if you’re an out of province student, you may want to start seeing if you can get additional financial aid sooner rather than later.
It’s also been noted already that while almost all the secular schools are seeing cuts to their budgets, many Christian schools are not. I haven’t checked this out personally, so take it with a grain of salt, but you can bet that part of my time away next week will be used investigating it.
Which brings me to my next topic, there will be no new issue of The Voice Magazine next week, as I’m taking another short holiday to prepare for Halloween (the best holiday, if you ask me) do some winterizing around the house, and in short catch up on all the stuff I should have been doing since the summer.
Fortunately, this week’s issue is slightly larger than usual, and filled with good stuff, including a straight up article from me on attending the AU Alumni awards. But better than that, we’ve got our feature interview with a student who wants to bring music into healing, and is seeking her Bachelor’s of Psychology to help her with that task.
Also this week, we have a look at the nature of fear, as we explore whether it’s even a useful emotion any more and why people still have it. Two writers this week take differing sides on the topic, with Darjeeling Jones finding the communal side of it and how fear can serve to bring relief from reality, while Wanda Waterman explores how fear is constricting and damaging to our becoming fuller human beings. And I can’t forget to mention Barb Godin with an article about a loved one being lost. Barb has unfortunately had to deal with more than her share of tragedy, but I find that her writings about it tend to uplift and connect with a lot of readers.
We also have a review that looks at a book which explores the origins of one of the great Halloween monsters tales, Frankestein. While it may be a tale that resonates with us even now, John Buhler takes a look at a book showing us how it connected even more strongly with the people at the time it was written.
Plus, we of course have course reviews, events, scholarships, advice, and more. Enjoy the read!