In September 2003, the
double cohort year, Waterloo opened its doors to a record number of new students.
But we were ready for them. There were rooms in residence for all the first-year
students who wanted them, staff in place to help them make the transition
to university life, faculty eager to open new worlds to them, and a brand-new
co-op and career services facility ready to serve their employment needs.
Perhaps the most exciting event of the new academic year was the opening of the new Centre for Environmental and Information Technology. The 170,000 square foot five-storey building houses the departments of earth sciences and electrical and computer engineering and provides much-needed additional teaching and research space, including a 150-seat lecture theatre and 19 specialized labs.
The CEIT is also home to the Waterloo Institute for Groundwater Research, one of our leading research centres.
The new $43 million CEIT is just one of the priorities of Campaign Waterloo, which went public in March 2004. By launch day, we had raised $183 million of the $260 million we plan to raise by the year 2007, Waterloo’s 50th anniversary. A month later, an extraordinary gift of $33.3 million moved us much closer to our target. Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis made this personal donation to help create a world-class centre for quantum-related teaching and research at Waterloo. Mike Lazaridis is the university’s chancellor and the founder, president, and co-CEO of Research in Motion.
But even friends as generous as Mike and Ophelia cannot compensate for the serious underfunding of post-secondary education in this province. In terms of per-student funding of universities, Ontario stands dead last in this country and has for a decade. We’re working hard to convince the government of Ontario to increase its investment in universities to the national average over the next three years. We’re also encouraging the province to allow universities greater flexibility in setting tuition fees, accompanied by our guaranteeing financial accessibility for students. We’re urging the province to include a 20 percent premium in its funding formula to help cover the extra costs of co-operative education. And we’re asking them to raise the co-op tax credit for employers to $2,500 per work term as an incentive to hire more co-op students.
In the meantime, we’re continuing to grow in some exciting new directions. The new home for the School of Architecture in Cambridge will open its doors to our students this fall, and our Research and Technology Park continues to expand. The CORA Group of Kitchener has been awarded the contract to build a new accelerator centre and multi-tenant facility in the park. Plans to build a new health sciences facility in downtown Kitchener are moving forward — the City of Kitchener has committed $30 million to the project, which will house Waterloo’s new School of Pharmacy. And in September 2005, the first students will be admitted to our new nanotechnology program in the Faculty of Engineering.
It promises to be quite a year.
University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
519 888 4567
http://www.uwaterloo.ca