This is normally the time of year when I award the “worst-back-to-school story” award.  But I’m not going to this year.  As a result either of this blog’s massive influence, or sheer bad luck, no pundit or op-ed writer wrote anything really stupid this year.  Really, the worst was this CBC credulous news story covering the CCPA’s latest nose-stretcher on tuition fees.  And while it’s needlessly sloppy on the part of the CBC journalist (Dude!  You couldn’t think of one single person outside than CCPA to go to for a reaction quote? Seriously?), it doesn’t really contain the sort of sustained inanity that this award demands.  So I’m leaving it unawarded this year.  Sorry.

But that leaves me with a dilemma – how to entertain the mass readership of this blog without having some op-ed writer on whom to tee off?  So I decide to go with a quiz.  Folks, time to test your knowledge of Canadian universities.  Let’s begin:

1)      Which Canadian University lost ten percent of its inaugural class to Typhoid?

2)      David Dodge recently stepped down as Chancellor of Queen’s University; who was the only other Governor of the Bank of Canada to serve as a university chancellor (and which university was it)?

3)      The YMCA was deeply involved with the creation of two universities in Ontario (York and Carleton), but only one Canadian University actually began its life as the adult learning branch of the local YMCA.  Which one was it?

4)      Only two Canadian universities can boast three or more Prime Ministers among their alumni.  Which ones?

5)      Only one Canadian university has the distinction of having had two Prime Ministers drop out.  Which is it?

6)      Which western Canadian university began its life as an affiliate of McMaster University?

7)      What is a “martlet” and what two Canadian universities have it as their mascot?

8)      The University of Waterloo started life as a satellite college of another institution, and only became independent because of a fight with the parent institution over the issue of co-op education (the Waterloo folks loved it – the parent campus thought it was a supremely dumb idea).  Name the parent institution.

9)      Two Canadian universities are the result of mergers between one Catholic and one Protestant College.  Name them.

10)   Canada is the world’s largest exporter of lentils, and one-third of all world lentils come from strains originally bred at one Canadian university.  Name it.

11)   Which Canadian university has the highest proportion of international students?

12)   Which Australian university has a campus in Canada?

The person with the best set of answers sent to: info@higheredstrategy.com  gets to choose a future OTTSYD topic; plus they get huge – HUGE – bragging tights.  Find the answers tomorrow in the grey box.