February 18, 2002

Monday, February 18, 2002

The squeeze on budgets and jobs
Grants for learning technology
Alumni can use job web site
Events and notes of the day

Editor:
Chris Redmond
credmond@uwaterloo.ca

The Hajj takes millions of Muslims to Mecca this week

[Red and gold uniform]
Canadian Olympian Beckie Scott, who won the bronze medal Friday in the women's 5-kilometre "pursuit" cross-country ski race, is a Waterloo student, taking her courses by distance education. (From Vermilion, Alberta, she now lives in Oregon.) Scott, now 27, has been taking courses since 1995, most recently in the fall term of 2000. She's listed as a non-degree arts student, but says on her web page that her goal is a degree in English. She's known for her involvement in a campaign against the use of performance-enhancing drugs in competitive skiing, and for her "nude but tasteful" pose for a fund-raising calendar.

The squeeze on budgets and jobs

"We're caught in a vise," someone in Needles Hall told me late last week, in a conversation about budgets, jobs, and the prospect of educating more students with fewer people to do the work.

The "vise" is the pressure of budget cuts (now) and enrolment increases (continuing), and the result is that things are going to be tough for a while. We ought to have a few more specifics on Monday, March 4, when provost Amit Chakma brings a draft of the 2002-03 budget for discussion by the senate finance committee.

By the time of that meeting, there will likely also be an announcement about staff salary scales for the coming year. The advisory committee on staff compensation meets again this week, and my sense is that staff negotiators will be asking for one of two things: a pay increase comparable to what faculty members got for the coming year (2.6 per cent scale) or an assurance (like the one they got in 2000) that there won't be significant layoffs. They can probably get one, but they certainly can't get both.

That's because most of UW's budget is spent on people -- as the graph below makes clear -- and as the salary budget goes up, there are few other places to cut. Any number of other factors are still uncertain, including tuition fee levels and enrolment for the coming year. But Chakma gave a preview of his budget thinking to the finance committee when it met in late January, and his "scenarios" were pointing to an overall spending cut of somewhere around 3 per cent this year.

Let me offer a few other thoughts, insights and bits of information, based on conversations I had last week after the Wednesday meeting in which many staff members expressed their frustration with the pressures they're under. Faculty are pressured and frustrated too, of course, and so are students, worried about rising fees and falling levels of service.

Salaries dominate UW's spending: Figures are in millions of dollars, based on 2000-01 financial statements -- gross figures for the operating budget, before chargeouts. The operating budget comes chiefly from government operating grants and tuition fees. It does not include funding received for construction, research, and trust funds, or self-supporting operations such as residences and retail.
There are certainly not going to be "university-wide layoffs" of staff. Budgeting and other planning at UW is mostly done on a department-by-department basis, in which managers are told: here's your cut, here's your budget, now how are you going to meet it? Lost jobs in one area don't necessarily mean lost jobs in some other area, and might well have more to do with a decision to give up a particular activity than with overall austerity. It's worth noting that UW survived a 3.5 per cent cut in the current year, and not one regular staff member was laid off.

The usual first step in budget-balancing is to trim non-salary expenses. (Uh-oh: I don't know whether I can make my Apple G3 last another year.) After that, a department will try to juggle whatever budget it has for casual staff, temporaries, part-timers. Or it'll hold a position vacant for a while when somebody quits or retires or goes on maternity leave. Or can that position be eliminated altogether? It's only after measures of that kind that a manager will conclude that a real live person will have to lose a job.

Faculty positions get eliminated too, especially part-time positions. And often, faculty posts get left open when someone leaves the university or goes on leave. In part that's because it takes longer to recruit a new professor than to hire a typical staff member, and during those months, the savings from a vacant faculty job can be the salvation of a department's budget.

But there are limits to how many faculty members UW can do without, especially since enrolment is going up. How many more students? Long-term figures are better described as wishes than as plans, things change so fast, but the provost's last estimate was a 15 per cent increase from current levels within three or four years. Maybe the government will offer more funding by then, maybe not. Meanwhile, more students, maybe fewer professors, doesn't bode well for student-faculty ratios, which have risen from 14:1 to 23:1 in the past decade.

We don't calculate a student-staff ratio, but there isn't much doubt that staff members, too, do more work as there are more students (and more research grants, and more government programs to monitor, and an impending fund-raising campaign). From all corners of the campus come complaints about high workloads and stress. Catharine Scott, associate provost (human resources and student services), says she's well aware of the unhappiness; that's why the staff performance evaluation process this year includes a discussion of workload and working conditions. Acknowledging the problem, she says, is the first step in finding ways to address it, and it makes people realize they're not alone.

If only, people are saying, Waterloo could call on a little more of that ol' Kalbfleisch magic! Jim Kalbfleisch, provost from 1993 to the end of 2000, seemed to have a remarkable ability to pull rabbits out of hats and steer the university off the rocks at the last minute. His biggest trick was to save the university $6 million a year (and give some temporary relief in employees' take-home pay too) by reducing contributions to the pension fund. But the fund's bulging surplus has been reduced by that tactic, and by weakness in the stock market, so pension contributions now have to edge back toward the normal level, just when a temporary saving would have been welcome. Rabbit-out-of-hat days are apparently over. "Managing the operating budget over the past seven years has been an interesting challenge," Kalbfleisch wrote just before his retirement, "but your next provost may need to be an alchemist." It looks like he wasn't kidding.

Grants for learning technology

Faculty members concentrate on fitting learning technology to their courses, in a workshop series held last fall by LT3. Another faculty series will start in the first week of March, and there's some space left, says Diane Salter at LT3. She can be reached at ext. 6832 by professors who might be interested.

The Centre for Learning and Teaching Through Technology -- LT3 -- is currently working with faculty members from three different faculties on Learning Technology Innovation grants, an announcement last week said: "Students in Environmental Studies, Mathematics, and Science may encounter innovations developed by Professors Wismer, Reyes and Dickey, and Morgan, respectively."

Susan Wismer of environment and resource studies received an LTI grant for the analysis phase of her project on ERS 250. Melanie Itzkovitch, a graduate student in ERS, is working with Wismer to investigate how technology can aid in enhancing team interactions in this project-based course.

Araceli Reyes, from the Centre for Education for Computing and Mathematics, and Lee Dickey, from the pure mathematics department, are collaborating on the development of interactive exercises for a university-level geometry class. They, with the help of a co-op student, Joanne Yeh, are developing the connections between existing packages that allow spatial manipulation of geometric objects and algebraic representations. "Ultimately," says a project description, "they would like to enable students to build geometric constructions that can be saved as a file and then can be submitted and marked on-line."

And Alan Morgan, earth sciences, has received an LTI grant to continue development of a virtual field trip for his first-year course. The analysis and prototype for this project were developed by students in IS 303a, the learning technology course associated with LT3, last summer, and now co-op student Tim Tang is continuing the development. "The learnware that Tim and Professor Morgan are developing consists of activities and animations that help explain the relationships and geologic phenomena that contributed to and resulted from the Heimaey eruption in Iceland in 1979."

LT3 says these three projects were selected as "innovations that would impact the learning and teaching experience for UW students". After the completion of the analysis and development phases, each project will complete the third phase ("Learning Impact"), to evaluate the learning impact of the project, last week announcement says.

"LTI grants are intended to make pedagogical innovation into a scholarly activity. Thus, emphasis is on such activities as building on work of others, collaboration, and generating reports of publishable quality."

Another round of LTI grants is to be issued soon; the application deadline has been extended to next Monday, February 25. Liwana Bringelson of LT3 (lbringel@engmail, phone ext. 5931) can provide more information.

Alumni can use job web site

The co-op education and career services department "is excited", a memo said last week -- "excited to announce that on-line job searching is now available to UW Alumni", through an arrangement with the alumni affairs office that involves the on-line E-Community.

The announcement explains: "The E-Community is a secure Web site that offers UW Alumni free electronic services to connect with friends and the University. Once registered in the UW E-Community, alumni can enter the Student ACCESS System to look at job openings. This system is also used by co-op, regular, and graduating students, to check for job postings and interview schedules.

"Job posting information was previously available to alumni in a weekly publication called the Employment Network by mail with a paid subscription or in person at Career Services on campus. The new on-line service allows alumni free 24-hour access to current job postings!"

CECS says employers can also use the E-Community to job post jobs in the Co-operative Education & Career Services Web site. "A convenient link connects employers to a on-line form."

Events and notes of the day

T-4 slips -- those stark summaries of last year's income, essential for filing tax returns -- are on their way to staff and faculty members' home addresses, the human resources department says. (In fact, they may all be there already; I received mine Friday.) Says Sandra Hurlburt, assistant director of HR: "Please keep them in a safe place, because there is a $10 charge to produce a duplicate."

The elevator in South Campus Hall will be out of operation today through Wednesday, the plant operations department advises.

The Engineers Without Borders group offers an information session today about internship programs. Scott Griffiths, a third-year systems design engineering student who just returned from an internship in Guinea, "will be sharing some stories, insights and pictures", an EWB announcement says. The talk starts at 5:30 in Davis Centre room 1302.

The weekly not-quite-a-church group The Embassy will be meeting tonight as usual, at 7:30 and 9:00, but has moved its regular meeting place from the Humanities Theatre to Federation Hall.

A farewell party is scheduled for Friday, as Kim Martin of the Math Faculty Computing Facility leaves UW (after twenty years) for an off-campus job. Friday's reception will start at 3 p.m. in Davis Centre room 1301. RSVPs and gift contributions go to Arthur Hills at ext. 2139, e-mail ahhills@math.

CAR

TODAY IN UW HISTORY
February 18, 1980: Frank H. Epp, history professor and former president of Conrad Grebel College, is the unsuccessful Liberal candidate for Parliament from Waterloo, in an election in which Pierre Trudeau unseats Joe Clark as prime minister.