Daily Bulletin

Student drowns on north campus

UW police sergeant Wayne Shortt said Proudfoot was one of a group of about nine students who were walking home to Village I along the Bauer Road behind the Optometry building on the largely undeveloped north campus. The ditch, running along the west side of the road, "was filled with fast-moving water".

At a spot near where the road intersects the Laurel Trail, some of the group -- soaked anyway as the rain kept falling -- decided to go into the water. A male student, and then Proudfoot, were swept into a culvert that runs diagonally under the road. The man made it through the culvert without serious injury, but Proudfoot was swept further downstream. Shortt said she was found about 300 feet (100 metres) south of where she entered the ditch, close to Columbia Street.

Someone from CKMS radio, which has its studios further north on the Bauer Road, came driving by as members of the group were trying to rescue Proudfoot, and he called UW police from the nearby Helpline phone. UW officers came to help and then called fire/ambulance rescue and the Waterloo Regional Police, Shortt said.

Enough professors? Enough quality?

Both reports were issued May 1. The first one examines the prospective demand and supply for university faculty in Ontario, and the second one reviews quality indicators and quality enhancement programs for Ontario universities and elsewhere.

COU president Paul Davenport said the two reports are important: "In his reports, Dr. Smith notes that Ontario universities are at a critical juncture in their history as they face the challenges of accommodating a large surge in enrolment, finding and funding first-rate faculty who will be needed to teach the increased number of students and replace an unusually large wave of anticipated retirements, while fulfilling their basic responsibilities to students and society at large."

COU said they are intended to complement "Will there be room for me?" a 1999 report, by PricewaterhouseCoopers, that was also commissioned by COU. That report projected that demand for university opportunity could expand by up to 90,000 places by the end of this decade.

In a report to UW's senate meeting tonight, Peter Woolstencroft, Waterloo's "academic colleague" to COU, lists these main points from Will There Be Enough Excellent Profs?

• Faculty are the crucial factor in determining the quality of institutions.
• There will be a particularly strong rise in demand for new faculty in the first decade of this century.
• Ontario's universities have a very limited capacity to meet enrolment pressures through more intensive use of the present faculty complement, if the quality of higher in education in Ontario is to be sustained.
• Improved support for graduate study is urgently needed.
• Demand for new faculty in Ontario occurs at a time of greater domestic and international competition for highly-qualified faculty. Regulatory barriers to seeking the best teachers and researchers should be reduced.
• In order to recruit and retain highly-qualified faculty, universities must create a supportive environment for high-quality education and research; to develop flexible and competitive compensation policies; and to apply the utmost diligence in search procedures.

• Ontario's universities are at a critical juncture in the quality of their work and face major challenges.
• Quality refers to the level of the academic program/department; the university; and the university sector.
• Quality indicators are related to, and often overlap with, performance indicators; but the latter are usually directed more to management objectives and results than to portraying the meaning of quality.
• Ontario's three mandatory indicators are a limited, incomplete approach to recording institutional quality; Maclean's ratings have serious weaknesses; institutions are developing quality indicators but have a long way to go.
• Graduate program appraisals are highly respected domestically and internationally.
• Undergraduate program appraisals are in their infancy but are a promising approach.
• With the demise of the Ontario Council on University Affairs in 1996, there is no organization devoted to work on the functioning of the university sector.
• American approaches reflect a highly competitive environment that provides a stimulus to quality and that draws substantial private and public resources to the support of high-quality institutions.
• The British approach appears to have some beneficial effects on quality but at substantial costs in terms of administrative burden and adverse effects on incentives.
• Key conclusion: "quality indicators should be considered as only a component of a broader, more powerful approach to quality enhancement. They reveal some symptoms of quality but they do not show the causes of quality nor the conjunction of resources and incentives that produce quality."

Ottawa-Carleton gets to be smart

Ottawa becomes one of twelve communities across the country that "will become world leaders in the integration of information and communication technologies into community life", said industry minister John Manley. CTT and Ottawa (represented by the SmartCapital project of the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation) were among Ontario finalists for the dozen $5 million grants.

CTT leaders said they were "disappointed" that the "mPowered" project here, which would have involved Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph and the surrounding area, didn't get the federal funding. But they'll move ahead anyway with whatever other support they can find, possibly including Ontario government funding under a program called Connect Ontario.

UW was expecting to play a big role in the mPowered project, which could be seen as an expansion of the existing Waterloo Information Network. WIN was developed on a shoestring by a team headed by Don Cowan of UW's department of computer science.

The federal "smart communities" program was originally recommended by a task force two years ago headed by David Johnston, who is now president of UW.

Just a few other notes

A seminar on the soon-to-be-hot field of health informatics is scheduled for lunchtime today. The speaker is Janice MacNeill of Angus Systems Group Ltd., speaking on "Information Technology in Real-World Health Care Systems" (11:30, Engineering II room 1307G). An "informal gathering to discuss research topics in health information management" will follow.

The Embassy, describing itself as "church, campus style", has a new location this term. "Join us every Monday at 7:30 p.m., Optometry building," an organizer says.

A workshop for teaching assistants, on "Assessing Group Work", will be held Wednesday at noontime, sponsored by the teaching resource office. "In this workshop," an announcement says, "we will present various techniques for assigning individual marks for both the product and process of group work. As a large group, we will also generate advantages and disadvantages for each technique. Be prepared for a highly interactive workshop and consider examples of assessment strategies for group work that you have used as instructors or experienced as students." Participants are asked to register by today (phone ext. 3132 for information); the event runs from 12 to 1:30 on Wednesday in Math and Computer room 5158.

Here's a reminder that registrations are due by the end of May for this year's Matthews Golf Classic, to be held Monday, June 19, at the Grand Valley Golf Course. Says Hazel Austin of engineering computing: "The event, as usual, is for staff, faculty and retirees. The event starts at 12:00 noon for the team photographs and winds 12:00 noon for the up at 6:00 for dinner. The event is a scramble, which means that all four members tee off at each hole and the team decides which of the four balls will be played for the second shot. Cost is $46 for golf and dinner, $26 for golf only and $20 for dinner only." More information is available from Jan Willwerth, phone ext. 2376.

Finally, I'm told that there was a kitchen fire in South Campus Hall during the weekend, but early this morning details aren't available.

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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