Daily Bulletin

University of Waterloo -- Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Yesterday's Bulletin | Previous days | UWevents | UWinfo home page

Friday, July 4, 1997

Faculty pay increase is settled

Professors at UW are getting a scale salary increase for the first time since 1992, under an agreement that was announced yesterday. Representatives of the administration and the faculty association signed the agreement on Friday afternoon, "which guaranteed a happy long weekend", said provost Jim Kalbfleisch.

It's a two-year agreement, providing a 1 per cent scale increase as of May 1, 1997 and another 1 per cent on May 1, 1998. Faculty members will also get the usual "progress through the ranks" (merit) increases on both dates. The official estimate is that PTR increases for individuals average about 2.2 per cent.

Kalbfleisch said he's hoping that the paperwork will be done in time for individuals to see their money in the paycheques that arrive at the end of August. (The payroll department has other things to think about today, though: supervisor Carol Wooten is celebrating her 25th anniversary at UW.)

Other details of the faculty salary agreement:

The faculty "professional allowance" is increased to $1,200 per year, and eligible expenses can be carried forward for up to three years (making it possible to claim larger purchases, such as computers, against several years' allowance).
The special arrangement by which faculty members within three years of retirement can trade in one week of vacation time for an extra 2 per cent salary increase is extended through the year 2004.
An "anomalies/merit fund" of $550,000 will be distributed in May 1998 -- up to $100,000 of it to correct individual salary anomalies, "particularly those related to position in the salary structure relative to recent hires", and the rest according to the usual merit procedure.
If UW's government grant increases or decreases by more than 2 per cent in 1998-99, "negotiations will be reopened with respect to the 1998-99 scale increase."

A 1 per cent scale increase in pay is the same figure approved for UW's non-union staff as of May 1, 1997. Individual staff increases depend on merit, with the official estimate being that they'll average about 2.5 per cent. "These are different salary systems and it doesn't make any sense to compare," Kalbfleisch commented. For example, staff members can aspire to be promoted into higher-paying jobs; faculty members stay in the same job all their working lives.

"We'll have to do a new draft budget," said the provost, noting that the increase will cost UW about $1.8 million this year, more than is left in unallocated funds. That will happen in the fall, when more information is available about enrolment and tuition fee revenue. "There's still the possibility of a small budget cut."

O beautiful for spacious skies

The United States celebrates Independence Day today -- and increases the spaciousness of the skies, you might say, by landing Pathfinder on the planet Mars, at the end of a seven-month trip. It's the first spacecraft to arrive there in more than twenty years. The first images sent back by radio from the red planet are expected this evening.

Other notes on a damp day

A memorial service will be held Sunday at 1 p.m. at the Notre Dame chapel, St. Jerome's College, for Helen Silveston, wife of Peter Silveston of UW's chemical engineering department. She died Tuesday. There will be visitation tonight from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Good funeral home in Waterloo.

Electrical power will be turned off this evening, from 4 to 8 p.m., at the central area of Village I, so a new electrical panel can be installed as part of the renovation project. The shutdown affects offices, kitchens, the great hall, and even the lights on the outside footpath.

The local Volunteer Action Centre is looking for people to sell burgers and beer tickets at a slow-pitch tournament in Waterloo Park July 26 and 27; individuals and families to be matched as friends for new immigrants; and volunteers who can work with "adolescent parents" and their children. More information: 742-8610.

Waterloo Web site of the day

THE BEEHIVE
http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~bee

Bill E. Eickmeier, or BEE, takes pride in how long his Web site has been around:

The beeHive started early in the graphical browser generation. I noticed a message in a newsgroup about a newfangled graphical gopher interface (or something like that) and thought "Hey, we could use this". Apparently, the NCSA httpd server I set up on a Linux box in my office was one of the first 500 in the world. I realized that estimates were tough to do at that time, but this was a best guess by the NCSA folks. I took this number with a grain of salt, but nevertheless it was neat to consider the site as one of the earliest around.

Eickmeier, whose job description says he's a "research programmer/ consultant" in the UW psychology department, made his page available "to give people a convenient means to find what they need":

The beeHive was a single page with the most requested items only one click away. Although there are a number of very computer-literate people in the department, a large number of people in the department are fairly, umm, computer-naive (for lack of a better word), so things had to be easy (don't tell them I said that). It let people easily find things for themselves and allowed them to be a little more independent which I think they appreciated (plus they don't need to line up at my door or wait for me to reply to voicemail or email). It also produced the added benefit of freeing more of my time for various programming projects I was backlogged with at the time. For some reason, though, around 4 years later, I'm backlogged more than ever with new projects.
Most people here (almost 200 faculty/staff/grad students) probably use it as a starting page for their web browser. Although it's oriented to people here in psychology, I've also had comments from people in other departments that they also use it as a starting page or visit it regularly.

Unlike most departmental or specialized pages, in fact, the beeHive can usefully be used as somebody's home page. Eickmeier adds: "As well, the last line of links in the top clump are the WWWoWWWWs (Weird, Wild, Wonderful or Worthwhile World Wide Web sites) which I make a point of changing daily -- a lot of people in the department regularly forward links for me to wwwowwwwify so it's always easy to come up with a new one each day."

He adds that there's a "stripped-down" version of the page, the MFMbeeHive (Made-for-Modems beeHive), which loads more quickly for people working at home.

CAR

TODAY IN UW HISTORY July 4, 1996: Just days after leaving through the Special Early Retirement Program, psychology professor Ken Bowers dies.

July 5, 1977: Mathematicians from around the world, including the legendary Paul Erdos, meet at Waterloo for a five-day conference on graph theory honouring UW's Bill Tutte. July 5, 1984: The first computers donated to UW under a "partnership" with Digital Equipment Corporation arrive on campus.

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca -- (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
Comments to the editor | About the Bulletin | Yesterday's Bulletin
Copyright © 1997 University of Waterloo