Faculty hold end-of-term meeting

The UW faculty association holds its fall general meeting this afternoon (3:00 in the traditional place, Physics room 145) and will hear reports on issues ranging from salaries to the status of women and equity.

Most of the reports on the agenda will be presented orally, although the paper agenda does include a few, including a brief memo from association treasurer David DeVidi of the philosophy department. He advises that the group is deliberately running a deficit in 2006–07, "to reduce the members' equity to approximately six to nine months of operating expenses, in line with the reocmmendation of our previous auditor." He adds that the membership fee — a so-called "mil rate" of 4.75, or 0.475 per cent of salary — "is lower than the corresponding rate at every Canadian university but one".

DeVidi will also be reporting on a survey of faculty members' opinions about workload and merit pay, and association president Roydon Fraser will say something about the possibility of a move from monthly to biweekly salary payment, an issue that has also piqued the interest of the staff association lately.

The report of the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee will come from a familiar figure who is its new chair. He's Len Guelke, retired from the UW department of geography but still active in the association. Guelke, who is also a former association president, returns to the helm of the AF&T committee with the retirement of Frank Reynolds of statistics and actuarial science, who has been its leader in recent years.

A detailed report from Reynolds, published in the November issue of the association's Forum newsletter, makes clear that the committee deals with a lot more than strictly "academic freedom" and "tenure" issues. Its range also includes practically any conflicts in which a faculty member might be involved, as well as disagreements about how policies apply and the conditions of a professor's employment.

For example, the retiring AF&T chair charges, "The treatment of professors with disabilities continues to be disappointing," with one such case leading to a grievance over a department's failure to provide "accommodation" for a disability that the professor had expected.

"A major attack on a member's academic freedom by a department chair was particularly odious," Reynolds writes, describing a dispute over how the curriculum for a multi-section course was being administered.

One faculty grievance has gone to arbitration, he writes, giving no details at all. "There were two cases in which tenure was denied," he continues, describing them briefly — apparently the same two cases discussed in the recent annual report from the University Tenure and Promotion Advisory Committee.

And, Reynolds writes, there have been two recent cases "involving allegations of sexual impropriety". In one of them, a professor "was exonerated" after charges of harassment brought by a staff member. "The second case involved a consensual relationship between a tenure-track professor and a student."

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Profs on a year's sabbatical leave

Here's the latest list of UW faculty members who are currently on sabbatical. The summaries of their plans come from agenda material presented to the university's board of governors, which has to give formal approval to all sabbatical leaves. All these professors have twelve-month sabbaticals that began on September 1.

Jonathan Buss of the school of computer science: "The sabbatical will be used to continue research into the boundary between feasible and infeasible computations encompassing several different approaches and theories — most prominent will be 'fixed-parameter complexity'. Concurrently, I will expand past work on basic models of computation."

James Sloan of the chemistry department: "I will develop my climate-related research program by undertaking new collaborations and expanding WCAS modelling and laboratory studies."

Ireneusz Szarycz of Germanic and Slavic studies: "During my sabbatical I will do researach on Aleksandr Grin, a neglected Russian writer of the 1920s. I will examin Grin's prose in the context of Russian literary aesthetics, traditions, and new trends of the first two decades of the twentieth century."

Scott Taylor, chemistry: "This leave will give me the opportunity to initiate a research program on the elucidation of the catalytic mechanism of aryl sulfatases. Knowledge gained from these studies will be used to generate lead compounds for the development of drugs for treating post-menopausal breast cancer, and lung and urinary infections cased by Pseudomonas aeruginosa."

Eric Croiset, chemical engineering: "I will spend one year at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, to work on simulation of solid oxide fuel cells operating with syngas."

Robert Myers, physics: "I will be visiting a researcher at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California in Santa Barbara. In particular, I will be participating in their programs: String Phenomenology (August 7 to December 15, 2006) and The Quantum Nature of Spacetime Singularities (January 8-26, 2007)."

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Big day for IT staff; other notes

Computer users on campus may be working without a net today, as the support staff are busy elsewhere, at the annual "WatITis" day-long conference, being held in several rooms of Rod Coutts Hall. Dean of engineering Adel Sedra gives the keynote talk this morning, starting at 8:45, after which participants will break into multiple sessions on such topics as software distribution, mobile devices, "The Environmental Informatics Explosion", podcasting, security issues, pandemic planning, ".NET Demystified", and "Developing a Department-Wide Vacation Request Management System". Speakers come not just from Information Systems and Technology but from the faculty computing offices, the library, LT3, communications and public affairs, institutional analysis and planning, and so on. The day winds up with a reception (3:30 to 4:30) at the Graduate House. A long-term effect of WatITis should be that IT support staff are back to work Thursday with a lot of new ideas. A short-term effect will be that help desks can't provide the full range of help today, and the central Computing Help and Information Place will be on reduced hours.

About 350 Waterloo Region high school students will participate in the annual Federal-Provincial Conference simulation at UW today and tomorrow. Sponsored by UW's political science department and the local History Heads Association, the simulation has been an annual event for more than 30 years. This year, delegations from 16 regional schools will participate. The role of Canada's prime minister will be handled by Zach Singer of Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute. Other students from this school will serve as federal ministers. Students from other schools in the region will chair meetings of provincial and territorial ministers. Besides first ministers meetings, ministerial delegations will participate in committees dealing with finance, justice, health, environment, agriculture, immigration and aboriginal affairs. Two schools will produce newspapers during the conference to provide information and promote debate. Working sessions will be held in several rooms in the Arts Lecture Hall, Humanities building and Modern Languages building both days, and the concluding plenary session will be held in the Theatre of the Arts on Thursday at 1:45.

Where to eat, where to eat . . . the daily (Monday-to-Friday) Christmas buffet at the University Club has begun, with a menu that this year includes grilled swordfish as well as turkey, pork loin and a couple of daily features, so that's certainly an option. The Club is also offering a dinner buffet tonight and next Wednesday (information, ext. 3-3801). At the other end of the main campus, a Christmas luncheon is planned at the Festival Room in South Campus Hall December 12 through 15 (that's Tuesday through Friday of next week); the menu there includes turkey, beef, and "lasagne de legumes au gratin". Looking for less elegance? Most coffee shops and cafeterias around campus are keeping to their usual hours of operation for the next few days, although the CEIT Café is now closing at 1:30 daily (rather than the usual 3:45), Tim Horton's in South Campus Hall is closing at 4:30 (rather than 7:00), and the Eye Opener in the Optometry building is closed altogether until the new year.

Claudio Cañizares of the electrical and computer engineering department has been named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. • Ventilation in "the west half" of Chemistry II building will be turned off all day tomorrow and Friday for repairs, the plant operations department warns. • The Centre for Information Systems Assurance, based in UW's school of accountancy, has issued a call for papers for a "symposium on IS assurance" to be held in Toronto next October.

Here's a reminder that the registrar's office is closed from 11:45 to 2:00 today. • Joan Airdrie, who has been a housekeeper in Ron Eydt Village since 1984, will officially retire as of January 1. • The continuing education office is offering a one-day course today on "Staying Out of the Middle: Coaching Staff on Responding to Their Own Conflict", and has it scheduled again on March 6 and May 17.

And . . . now might be a good time to think about nominating a UW teacher (maybe somebody whose fall term course has just ended) for the 2007 Distinguished Teacher Award or Exceptional Teaching by a Student Award. Nominations in both cases require some paperwork, particularly documentation of students' comments and tributes, so it isn't wise to leave everything until just before the deadline in February. Nominations are now being accepted, says Verna Keller in the UW teaching resource office, which administers both award programs. Details are available on the web.

CAR

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