November 16, 2004

Hiring of women for faculty positions at UW is going up and up, the university senate was told last night. According to the annual report of the University Appointments Review Committee, 33 women and 46 men were appointed to the faculty in 2003-04, meaning 42 per cent of positions went to women.

Last year

Three years ago it was just 17 per cent, said Flora Ng of chemical engineering, who spoke briefly to the senate. "We'll see whether that trend will continue," she added.

Ng also told senate that the percentage of hires who were Canadian citizens or landed immigrants has been falling. She didn't give final figures on those who were hired, but of the 97 "proposals for regular faculty appointments" that were screened by the committee, 54 were for Canadians and 43 for foreigners.

Not every "proposal" leads to a hiring, the UARC annual report pointed out. During the year the math faculty hired 23 professors; engineering, 20.5 (counting half of a joint appointment with environmental studies); arts, 14; science, 12; AHS, 6; and ES, 3.5.

Figures about women and about non-Canadians are both "positive trends", provost Amit Chakma told the senate. He said they're evidence that UW is making an effort to find the very best faculty members wherever they may be. "We're looking at recruiting colleagues from across the world."

Ng commented that "some of the hires are really outstanding." Her committee looks at every proposal from an academic department before a job offer can be made, to make sure policies are being followed and everything is on the up-and-up.

UW president David Johnston and IITD director R. S. Sirohi sign the agreement in Johnston's office

Links with a top Indian institute

An agreement between UW and the Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi, signed in mid-September, is just the beginning as Waterloo develops closer relations with India, says UW provost Amit Chakma.

"We'd like to establish links with as many of the IITs as we can," says Chakma, "because we believe they're top-tier institutions." There are seven IITs, highly selective universities in the pure and applied sciences.

The provost was in India last spring to sign an exchange agreement with another IIT, at Kharagpur, and also visited Delhi. "I was hoping we might be able to sign an agreement while I was there," he said last week, "but we just didn't have time." Instead, UW invited IITD officials to make a Waterloo visit to sign the documents. "They liked what we do, they saw the quality, and they saw that we meant business," the provost said.

UW also has an agreement with IIT Madras, though it has not been very active lately, Chakma said.

The "Memorandum of Agreement" that was signed calls for an exchange of "information on research and educational programs", cooperation in continuing education and conferences, involvement of each other's faculty members in research and training programs, and student exchanges. As a first step, Chakma said, an IITD faculty member will be coming "very soon" to teach a computer science course at UW, a one-term course compressed into a two-month period. "We'll let it grow from there," he said.

Srinivasan Keshav of the school of CS, who is himself a Delhi graduate, has been named UW coordinator of the IITD agreement, the provost said.

He said an important goal of the agreement as far as UW is concerned is bringing graduate students to Waterloo. While recruiting grad students around the world is pretty easy, the provost said, "recruiting top students is an extremely competitive business. So we're trying to be proactive." The IITs are high-quality institutions, he said, whose graduates will make first-rate grad students in Canada; even better, they operate in English, so there will be no language difficulty when their graduates come to UW.

His hope is that IIT Delhi will "encourage" its graduates to consider Waterloo for further study, and Waterloo promises that students from IITD will get "a fast turnaround" on their applications.

Chakma said he's also hoping that IITD will be able to host students from Waterloo, particularly on an exchange basis. But everything depends, he said, on personal relationships being developed by faculty members -- not just in CS but also in other parts of math, as well as engineering and science -- and back-and-forth visits by individual professors are the key to making it happen.

Chinese memoir launched at Renison

Renison College will hold a book launch tomorrow at 11:30 for A Memoir: From Mainland China to 43 Years as MP in Taiwan by Elizabeth Wang.

The novel plunges the reader into the extraordinary life of Elizabeth Wang, who was born in 1912 in a village in Jiangsu, north of Shanghai, in eastern China. She tells the story of her family and the start of her love of literature.

Her education was an extensive one and eventually she graduated with a BA in Chinese and English literature. When she was 25, her father sent her to the United States to enroll in the master's program in English literature at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She returned to China in 1940 during the war between Japan and China, and by 1947 decided to flee to Taiwan to escape the violence.

Wang was an elected member of the Kuomintang government in Taiwan and travelled as a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. She was also a professor of English novels and Chinese culture at Soo-Chou University. She had three sons who became bright academic scholars and had settled in North America. In 1992, she immigrated to Canada to be with her son, Edward Tzu-Hsia Wang, and has settled in Waterloo.

WHEN AND WHERE

Communitech Business and Technology Forum: Bruce Coxon, CEO of Lavalife, 12 noon, Waterloo Inn, information online.

Centre for International Governance Innovation presents David Malone, president, International Peace Academy, "UN Reform: Oxymoron?" 12 noon, 57 Erb Street West, reservations rsvp@cigionline.ca.

Institute for Quantitative Finance and Insurance seminar: Steve Shreve, Carnegie Mellon University, "A Two-Person Game for Pricing Convertible Bonds", 2:30, Rod Coutts Hall room 205.

Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology program information meeting 4 p.m., Davis Centre room 1304.

'Job Search Strategies for International Students' workshop 4:30, Tatham Centre room 1208.

German 359 film "Der Himmel Über Berlin" (1987) 6:30, Rod Coutts Hall room 308, free.

'The Tempest', by-invitation preview performance for arts alumni, 7 p.m., Theatre of the Arts, reception follows.

Craft and toy fair sponsored by Hildegard Marsden Day Nursery, Wednesday-Friday 8:30 to 4:45, Davis Centre room 1301.

Campus TechShop (Student Life Centre) "focus day" on Targus hardware, Wednesday 10 to 3.

'Balancing Roles' workshop, chiefly for graduate students, sponsored by teaching resources office, Wednesday 12 noon, details online.

'Art Songs and Operatic Arias' by Kristina Baron, Wednesday 12:30, Conrad Grebel University College chapel, free.

Geographic Information Systems Day open house Wednesday 1 to 4, Environmental Studies I courtyard. GIS demonstration, 1:30, ES I room 221; library workshop on digital data, 2:30, ES I room 246.

Millennium Scholarship recipients honoured at reception, Wednesday 4 p.m., Laurel Room, South Campus Hall.

Staff association "meet and greet" session Wednesday 4:30 to 6 p.m., University Club.

Sybase Inc. opening ceremonies for new building in UW Research and Technology Park, Thursday 9 a.m.

'Haiti and the Church' discussion Thursday 10 a.m., Siegfried Hall, St. Jerome's University, information 886-9520.

'Artlantis', arts semi-formal, Friday evening, Federation Hall, tickets from ASU office, Arts Lecture Hall.

'Christian Canada No More?" Paul Bramadat, University of Winnipeg, Friday 7:30 p.m., Siegfried Hall, St. Jerome's University.

"The changing world changed my life," she says. "Born in a village and brought up in a traditional Chinese family, I was taught how to fulfil filial piety, which is to obey my parents and respect and be gentle to my husband if I am married. I never thought I could self-teach myself English, or could have the courage to go and study alone in the United States at a time when few women went abroad. Later, I even had a divorce. How dare I! I never believed I would be strong enough to be a single mother."

Admission to tomorrow's event is free, but space is limited -- RSVPs go to 884-4404 ext 657.

Pixels in the big picture

Just yesterday I wrote about the one-day course in "customer service" being offered this week by UW's continuing education office -- and now word comes that the course has been cancelled. Maybe another time? A number of other business and professional courses are still on the CE agenda, however, including "Communication Skills for Personal and Organizational Effectiveness", tomorrow from 9 to 5. Information on the available courses is, of course, on the continuing ed web site.

Classes in the fall term of 2005 will start on the predictable day, September 12, which is the Monday after Labour Day. Winter term classes in 2006 will start on Tuesday, January 3. Those are among the features of the 2005-06 academic calendar, approved by UW's senate last night. There was brief discussion of whether the winter (and spring) term might start later, to give people a longer Christmas break, and the registrar promised to look into it. Senate also briefly talked about the possibility -- which has been raised before -- of giving the engineering and math faculties a full week's break in mid-February, which the other faculties traditionally get, rather than just a two-day "reading period". Those faculties will consult, said dean of math Alan George, and a recommendation one way or the other will come to senate in time to be adopted for the winter of 2007.

The administration and maintenance office at the UW Place residence complex is moving, effective Thursday. The office has been at 106 Seagram Drive (otherwise known as Waterloo Court) for the past four years, but as renovations in the complex continue, it's moving to suite 105 in 161 University Avenue (Wilmot Court). "Entrance can be obtained through the building's side door," writes Rachel Dolson, office assistant in UW Place.

[Jersey cow is brown] Two UW students placed high at the National Jersey Show as part of the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair last week in Toronto. In the Senior Showmanship category (for exhibitors between the ages of 15 and 21), Melissa Hastie (3B mathematics) placed first and Kora Bennett (1B arts) placed second out of 24 competitors. The two have competed before in Ontario youth cattle events.

The UW International Health Development Association -- UWIHDA -- "is currently launching its second international aid project," writes the group's executive director, Archna Gupta, from her co-op posting in Ottawa. "This year's project focuses on youth awareness of HIV/AIDS in Africa." Specifically, the plan is for eight participants to go to Tanzania for five weeks next summer. They'll spend most of the time "running an HIV/AIDS peer education program in rural regions of Tanzania. . . . The program will be based on a Small Team model of four UW participants working together in each region to implement the HIV/AIDS peer education program in collaboration with local youth leaders." Applications are due by December 24, with participants being chosen in January. More information is available on the web.

Fish and plants in the Biology buildings are making do with ordinary water this morning, as the supply of (untreated) water from UW's private well is shut off for a few hours' maintenance. . . . "Schaum's Outlines", a popular series of study aids, are priced at 25 per cent off in the UW bookstore until the end of November. . . . UW researchers now have access to more than 10,000 journals in electronic form, as well as more than 7,000 in print, university librarian Mark Haslett told the university senate last night. . . .

CAR

Communications and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
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