Celebrating UW's 25th anniversary in 1982 were Douglas Wright (president of UW 1981-93), Steve Little (director of secondary school liaison and chair of the anniversary committee), Gerald Hagey (president 1957-69), Burt Matthews (president 1970-81), and William G. Davis (premier of Ontario 1971-85).

Honouring the newcomers of 1982

Five dozen people will be guests of honour at a gala party tonight, as UW celebrates their presence and they celebrate 25 years at Waterloo. That means the faculty and staff members who will be the centre of attention tonight have been at the university for half its life, starting work here as the 25th anniversary was being celebrated and reaching this milestone during the 50th.

Tonight's event is the annual gathering of the 25-Year Club, with presentations to the new club members and a chance for other old-timers to greet them and each other, marvelling at how the time flies and how much UW has changed.

Things were different, all right, when the latest crop signed on in 1982. UW had no Davis Centre, no Federation Hall, no Tatham Centre, no Architecture campus — and no Keystone Campaign, no associate provosts, no Quest, no Maclean's rankings, no voicemail, no e-mail. No Daily Bulletin either, of course. What did it have? Six faculties, a massive co-op program, boasts about "entrepreneurship" and "commercialization", plans for a north campus research and technology park, and a fund-raising campaign called Watfund.

In Water Under the Bridge, Simon the Troll's year-by-year story of UW, 1982 is described as the busiest year in the university's history, what with the launch of an Institute for Computer Research, fund-raising, the arrival of $17 million in equipment provided by IBM Canada, a new honours program in accounting, the beginnings of an international presence ("Waterloo, it's your world"), and the anniversary celebration. At the same time, the book says, "1982 was not really a year of good times," with high inflation and high unemployment leading to "salary restraint" at publicly-funded institutions and hampering the employment of co-op students and graduates.

Tonight's 25-Year Club gathering — by invitation only — will be held in the Physical Activities Complex, with the doors opening at 6:00. In addition to recognition of 25-year staff and faculty members, 16 people who have reached the 35-year plateau (starting at UW in 1972) will also be honoured.

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Admissions at 114 per cent of target

The cup runneth over in all six of UW's faculties, with first-year enrolment for September running well ahead of target, according to associate registrar (admissions) Nancy Weiner.

"After experiencing one of the largest percentage increases in applications, UW is receiving more confirmations than anticipated," a news release from the university said yesterday. Numbers from Weiner's office indicate that 5,825 students have accepted an offer of admission — 114 per cent of the target, which was 5,101 students.

"It is a comfortable position to be in," says registrar Ken Lavigne. "We know from experience that we will see some attrition as students and families alter their plans. And we have a history of being more popular than expected, so we know how to ensure that a few additional students will not negatively impact the student experience."

The faculty of science is facing the biggest crowds: it planned for 840 first-year students and has received confirmations from 1,086, or from 129 per cent of its target. With 390 confirmations, environmental studies reached 129 per cent of its target of 303 students. Other figures: applied health sciences, 370 students or 105 per cent of target; arts, 1,304 or 110 per cent; engineering, 1,343 students or 108 per cent; mathematics, 1,173 students or 115 per cent. In inter-faculty programs, software engineering is at 121 students or 110 per cent; accounting and financial management, 38 students or 63 per cent.

"Anything with management or business did really well this time around," says Weiner. "With 165 per cent of its target, management engineering had the highest confirmation overrun."

She provides more background in a memo: "The data show that the percentage of confirmations to targets by OSS (Ontario secondary school) domestic students, which is a large part of our year one target, is at 113%. The data for non-OSS domestic students show that we have exceeded our institutional target at 102%. Even more encouraging is our success in the visa category where all faculties except Arts with only a slight number below target (98% of target) have exceeded their targets resulting in 530 confirmations or 147% of our visa target. Last year at this time, 570 visa students had confirmed.

"We have more first year entrance scholars confirmed at 3,227 compared to last year at 3,066 (increase of 5%). There are 298 President’s Scholarships of Distinction, 1,261 President’s Scholarships, and 1,668 Merit Scholarships."

The various faculties now are exploring the options for dealing with their overruns, yesterday's news release assures the public. "These will likely involve adding classes, or adding sections and lab sessions to already scheduled classes."

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Dean of science honoured, and more

A reception this afternoon will honour George Dixon (left), UW's dean of science for the past six years, who's moving on to a new role as vice-president (university research) as of July 1. Dixon is a specialist in toxicology and biological effects of pollution and a winner of both the Distinguished Teacher Award and the Research Excellence Award, and had been chair of the department of biology before moving into the deanship. Colleagues will drink his health today between 4:00 and 5:30 at the University Club (last-minute information, ext. 3-3363); contributions in his honour are being accepted to the Faculty of Science Scholarship Fund.

Dixon was also in the spotlight at last week's meeting of the UW board of governors, when he gave a briefing about the work and successes of the science faculty. Among the factoids he provided: The school of pharmacy now has four faculty members on strength, with six more expected by September. There are 31 students in Waterloo as part of the "two-plus-two" program linking UW with five Chinese universities, and 40 more are expected this fall. Quality of the students who take science undergraduate programs is demonstrated by the finding that 75 per cent of them go on to take "another degree of some type", either graduate or professional. And one good-sized concern: "A lot of our undergraduate teaching labs are 30 to 50 years old. They have been well maintained, but times change," and some extensive renovations are increasingly necessary.

Widely known as one of the “fathers of the Internet”, Vint Cerf will give a public talk Thursday on the future of the World Wide Web. Cerf, vice-president and “chief Internet evangelist” for Google Inc., will be “Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century” at 1:30 Thursday in the Humanities Theatre. Admission is free. The talk is part of the Distinguished Speaker Series of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. "Attracting a speaker of this calibre certainly speaks to UW's and this community's reputation as a centre for technological innovation," says CS director Tamer Özsu. Cerf will look at some problems that will require research to solve, and others involving thorny policy issues of international scope, such as spam, denial of service attacks, abuse of domain names, fraud and harassment. "We will also see how network-oriented applications are becoming very popular both for reliability reasons and also to enable collaborative work," Cerf says in an abstract of his upcoming talk. "As consumer devices become part of the Internet, we will discover new kinds of network-based services that allow third parties to help users manage their entertainment and work." As well, he will discuss the extension of the Internet to operation across the solar system as a communication infrastructure in support of space exploration. Cerf and colleague Robert E. Kahn were named the recipients of the ACM Alan M. Turing award, sometimes called the Nobel prize of computer science, in 2004 for their work on TCP/IP protocols, the basic communication language of the Internet.

The Canadian Mathematical Society has awarded its 2007 Excellence in Teaching Prize to Brian Forrest (right) of UW's department of pure mathematics. The award, presented at the CMS summer meeting in Winnipeg earlier this month, recognizes “sustained and distinguished contributions in teaching at the post-secondary undergraduate level”. Says a CMS news release: “Brian Forrest's outstanding teaching has previously been recognized by the University of Waterloo, most notably in 2000 through Waterloo's Distinguished Teaching Award. His citation at that time spoke to his ‘ability to convey the beauty and elegance of mathematics to students at all levels’, and to his contagious excitement and enthusiasm for teaching mathematics. Former students refer to him as the best university instructor they have encountered — someone who stands out both as a lucid expositor and as a caring mentor. His colleagues describe him as the most effective and committed teacher they know, someone who consistently obtains stellar evaluations and who devotes uncounted hours to his students. He is patient and thorough, and succeeds at delivering rigorous and demanding material in ways that resonate with students. . . . In parallel with his achievements in teaching, Dr. Forrest has been a driving force for curricular development in his department and faculty. Together with colleagues, his accomplishments in this area include completely restructuring the Waterloo calculus curriculum, developing an innovative new program in computational mathematics, overhauling the general program in mathematics to give it both cohesion and focus, and introducing specialized options that combine mathematical study with engineering, teaching, or finance.” A faculty member at UW for 18 years, he has served as chair of the pure math department and as associate dean (co-op education) in the faculty of mathematics.

And . . . as reported earlier this spring, the consulting firm Urban Strategies, which wrote UW's campus master plan more than a decade ago, is working on updates, particularly for the "east campus" region off Phillip Street and the undeveloped regions of the north campus lands. "This is a precursor," says Tom Galloway of UW's plant operations department, "for an eventual District Plan, Plan of Subdivision and infrastructure construction for the lands involved in the City of Waterloo YMCA/Library agreement with UW. In order to solicit input into this study from the UW community, an Open House is being held on June 27 between 2:30 and 7 p.m. in Davis Centre room 1301. A series of presentation boards will outline current thinking. Staff from Urban Strategies and local planning firm GSP Group, and UW staff on the project team, will be in attendance to answer questions. Comment sheets will be available for participants to fill in."

CAR

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