February 6, 2002

Wednesday, February 6, 2002

Faculty salary increase settled
New housing considered for extra students
Comments wanted on staff leave policy
Christian lectures on genes, ethics
Sufficient unto the day

Editor:
Chris Redmond
credmond@uwaterloo.ca

Happy and glorious, for 50 years today

[Peering over the fence]
Absurd! Erika Sedge and Brad Goddard are She and He, respectively, in "Loveliest Afternoon of the Year" by John Guare -- one of three absurdist plays being staged by UW's drama department this week and next. The other two one-act plays are "Play" by Samuel Beckett and "The Dumb Waiter" by Harold Pinter, and the trio will be staged tonight through Saturday and February 13-16 in Studio 180 in the Humanities building. All performances are at 8 p.m. The drama department (phone ext. 5808) has tickets, at $12 general admission, $10 students and seniors.

Faculty salary increase settled

UW and its faculty members have reached a two-year agreement on salary increases, provost Amit Chakma told the board of governors last night.

He said the agreement provides a scale increase in 2002 and 2003 equal to the rise in the cost of living. This year, he added, that means 2.6 per cent, effective on May 1.

Besides an adjustment to salary scales each year, faculty members receive an individual "progress through the ranks" merit increase calculated by formula. Average cost of those PTR increases is usually estimated at about 2.2 per cent.

In addition, this year and next there will be a special "excellence award" -- an extra sum, equal to about $500 per faculty member, distributed as part of the PTR increase. That should be worth about 0.4 per cent each year. Chakma said the "excellence award" is "trying to recognize our colleagues for doing more than we expect them to do . . . in a symbolic way it deals with the retention issue."

The "floors and thresholds" in the salary structure, the minimum salaries for various categories of faculty, will go up by 3 per cent this year and by the scale increase plus 0.4 per cent in 2003.

The salary increases were negotiated under the usual procedure, by three negotiators from the faculty association and three representing UW management. They were headed by Metin Renksizbulut of mechanical engineering, for the association, and Harry Panjer of statistics and actuarial science, for the administration.

The average salary of a full-time faculty member was reported as $85,200 last year.

New housing considered for extra students

UW officials are looking at the possibility of putting up one or even two new 500-bed residences, president David Johnston told the board of governors last night.

He said new residence space would help UW cope with the extra first-year students it's hoping to admit, starting in the fall of next year, and still allow the present number of upper-year students to live in on-campus residence buildings.

The problem is funding, Johnston said. Each new 500-bed residence would cost about $30 million, and although residence rentals would eventually pay off the cost, that's a lot for the university to borrow in the meantime.

UW (including the church colleges) currently has about 5,100 beds in residence. The newest residence, Mackenzie King Village, opened just last September, at a cost of $15.6 million.

Johnston said a decision needs to be made quickly, and if officials decide it's practical to go ahead, they will bring a proposal to a special meeting of the governors within a month to six weeks.

Extra housing, especially for first-year students, is a looming issue with the expected arrival of the "double cohort" in the fall of 2003. At yesterday's board meeting, provost Amit Chakma reviewed the tentative plans for enrolment expansion that he's been talking up over the past few weeks. They involve hiking annual admissions from 4,500 new students this year to about 5,100 in September 2003 and each fall after that -- boosting the number of undergraduates, within four years, by 12 per cent to 17 per cent in each of the six faculties.

The provost said there will be "additional faculty and staff recruitment" so UW can handle more students. "We are still sorting out specific numbers." But he cautioned that "it depends on full-cost funding" from the Ontario government. "If we do not have that, we will review our plans. . . . Incremental cost must be covered by incremental revenue. We don't have the resources to take students at the expense of our existing programs." Already, he reminded the board, UW enrolment is 2,300 students ahead of what the government is paying for -- the equivalent of $8.5 million a year in lost revenue.

Gary Waller, associate provost (academic and student affairs), told the board that he thinks UW can avoid having Saturday classes after the enrolment goes up. "I don't have any doubt," he said, "that there will be more late afternoon and evening classes."

Also at yesterday's board meeting . . .

Residence fees for 2002-03 were approved.
A decision on a "statement of purpose" about financial aid was postponed to the next meeting, after several members said they were uncomfortable with it and wanted figures about how much it would cost to keep the statement's promises.
Approval was given for the school of architecture to move to a restored building on Melville Street in the historic core of Cambridge.
The board approved the name change of the computer science department to "school of computer science", effective May 1.

Comments wanted on staff leave policy -- a memo from the university secretariat

The Staff Relations Committee is soliciting feedback from all staff on proposed changes to Policy 39 (Leaves of Absence for Staff Members).

Highlights of the proposed changes:

inclusion of a pointer to Policy 3 for guidelines re: "Political Leaves"
relocation of several sentences/paragraphs (to improve readability)
removal of the reference to partial unpaid leaves of absence (they are to be referred to as reduced workloads and will be addressed in Policy 59)
expansion of the paragraph which deals with approvals (to make it clear that, while granting an unpaid leave of absence is at the discretion of the Department Head, he/she will take into account "various factors, including the merits of the case, whether the position can be adequately filled in the staff member's absence, and the effect on the organization.")

Copies of the current and draft policy may be found on the Secretariat website. Comments for the Committee's consideration should be in writing and directed to Trenny Canning, Associate University Secretary, Secretariat, Needles Hall (tcanning@secretariat), by Monday, February 18, 2002.

Christian lectures on genes, ethics

"Designer Genes" is the theme of this year's Pascal Lectures on Christianity and the University, to be given starting tonight. The speaker -- named Scientist of the Year in 1996 by Radio-Canada -- is Bartha Knoppers (left) a law professor and bioethicist at the Université de Montréal.

Once described as "a lawyer for mankind", she is chair of the International Ethics Committee of the Human Genome Organization. Knoppers is also a member of the Interim Governing Council of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and of Genome Canada and Genome Québec. She has published treatises on a variety of areas such as abortion law, infant rights, newborn screening, childbirth injury, artificial insemination, matrimonial property, marital violence, DNA sampling, xenotransplantation (transfer of living cells, tissues and organs from non-human animals into humans for medical purposes), gene therapy, and Alzheimer's Disease. She is past commissioner of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, past president of the Canadian Bioethics Society and past vice-president of the National Council on Bioethics in Human Research.

Her first lecture at UW, "The Perils of Genetic Predestination", will be given at 8:00 tonight in the Theatre of the Arts, Modern Languages building. The second lecture, "Biotechnology and Policy Making", will be given tomorrow at the same time and place.

Earlier tomorrow, she will lead a seminar, "The Human Genome, Human Dignity and Benefit Sharing", at 12:30 p.m. in Biology I room 370.

The Pascal Lecture series at UW was established to create a forum for Christian issues in an academic environment by inviting outstanding individuals who have distinguished themselves in both an area of scholarly endeavour and of Christian thought or life. It is financed by donations and royalties from published lectures. The series is named after Blaise Pascal (1632-1662), a French academic and Christian, best remembered as a forerunner of Newton in the establishment of calculus. Pascal was also the author of a book of Christian meditation, Les Pensées.

Sufficient unto the day

Today brings the winter job fair, sponsored by UW and other post-secondary institutions in the area. "Learn more about job opportunities," says a flyer. "Network with over 100 North American employers from diverse sectors. Hiring for full-time, contract, summer, co-op and part-time jobs." The event runs from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at RIM Park, on the eastern edge of Waterloo, and there will be shuttle buses from UW's Student Life Centre every half hour.

Back on campus, the Imaginus poster sale continues, through Friday, in the Student Life Centre.

And in the lobby of Environmental Studies I today, there's a "TexMex Bake Sale, mini garage sale, and raffle". You can't really buy a mini garage there, and I'm told that the food isn't really TexMex -- but the whole thing is a fund-raiser for the Environment and Resource Studies 475T field trip to Texas and Mexico later this month, hence the name. Activities start about 9 a.m., and the raffle draw is scheduled for 12 noon.

The Federation of Students election campaign continues, with polls opening Friday afternoon. Today brings a candidates' open meeting at 11:30 a.m. in the Student Life Centre.

There will be a surplus sale of UW equipment and furniture from 11:30 to 1:30 today at central stores, East Campus Hall (off Phillip Street).

People from Xerox Canada will be talking about their newest equipment at a "free lunch and great technology" session, sponsored by the UW computer store, at 12 noon in Davis Centre room 1302.

The alumni council will meet this afternoon -- not face to face, which would mean travel to Waterloo for alumni representatives scattered far and wide, but over the Internet. The council is trying out a new piece of conferencing software, Livelink 9.1 -- actually a "collaborative knowledge management application", according to its developers, the UW spinoff company Open Text Corp., who are making it available to the university.

The final event in the month-long "civic dialogue" series, sponsored by the civics research group, is scheduled for today from 4:30 to 6:00 at its home in downtown Kitchener, 70 King Street East.

The volleyball Warriors will host the Wilfrid Laurier Golden Hawks tonight in the Physical Activities Complex: the women's teams play at 6:00, the men's teams at 8:00.

The Gays and Lesbians of Waterloo group will hold its weekly discussion group tonight at 7:00 in Humanities room 373. Topic of the week: "Sexual Health", with a visitor from the Waterloo Region Public Health Unit.

Also at 7:00, the Waterloo Public Interest Research Group presents a video showing of "Hidden Wars of Desert Storm", a viewpoint on the past 11 years of United States sanctions against Iraq. The location is Davis Centre room 1304.

Tomorrow brings a presentation by two visitors from the Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction, one of the units of the new Canadian Institutes of Health Research. "All researchers potentially involved with the Institute are invited," says a memo from the UW research office, "not only members of biomedical and clinical departments but also members of the relevant social science departments, as well as those in epidemiological/health related research who might have an interest; students and post docs are welcome to attend." The session tomorrow runs from 1:30 to 3:30 in Needles Hall room 3001.

And -- this is your final warning -- "Dial F for FASS", this year's rendition of the annual faculty-alumni-staff-student variety show, opens tomorrow night. Performances are at 8:00 Thursday and Saturday, 7:00 and 10:00 Friday, in the Theatre of the Arts.

CAR

TODAY IN UW HISTORY
February 6, 1979: The name of "Engineering IV" is officially changed to Carl Pollock Hall in honour of the second chair of UW's board of governors, and later chancellor, who died recently. February 6, 1990: Undergraduate engineering students vote to pay a voluntary fee each term to create a Waterloo Engineering Endowment Fund.