Daily Bulletin

Under the cool August sun

The main road entrance to campus should be open again by the end of today, as contractors finish putting a base coat of asphalt on the University Avenue "stub road" and the stretch of the ring road from South Campus Hall to the Psychology (PAS) building. Tomorrow, work moves further along the ring road, and the stretch from Environmental Studies II to the Student Life Centre will be closed, says Tom Galloway of the plant operations department. "While it is hoped that it will reopen prior to the first day of classes," Galloway said, "due to rain delays last week it is now more likely to go into the following week." He warns of "intermittent closures for a day or two" as sidewalks and the final layer of asphalt are added to various parts of the road. Landscaping around the University Avenue entrance will be done in September and October, he added.

Elsewhere on campus, there was scaffolding in the great hall of the Davis Centre for a while last week, and people wanted to know why. Bill Carroll of plant operations explains: preventive maintenance was being done on the fire alarms and smoke detectors, and that required removing the lobby benches and setting up the scaffolding. "It's a real chore to do that location," he said, "because they're on the ceiling, which is four storeys up!"

New on the web within the last few days are glitzy sites from the registrar's office and three of its high-profile units: the undergraduate admissions office, the student awards office and the visitors' centre. Many of the people who seek UW on the web are looking for admissions information, in particular, and admissions now has a more prominent spot on the UWinfo home page.

Note from the Germanic and Slavic department: "Are you originally from Holland or speak and know the Dutch language well? Would you be interested in conducting the lab session for Dutch 101 (and possibly for Dutch 102) this fall on Thursday nights from 8 until 10?" If yes, you can get in touch with Janet Vaughan, secretary in the G&S department, at ext. 2428.

Last-minute note: the parking services office will be closed over the noon hour today, from 12:00 to 1:30. "Anyone needing immediate assistance," says manager Elaine Koolstra, "will be looked after by the UW Police; persons wanting to buy their permits will be looked after when we reopen."

Textbook rush at lower prices

"Some big courses" will be using new texts this year, which means students won't have the option of buying used books, says May Yan, director of retail services. Another change is this summer's closing of the Mennonite-owned bookstore Readers Ink, in a plaza just east of campus. Books for a number of courses, especially in religious studies, which were traditionally sold at Readers Ink, will be in the UW store instead this year.

Longer hours for store The UW bookstore will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. starting September 7. May Yan, director of retail services, said the longer hours are a permanent change, "because of the coffee shop". Food services took over a corner of the store earlier this year, paid for renovations and opened its Double U's pastry outlet and Starbucks coffee.

"We worked two nights last week to set up the stockpiles," says Helen Hirsch, manager of the bookstore's textbook department. But sales had already started to boom: the store sold 1,772 identifiable textbooks on August 9 during Student Life 101, the annual event to introduce first-year students to campus.

There has also been an increase in orders through the store's Express Books service, which lets students order and pay for their books by e-mail. The books can then be picked up at the store or at the Village residences.

Despite the popularity of specially created "course notes" packages, on-line information and other resources, there's been no visible drop in the number of textbooks in use at UW, Yan says. For teaching, "It still is the medium that people use!"

Books will be cheaper at the UW store this fall than they were a year ago, as the 4 per cent discount, offered for a number of years, has been replaced by a 10 per cent discount on the list price of all books. Not many universities offer that kind of discount, says Yan: she said even some students from Wilfrid Laurier University buy their books at UW in order to cut 10 per cent from the bill.

The discount can make quite a difference when you're talking about the likes of Understanding Abnormal Behavior at $116.00, or Wastewater Engineering at $154.95. "It's a harsh reality for first-year students," says Yan, "that they have to pay for books! It's hard to swallow that a book is a hundred dollars." But textbooks have a limited market, they're expensive to produce, and if the publisher announces that kind of price, there's not much the bookstore can do about it.

The store is getting ready for the September rush by designating in-and-out doors, setting up extra cash registers, announcing evening hours (the store will be open until 7 p.m. September 13, 14 and 15), putting a "textbook information desk" in the South Campus Hall concourse, and moving first-year math and engineering texts across the concourse to the UW Shop area, to reduce congestion in the main store.

Last day for dean of grad studies

Rowe returns to the psychology department, where she has been a faculty member since arriving in 1963 along with her brand-new husband, Philip Bryden. They were colleagues as well as spouses for 33 years: Bryden died in August 1996. One of the achievements of Rowe's years as dean of grad studies was the approval, earlier this year, of a new interdepartmental PhD program in behavioural neuroscience, which had been Bryden's field of research.

Rowe works in industrial psychology, studying such things as job interviewing and the use of psychological testing by employers. She has worked particularly on studying co-op education -- for example, one of her articles, published in 1991, is titled "A comparison of cooperative education graduates with two cohorts of regular graduates: Fellow entrants and fellow graduates".

She was the first woman to hold a dean's job at UW, becoming acting dean of arts for a few months in 1973-74 after a year as associate dean (undergraduate affairs). She was appointed dean of graduate studies as of July 1, 1991.

"I have always found her to be an understanding and compassionate advocate for graduate students, an extremely knowledgeable leader for graduate education at Waterloo, and a fine colleague," says one faculty member who has known her well. "I found Pat to be very diplomatic, sage and effective at getting all sides to work together," another administrator told me last week. "She was always very sensitive to the effect that policies would have on students, always very aware of what it felt like to be a student dealing with a powerful administration."

And a third colleague listed some of her areas of special interest: "graduate student support and other advocacy issues, staff development and participation in graduate studies administration, faculty recognition for participation in graduate studies academic and administrative work". Rowe was particularly proud of the creation of an award for distinguished teaching by a student, presented for the first time this year.

Among other changes in graduate studies during her time as dean: a new intellectual property policy at UW, giving more recognition to graduate students' ownership of their work; creation of the position of associate dean, particularly responsible for financial assistance; reorganization of what had been the "university graduate office" under the new name of graduate studies office; presentation of detailed calendar information on-line rather than in print form; new graduate programs in management of technology and taxation.

. . . and for St. Paul's principal

Mills (she was Helga Kutz-Harder then) came in November 1994 to head UW's smallest church college. After a career as an English professor in Canada and Japan, she had been working as executive secretary of Toronto Conference of the United Church of Canada. She will be retiring to Nova Scotia this fall.

She is well known for her passion for social justice, an enthusiasm that came out in the organizing of "A Lenten Forum on the Social Safety Net" in March 1996, less than a year after the budget-cutting Progressive Conservatives came to power in Ontario. Some 150 participants from church, government, community and university heard talks on such topics as "The Social Impact of Welfare Cuts" and "The Phoenix of Compassionate Community".

And she brought Stephen Lewis, former leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party, to campus as the college's first Kerr-Saltsman Lecturer, in March 1998. Lewis drew a capacity crowd for his lecture on "The Rise and Fall of Social Justice", in which he told the audience that "something has poisoned Canadian politics . . . voters seem to have abandoned their earlier social concerns," but that there are signs of a change back again.

The Kerr-Saltsman program, in which novelist Mordecai Richler was this year's visitor, was part of the most prominent development at St. Paul's over the past few years, the creation of the Stanley Knowles visiting professorship in Canadian studies. The Knowles professorship seeks "to enrich the educational experience of graduate and undergraduate students by bringing to UW people who possess a diversity of views and backgrounds, and who may hold differing and controversial commitments to Canada. . . . The professorship program will include many voices that have already been heard in Canada, and will provide an opportunity for new voices that need to be heard."

Among other innovations, Mills organized a non-credit lecture and discussion series, "Journey Beyond Credit", in its third series this fall with the theme "The future isn't what it used to be!" She will be speaking on "Spinning the Crystal Ball" as the six-evening series begins on Wednesday evening, October 13.

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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