Daily Bulletin

Talking about the president

But here and there I heard comments to the effect that maybe it's not so surprising. "He's been a university president for sixteen years," I was reminded, including a year at Carleton, a decade at New Brunswick, and now five years at Waterloo. "Would you want to keep on doing that job until you retire?" The past five years at UW have been particularly draining and stressful, what with the Social Contract, government pressures on the education system, unease over rising tuition fees, an attempt at faculty unionization on this campus, friction and growing competition among Ontario universities, some ugly personnel controversies within UW, and so on and on.

So it's easy to take Downey's letter at face value:

You may remember that I hesitated in the fall before allowing the review process to proceed. Refreshed by a Christmas break I decided that I could accept a shortened term if that were the university's wish. The more I have reflected on that decision, however, the more I have come to feel that both for the university and myself it would be better to effect a change of presidential leadership next year. For the university it would mean new leadership at the beginning of what I believe will be a period of rebuilding, especially of our research enterprise. For myself, now 58, it will, God willing, provide time enough to make a meaningful return to teaching and scholarly writing or, perchance, to find another career engagement.

The best comment of the day ran like this: "Do know the real reason Downey is leaving? They threatened to take his Mac away." Yes, Downey is a user of that endangered species, the Macintosh computer.

There's also speculation that he must have been discouraged by the results of the campus-wide poll conducted during January by the nominating committee. But we can't know that he had even seen those results before writing his letter to the committee, dated Monday -- or that they would have been discouraging. Some staff and faculty admired Downey, some probably didn't. Still, again, people will think what they want to think. "It's just too bad that he let the survey go ahead," I was told; if only he'd signalled his decision sooner. . . .

There was a bit of a tendency , I noticed, for people to speak of Downey in the past tense -- to say that he "was" a president with a different style from that of his predecessor, Doug Wright. It's important to note that he's not resigning; his term has sixteen months still to run.

During that time, the presidential nominating committee will start a Canada-wide search for UW's next president. "I feel sorry for the nominating committee members, who signed on to what they thought was a straightforward task," a faculty member told me. They may have thought they were going to reappoint Downey, with whatever advice or directions seemed wise for the next six years, and now they have to do a much bigger job. Discussion turns to the issue of what sort of president is wanted for the first decade of the 2000's.

And what of Downey's own future? I note that he's a tenured professor in UW's English department, where he could, indeed, turn to teaching and writing for a few years if he chose. I also wouldn't be surprised to hear that, after a sabbatical, he emerged into public life of one kind or another. He'll be 60 when he leaves office.

Downey himself wasn't available yesterday to comment on any of these matters; he was in Atlanta for a meeting of the directors of Hewlett-Packard, one of several boards on which he sits.

Heading off for reading week

Let no one think that only students spend this break in reading. (And no remarks, please, about how much reading gets done on the beach and the ski slope.) "I have a lot of reading to do very soon," a faculty member told me yesterday, itemizing "student work reports, scholarship applications, project proposals, computer assignments, midterm exams".

Note for those who aren't too far from campus over the next few days: this Daily Bulletin will appear as usual every day next week, and yes, there will be a Gazette on Wednesday.

The end of the Red servery

He notes that in the 31 years of the Village's life, the Red servery has been the primary food outlet for residents there, and an estimated 26.5 million meals have been passed across the counters. So last night was "a night of both joy and sorrow" -- sorrow in nostalgia, joy in looking forward to the new food outlets that will open in the Village by next fall. For the rest of this term and the spring, makeshift arrangements will be in place.

Other news and events

An open house on "directions and support" for Macintosh computers will begin at 11:30 this morning in Needles Hall room 3001.

Geography professor Bruce Mitchell has been named as the first winner of the Environmental Studies Research Lecture Award, created this year to honour interesting and significant research in ES. "The award recipient will give a public lecture which will be published," says a memo from ES dean Geoff McBoyle, "and the recipient will receive $5,000 for a research assistant." Mitchell -- who coincidentally was the subject of an article in this week's Gazette -- works chiefly in water management, and has written or edited some 22 books, McBoyle notes.

"For those who just can't wait to experience Trellis," the planned new library system, a test version of the Trellis web page is now available, a bulletin from the library notes this week. Don't get your hopes up too high, though: there's no database behind the page yet.

Valentine's Day tomorrow brings a number of events, including a "wine, writers and song" party for The New Quarterly at the Button Factory arts centre (information ext. 2837), and an art evening at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, with much UW involvement (information 746-1882). Earlier in the day, "a group of concerned citizens", some of them from UW's WPIRG, "will be participating in the 9th annual National Anti-Fur Day, held on St. Valentine's Day", with the theme "Have a heart, don't buy fur." Distribution of leaflets in downtown Kitchener starts at 1:30 p.m.

A few words about colours

The responses I received were by no means a scientific sample of anything, but I found the results interesting. They could be divided into two groups. One group was more or less computer-oriented people, who called ff00ff "magenta". I learned that "magenta" is in fact a well-established technical term for a computer-generated colour, and that color=magenta would have produced the same result in my HTML code.

The non-geek group, though, were (mostly) divided just as I had predicted, and as previous colour-naming experiments have typically found. Most of the men said "pink"; most of the women said "fuchsia", a word that's not in the typical male vocabulary. It is, however, in the computer's vocabulary, as fuchsia is interpreted as a synonym for magenta. (And color=pink produces type of this hue, almost invisible on many backgrounds.)

My interest in sex differences in colour names goes back to the days when I was teaching English 150 and used to do that experiment as an ice-breaker, pointing to somebody's sweater and asking everyone to write down its colour name. There was always a neat male-female, pink-fuchsia division. A number of other colour differences have been reported in psychological literature, by the way; a report in Anthropological Linguistics some years ago concluded, for example, that women use far more food names for colours than men do (coffee brown, lemon yellow).

CAR

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@uwaterloo.ca | (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
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