Daily Bulletin

Tuesday, August 26, 1997

It rained where I was, too

Miller Bell Tower at Chautauqua

So, back to Waterloo, where I don't notice too many changes. The Humanities building was still red brick when I walked up from the parking lot, and Porter Library is still big and white. I see roofing work happening on the Arts Lecture Hall, and something called LUAC seems to be meeting on campus -- must find out what that is.

Let me express my thanks to my colleague Barbara Elve, who has kept the Daily Bulletin going for the past three weeks. Over the past few days south of the border, I've been reading her Bulletins with interest, through the facilities of Epix Internet Services.

The biggest event I've missed was Student Life 101, which drew an estimated 3,450 new students and parents as visitors on August 11. "We signed up 1,000 new Watcards," says Catharine Scott, associate provost (human resources and student services), co-chair of the big event. She adds that Ron Eydt Village gave out 1,200 cups of coffee to people on tours. And was the day a success? Yep. One staff member, she says, "saw two roommates actually meet each other for the first time. One woman and her daughter told [us] that her other daughter (not a frosh) had changed her mind about attending university (felt it was too big and impersonal a place to go) because of the day's events and the UW people!"

While all that was happening, I was on my annual visit to Chautauqua, where the crowds were thick with sweatshirts from Maine, Maryland and Mercyhurst, but there wasn't a Waterloo shirt in the bunch. The nearest thing to a UW presence on the program was Douglas John Hall, who was founding principal of St. Paul's United College a generation ago and is now one of Canada's leading theologians. He was on the Chautauqua platform just like Natalie Cole, Harry Belafonte, an expert on cancer prevention, and some fellow who's writing a history of the public schools of Decatur, Georgia; the program is nothing if not eclectic.

News from the American side

The best university in the United States in 1997, according to US News? A tie, between Harvard and Princeton. The rest of the top ten: Yale and Duke (tied), Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth and Pennsylvania (tied), Northwestern and Caltech (tied).

Swarthmore College was ranked as the top liberal-arts college, as it was last year, and the University of Virginia came first in a new category, "best public university".

At those institutions and three thousand others across America, a new academic year is beginning, but few of them can be experiencing changes as dramatic or well-publicized as those at the Virginia Military Institute, which has admitted women students this fall after 158 years as an all-male institution. There are 30 women among the 460 first-year cadets who are learning to "walk the rat line", as VMI slang describes the tough experience of entering military life. The institution got a special $5.1 million government grant to make the transition: recruiting women students, training staff and upperclassmen about such issues as sexual harassment and "fraternization", and constructing women's bathrooms.

The fewest women on faculty

Nationally, the average is 24.4 per cent, the CAUT figures say -- 5,581 women among 22,859 professors across the country.

The only institutions showing a figure of less than 16.1 per cent are two military colleges, one theological college, two engineering schools (Ecole Polytechnic and Technical of Nova Scotia), and two small universities (Brandon and Algoma).

Some figures from major institutions: Toronto, 25.8 per cent; Guelph, 20.9 per cent; Western, 22.1 per cent; Alberta, 23.4 per cent; Victoria, 28.6 per cent; McGill, 25.3 per cent; Laval, 18.1 per cent; Memorial, 24.1 per cent. Wilfrid Laurier University is listed at 26.1 per cent. The statistics are from 1995 (1994 in the case of Québec institutions).

Some announcements and notes

Lauri MacLeod of retail services advises that the department will be holding its annual staff meeting tomorrow, Wednesday, and so the bookstore, UW Shop and Computer Store won't open until 10 a.m.

This from Greg Cummings of information systems and technology: "The University of Waterloo Datapac service will be permanently shut down at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, Aug 29th. All current Datapac users have been notified." (Datapac is a service, pretty much obsolete with the development of today's Internet tools, for connecting to remote computers over telephone lines.)

Waterloo Web site of the day

"I am an avid science fiction reader," writes computer science staff member Dave Switzer, "and Joan Slonczewski is one of my favourite authors. I searched on the web for a site devoted to her books and I didn't find one, so I created one myself."

And here it is, with excerpts from Slonczewski's writings, fragments from what reviewers said about A Door into Ocean and her other novels, and links to essays about her and information on related topics, including science fiction and the Quaker movement.

Says Switzer:

How popular it is, I'm not really sure -- I don't have a counter running on it or anything. But Omni Magazine designated it an "Omnivision winner" so that must count for something.

I've been in contact with Joan through e-mail, and she has provided me with a few things to put on the site. Probably the most distinctive feature is the entire text of Joan's short story "Microbe," which is her only short story that she's published so far. I also have a short blurb about her recently completed novel, "The Children Star." And there's some biographical information, reviews of her books, and a few essays about her books and other SF.

CAR

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca -- (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
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