Daily Bulletin

Ready for Monday's visitors

Waterloo will roll out the welcome mat, open the parking lots, stoke the barbecue fires and put its best foot forward to give incoming students and their families an opportunity to get acquainted with the campus and with key people in their academic departments and in student services before September.

For many new students, Student Life 101 is their first encounter with UW, and a chance for the university to make a good first impression, says Catharine Scott, associate provost (human resources and student services).

Seminar today John Halley of St. Andrew's University, Scotland, will speak at 10:30 a.m. (Math and Computer room 5136) on "Fractal Approaches for Stochastic Ecological Models", in the statistics and actuarial science seminar series.

"It's a big transition from high school to university," says Scott. "Parents are very anxious about their children leaving home; students are worried about fitting in, wondering if they can handle the workload.

"Every staff member and every faculty member can make a difference on this day," she added. Although a team of staff, faculty and student volunteers sporting yellow T-shirts will act as the official representatives, "you don't have to have a yellow shirt to make an impact. Even if you're not directly involved, you may still be in a position to offer a helping hand or a friendly face."

Feedback from previous years has shown that "one lone staff member who offers directions" to a disoriented visitor can mean "this place really cares about me."

Visitors are expected to start arriving by 7:30 a.m., says parking manager Elaine Koolstra, who expects the most congestion around the Ring Road to occur between 8:30 and 9. Vehicles are being directed to the university's Columbia Street entrance, although UW police will be posted "on point duty" at the University Avenue entrance as well.

With exams underway and many faculty and staff on holidays, Koolstra doesn't expect any problems with parking, despite the huge influx of cars on campus. Lots M, R, some of N, as well as lots in the Villages, will be used for parking, with Lots W and X north of Columbia Street available for overflow. Parking staff will be stationed at each lot to direct traffic.

Refugee crisis after war

"I have spent some time studying the German occupation, particularly in northern France," she says, "looking into how the local populations dealt with their difficulties and how their experiences during the period impacted on them. I found that even today strong emotional reactions continue to resonate among the French, reactions that still impact on French politics -- indeed, on political events throughout Europe. Collaboration with the Nazis during World War II is still political dynamite all over the continent."

Taylor's research into resistance-versus-collaboration during World War II has resulted in a book which will be published later this year, Between Resistance and Collaboration, with Macmillan Press.

Upon completing the book she became caught up in further research, this time into the refugee crisis in Europe in the late '40s and early '50s.

"Many of the questions that had to be dealt with in the late '40s are currently being raised all over again," she notes. At the close of World War II, millions of refugees flooded across Europe -- estimated at between six and eight million. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) was established in 1943 to try to deal with the displaced persons until they could go home again, but this did not happen as quickly as anticipated; in fact, some of the refugee camps that UNRRA had set up were still in existence 10 years later!

"One of the problems of the '40s was: How do you determine a refugee's national identity at a time when national identities are being redefined?" she says. "During the post World War II era, Eastern European governments used the refugee crisis to sort out some of their own population problems. Thus even though someone may have come from a family that had lived in Poland for hundreds of years, if he or she happened to have a 'German' name, they might not be allowed to go back. Or, the refugee might not want to go back because he or she knew they would be put on trial if they did get there."

While these things were going on, borders were being shifted -- for example, the Polish border was moved west into what had been Germany prior to the start of the war. In other cases, a refugee who wanted to return to his or her ancestral home would have great difficulty establishing a claim to the property. Some of these people simply ended up in another country.

She says she was in New York City researching in the UNRRA records when NATO began its bombing campaign to try to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Kosovar Albanians. She soon observed, in news media reports of the situation, the same kinds of quick, off-the-cuff policy making being carried out that had to be done 50 years earlier by UNRRA. "It was as though I'd gone suddenly gone back in time all those years," she says. "I could almost predict what the next issue to arise would be, and that's when I began to realize that a great deal can be learned by looking at what was done about refugees back in the '40s."

Spotted in print recently

The University of Alberta, seeking to increase its enrolment of foreign students, is making plans to raise their tuition fees sharply. Yes, raise them. According to the U of A newspaper Folio, president Rod Fraser said recently that many international students equate higher tuition with greater quality, which may be one reason "we've been losing the market share even though we have one of the lowest prices in the world." Raising fees is an attempt to raise the university's profile on the international market. The University of British Columbia, for example, charges $13,000 in fees to undergraduate foreign students. Alberta's figure this year: $6,656.

"Credit card solicitations are common on college campuses," reports The Student Printz at the University of Southern Mississippi. "And recent [American] studies show that students are usually anxious to sign and start ringing up purchases. A recent study by the Center for Financial Responsibility showed that 71.5 percent of students in college today own at least one credit card. The study showed the average balance on those credit cards is $1,700. . . . The survey also showed that less than 50 percent of student credit users pay credit card bills in full. That can mean a large portion of a minimum payment to keep the bill current goes for finance charges and does not really reduce the debt."

McMaster University has proudly announced that it's "the first university in English Canada to have an active, real-time stock exchange trading room". Says the McMaster Courier: "The facility will provide students seeking careers as stock traders, investor advisers or risk managers with hands-on experience. Located on the first floor of the Michael G. DeGroote School of Business, the Educational Trading Centre even includes a flickering stock ticker board. . . . The Université de Montréal launched a similar facility about eight months ago."

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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