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| Response to uws readers (David Johnston) |
Contributed by: uws archive on Friday, September 06 2002 @ 12:09 AM CDT
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This is an archived story posted by David Johnston. You can view the original
here.
Dear Jesse:
Thanks to you and uwstudent.org for compiling these 10 questions from students. I believe normal university practice has been followed in dealing with external funding in the case of the Microsoft Alliance. I hope these responses will yield better understanding of this initiative, which is designed to add value to our students’ learning experience.
- Do you feel that it is part of the job of the university administration to consult students on such partnerships (particularly with such controversial companies), or do you feel that the university administration is entitled to make these decisions unilaterally?
Decision-making at universities is rarely unilateral. With respect to academic decisions for courses, each Faculty uses established processes and committees to come to such decisions and determines the scope of the consultation.
As to the UW/Microsoft alliance, when it was learned that Microsoft Canada was interested in creating a $10-million Academic Alliance Fund, the Director of the Institute for Computer Research took the lead in preparing an application with discussions on research and curriculum initiatives with interested faculty in the faculties of Engineering and Mathematics over an eight month period. There was particular interest in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in adopting new tools used in the introductory course ECE 150 and creating a high school outreach initiative called 050. The instructors and Department Chair discussed the proposed change which led to this part of the Microsoft alliance.
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Already, enrollment is outstripping CECS' ability to keep the placement numbers uphow do you think limiting first-year E&CE students' development skills to a proprietary Microsoft platform will impact co-op hiring from other companies?
My understanding is that the professors responsible for the E&CE 150 course believe they will be expanding rather than limiting students' development skills by introducing C# when the course is revised for September 2003, and that C, C++, and Java will continue to be used throughout the undergraduate curriculum. I am told that this particular course has used four different main programming languages in the last 10 years, which suggests that the professors responsible for the course are regularly adjusting to new developments and are trying to ensure that students are exposed to a diversity of languages.
The point is that students are learning concepts and skills that are transferable, thereby enhancing co-op students’ placement options. C# has already been picked up by a number of companies, and has potential in the marketplace.
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How much is too much influence for a private entity to have over the curriculum delivered?
Decisions about what material should be taught are the collective responsibility of the professor(s) teaching a particular course, the department and its departmental curriculum committee. Private entity software or support may be used if it’s deemed this will enhance the students’ learning experience.
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Could you express some thoughts on the issue that the recent agreement with Microsoft might damage the reputation for academic freedom for which all Universities stand?
I don’t believe this arrangement does damage to academic freedom. From our beginnings in 1957, the University of Waterloo has worked with the private sector particularly as educational partners in providing stimulating co-op placements. Currently, we partner with more than 3,000 employers to place more than 10,000 students. Co-op partnerships and other sponsorship arrangements work very well for the university; they enhance academic freedom and learning, provided that both parties recognize conflicts may arise from time to time and must be dealt with appropriately and according to established university policies and practices.
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Can the agreement be reversed/halted? What would cause it to be reversed?
In the case of the curriculum initiatives, the proposed start dates are September 2003 (for E&CE 150) and March 2003 (for E&CE 050) respectively. If either party concludes that its understandings and objectives are not being met, it may give notice and cease to continue that part of the agreement.
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Is it appropriate for a University to enter into an irreversible agreement that is basically a surprise-announcement?
This initiative has been under discussion in E&CE and the School of Computer Science since January 2002. By late August the discussions had reached enough consensus that UW was able to become the first recipient of a $2.3 million award from Microsoft Canada’s Academic Innovation Alliance fund ($10 million available to institutions over five years). The University is now proceeding with more detailed planning of the specific projects over the next year. Microsoft and UW have a long relationship through joint research initiatives and particularly through co-op student and graduate placements.
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What decision-making bodies has this proposal passed through?
Responsibility and authority for the decision-making in this case lies with the researchers and instructors who are directly involved in the three projects to be funded under the agreement. As to the curriculum initiatives involving C#, this decision is overseen by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Studies Committee, the Faculty of Engineering Academic Policy Committee, and the Engineering Undergraduate Studies Committee (including the Year One Implementation Committee).
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Could you please describe the consultation process that resulted in this decision? Who was involved in the decision?
As I understand it, the consultation process was led by the Director of the Institute for Computer Research. As the coordinator of the three individual projects, he works with a wide variety of interested academic colleaguesresearchers or instructors depending on the projectplus the Department Chairs, curriculum committees and Deans of Engineering and Mathematics.
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What University level policies are in place that lay out what may be put on the table when dealing with potential benefactors (investors)?
A quick glance through the UW Policies Manual suggests the following policies give guidance to agreements for external funding:
- Donations and Gifts in Kind #7
- Research Grants/Contracts #26
- Ethical Behaviour #33
- Contract Research at UW #41
- Conflict of Interest #69
- Intellectual Property Rights #73
There are also guidelines articulated by the Senate or Board of Governors from time to time that may be pertinent to agreements with external parties.
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Are there plans like this in the works, in Math or in any other faculty?
The best place to get information on planned changes is from the Dean of the particular Faculty or Chair of the particular department. There is a great deal of activity happening every day, largely centered in the work of individuals or small groups of faculty members. Last year, the university received $115 million in external research funding, and $30 million in private gifts in kind or cash.
To reiterate, external funding does not drive curriculum or research decisions. Nevertheless, external funds are welcome in part due to government funding cuts. To illustrate, we were forced to make a 5.5 percent base cut to our operating budget this past year, and only seven years ago, we made a 15 percent base cut as a result of reduced government operating grants, and since government grants do not recognize inflation we have had persistent annual real cuts of 3 to 4 per cent for the past decade.
As to the Microsoft Canada Academic Alliance Fund, we may make a further application in a year or two, but we will have to respect the fact that other universities will want to have their proposals considered, and that we were given the first opportunity.
I hope you and your readers find these comments helpful.
Sincerely,
David Johnston,
President
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| Authored by: uws archive on Friday, September 06 2002 @ 02:38 AM CDT |
This is an archived comment posted by Mark. You can view the original
here. Here are some direct questions I would like to see President Johnston answer:
1. Were students consulted? (this was asked indirectly, but Johnston's reply danced around a basic "no")
2. What are the details of the agreement? Is curriculum-change tied to funding?
3. Can we see a full copy of the agreement?
4. Why isn't there truly public discourse before agreements of this nature are signed?
The answers Johnston did provide don't seem to say anything of substance, especially with regards to the main issue of contention - was the E&CE curriculum bought?[ Parent ]
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| Authored by: uws archive on Friday, September 06 2002 @ 01:32 PM CDT |
This is an archived comment posted by Ryan Chen-Wing. You can view the original
here. I saw E&CE Chair Tony Vannelli today and he told me that ECE 150 will use both C++ and C#.
He stressed that there is no curriculum change.
I am sure he will reiterate similar comments and more at the forum on 12 Sept.
[ Parent ]
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| Authored by: uws archive on Friday, September 06 2002 @ 02:57 PM CDT |
This is an archived comment posted by Prabhakar Ragde. You can view the original
here. President Johnston has chosen his words carefully, and it is easy for readers to make incorrect assumptions. I will quote parts of his message in italics, and point out some potential pitfalls after each quote.
With respect to academic decisions for courses, each Faculty uses established processes and committees to come to such decisions and determines the scope of the consultation.
What Johnston does not say is that established processes and committees were utilized in this case. At least with respect to CS, they were not. (I do not know the precise sequence of events within E&CE and cannot comment on that.)
As to the UW/Microsoft alliance, when it was learned that Microsoft Canada was interested in creating a $10-million Academic Alliance Fund, the Director of the Institute for Computer Research took the lead in preparing an application with discussions on research and curriculum initiatives with interested faculty in the faculties of Engineering and Mathematics over an eight month period.
The faculty who did take part in the discussions may have been interested, but they were not all interested faculty -- in particular, in CS, they appear to have consisted of the Chair of the Department and a hand-picked set of lecturers, and excluded those faculty whose responsibility it was to actually oversee curriculum.
Decisions about what material should be taught are the collective responsibility of the professor(s) teaching a particular course, the department and its departmental curriculum committee.
But in this case, in CS, neither the department nor the departmental curriculum committee were set to be consulted before the announcement; the news leaked, and a hastily-called meeting of the curriculum committee vetoed the move in CS. Again, I don't know what happened in E&CE, but I would be very surprised if the situation were not similar.
This initiative has been under discussion in E&CE and the School of Computer Science since January 2002. By late August the discussions had reached enough consensus that UW was able to become the first recipient of a $2.3 million award from Microsoft Canada’s Academic Innovation Alliance fund ($10 million available to institutions over five years).
January 2002 was when a small number of people in both departments began discussions, and as far as I can tell, the "consensus" was among a proper subset of those people.
Responsibility and authority for the decision-making in this case lies with the researchers and instructors who are directly involved in the three projects to be funded under the agreement.
Here is a clear admission that only the instructors who wished to develop the new material were involved in the decision. But this is followed by:
As to the curriculum initiatives involving C#, this decision is overseen by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Studies Committee, the Faculty of Engineering Academic Policy Committee, and the Engineering Undergraduate Studies Committee (including the Year One Implementation Committee).
Note the use of the passive tense. This does not mean that these committees were consulted in this decision. It means that they do have the power to alter the decision, if they wish to go against the wishes of the President and the Chair of their department, and give back money already being allocated in budget decisions.
As I understand it, the consultation process was led by the Director of the Institute for Computer Research. As the coordinator of the three individual projects, he works with a wide variety of interested academic colleaguesresearchers or instructors depending on the projectplus the Department Chairs, curriculum committees and Deans of Engineering and Mathematics.
DiCiccio could be said to have worked with the CS Curriculum Committee, in that he was asked to be present at its emergency meeting of August 8. But apart from that, he had no involvement with this committee, nor did he inform it of any developments.
To reiterate, external funding does not drive curriculum or research decisions.
But it certainly influences them. Note that this has long been the case in research decisions. What is worrisome in this case is the combination of a precedent being set for external funding influencing a curriculum decision, plus the apparent subversion of established procedure to ensure that funding. --PR [ Parent ]
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| Authored by: uws archive on Saturday, September 07 2002 @ 06:42 AM CDT |
This is an archived comment posted by Ka-Ping Yee. You can view the original
here. Note that the original fact sheet posted by UW on the alliance has disappeared! The page at
http://www.uwaterloo.ca/documents/microsoft20020816.html
has just been quietly replaced by a new page - a statement from the Dean, Sujeet Chaudhuri. I don't know if this has anything to do with my letter in the Record, which contains that URL... but it is a rather interesting coincidence that the page was changed on the same day the letter appeared.
The new page makes some defensive statements about curriculum policies, but says nothing about the facts of the Microsoft agreement. There is no trace of the information that was on the old page.
I have a saved copy of the old page at my site for reference: http://zesty.ca/mcaia/. [ Parent ]
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| Authored by: uws archive on Saturday, September 07 2002 @ 08:09 AM CDT |
This is an archived comment posted by Ka-Ping Yee. You can view the original
here. I cannot be present at the forum, but I would
really like someone to put the following three
challenges to the panel.
1. Here is a key question:
1. What objective evidence was presented during the decision-making process to justify
switching to C#?
In particular:
1a. Do you have any objective evidence
that engineering students want to learn C#?
1b. Do you have any objective evidence
that engineering employers want students to
know C#?
If such evidence
was not provided, we must conclude that the switch
was motivated by the money, not on its own merits.
2. There has been a great deal of controversy and
many complaints from all sides, including the faculty
and administration, that information about the
agreement is unclear, vague, or inaccurate. It's
been three weeks now.
2. Why not just show everyone the agreement?
Surely this would clear everything up instantly.
The Dean and President have claimed that no policies
have been violated and the integrity of UW has been
maintained. Why not remove all doubt?
3. Notice the
Eligibility Criteria slide from the press conference and
look at the "Eligibility Criteria" section in
Microsoft's backgrounder on the MCAIA. The sponsorship criteria clearly state a requirement for
"Focus on C#", among other things.
3. How do you explain accepting an
agreement that is defined by the sponsor as
sponsorship in exchange for a required
curriculum change? [ Parent ]
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| Authored by: uws archive on Saturday, September 07 2002 @ 11:45 AM CDT |
This is an archived comment posted by Douglas Stebila. You can view the original
here. Over the past two weeks myself and other student leaders (Brenda Slomka, Feds President, Ryan O'Connor, Feds VP Education) have met with some of the key players in this issue, including Dr. Johnston (UW President), Tony Vanelli (Chair of E&CE), and Vic DiCiccio (Director of ICR).
Let me try to write a little about the timeline that I've pieced together from these conversations.
- before 2002 - various UW administrators think about wanting to approach Microsoft for money
- 2002 January, February - Vanelli and DiCiccio each write $10 million proposals to Microsoft Research and "whoever at Microsoft" respectively; both were vague and pie in the sky; no serious response
- 2002 March - DiCiccio and Frank Tompa (Director of CS) go to Seattle
- 2002 April - Microsoft comes to campus and meets with about 10 faculty - mostly those who teach ECE 150 and those who eventually became involved with the tablet PC research
- 2002 end of April - DiCiccio writes a ~$2.5 million proposal to Microsoft Canada based on discussions over the past two months
- 2002 late June - MS Canada says "think so"
- 2002 July - MS Canada says "yes"
- 2002 August 14 - press announcement
- 2002 August 20 - Bill Gates comes to campus
Now, some other notes.
First, no agreement has been signed. At the time of the announcement, it had been clear that MS and UW had come to an understanding on what an agreement would constitute. That is what was announced. The agreement is currently being drafted. DiCiccio indicated to me that he is trying to make two agreements - one related to curriculum integration and one for everything else.
[ Parent ]
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| Authored by: uws archive on Monday, September 09 2002 @ 01:05 PM CDT |
This is an archived comment posted by Doug Sibley. You can view the original
here. I would like to see student-wide referenda on two questions:
a) Do you wish the Federation of Students to encourage the senate of the university,
on your behalf, to pass a policy prohibiting the university from accepting any funding
which requires altering in any way what is taught in courses offered by UW?
b) Do you wish the Federation of Students to encourage the Board of Governers
of the university, on your behalf, to take the diciplinary action of termination against
the president for failing to protect the academic integrity of the UW and for the failure
to properly consult the curriculum committees before announcing changes in their
scope of jurisdiction?[ Parent ]
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| Authored by: uws archive on Tuesday, September 10 2002 @ 10:20 PM CDT |
This is an archived comment posted by simon. You can view the original
here. I received the following letter, from Laura M. Talbot-Allan, in response to my own letter to Dr. Johnston. I wrote to them that the alliance threatened my continued financial support of UW. I don't know if the response is a form letter, or if it is a personal response.
Dear Simon:
Thank you for your letter regarding Microsoft. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of misinformation and miscommunication regarding this gift to UW.
Be assured of the following:
* the university would not have entered into this arrangement if it didn't, first and foremost, meet its own instructional and research goals;
* no corporate donor to UW can "mandate curriculum" via a donation or any other influence mechanism; C# was chosen by the chair of the department who consults with instructors; the department feels it will add value to what is currently taught;
* C# would be one of the languages taught undergraduates in their studies here (including C+ (sic), C++, Java etc.); an implementation decision for September 2003 is still be (sic) developed in cooperation with engineering faculty and the curriculum committee;
* curriculum is never for sale; decisions of curriculum change (sic) are made by faculty members in consultation with the department curriculum review committee;
* finally, there are a number of university policies, adhered to rigorously in this case, that guard against undo influence or a "sell-out."
We hope that a student forum on September 12 with engineering students, faculty and administrators will provide for good discussion and better understanding. I will keep you informed about what transpires at that meeting and on any other material developments.
Meantime, your support is greatly appreciated. UW is a great institution held in high regard world-wide. You degree hold great value because it comes from UW. I hope you will continue to support the university and stay in touch.
Again, thank you for your concern,
Laura M. Talbot-Allan
Vice-President, University Relations[ Parent ]
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| Authored by: uws archive on Thursday, September 12 2002 @ 03:15 AM CDT |
This is an archived comment posted by simon. You can view the original
here. Here's a collection of quotes from the last week or so. Quotes are taken from the following sources: uws 2, uws 3, dean's letter, kw record 3, fauw, fact sheet, kw record letter. Previous quote sheets are here and here. Edited for readability only, edits are in [square brackets]. I also re-ordered some of them for clarity and added [...] to indicate I did that.
The organization, obviously, is my own invention.
I'm sorry if it seems unclear.
The Emperor's New Clothes
Wired News: "The funding partnership was signed Aug. 13."
The Emperor Defends His New Clothes
David Johnston (President) in Fact Sheet of Aug 16: "The University of Waterloo has chosen to add C#."
KW Record Aug 17: "Yesterday, university president David Johnston posted a letter and fact sheet on the university Web site to defend the Microsoft-UW alliance."
The People Observe No Clothes
Sujeet Chaudhuri (Dean of Engineering) in Letter of Sept 6: "The previously posted fact sheet unfortunately contains inaccurate information on the use of C sharp."
Sujeet Chaudhuri: "C sharp is under discussion in the Curriculum Committee in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for the redesign of a course for September 2003.
Douglas Stebila (UW Governor): "First, no agreement has been signed. [...] The agreement is currently being drafted."
The Comic Relief
Ka-Ping Yee, (CompEng Alumnus): "If the agreement hasn't been signed, then what was signed by Johnston on the tablet PC at the press conference?"
The Word of the Day
Ryan Chen-Wing (UWS): "I saw E&CE Chair Tony Vannelli today (Sept 6) ... he stressed that there is no curriculum change."
Douglas Stebila: "The three administrators I've spoken with all understand it not to be a curriculum change since it does not involve a course calendar change."
Prabhakar Ragde: "Johnston, who chairs Senate, can say, '[...] no motion can apply, because this is not a curriculum change.'"
The Faculty Speak
Faculty Association of UW: "Established procedure [...] might have been circumvented; the academic freedom of the faculty [...] could be compromised; [...] the University could be perceived as endorsing an external organization's products."
Ryan O'Connor: "The next Senate meeting will be held 16 September at 4:30pm in the Board & Senate Room on the 3rd Floor, Needles Hall."
The Professional Ideals
Ka-Ping Yee: "The code of ethics of Professional Engineers Ontario demands that an engineer act at all times with 'fidelity to public needs' and 'devotion to high ideals of professional integrity.' But with this action, UW has violated ideals of professional integrity [...] allowing the engineering and computer engineering curriculum to be directly influenced by a corporate donation."
The Dream
Wired News (quoting Frank Clegg, Pres of MS Canada): "'I'm proud of this. I'm so pleased,' he said. 'This is something I've dreamed about being able to do for over the 11 years I've been at Microsoft.'"
Douglas Stebila: "In speaking with Dr. Johnston, he gave us an idea of the grander vision here [...] What this all means is that what has happened with Microsoft will happen again. It is essential that we learn from what has happened and is happening with the MS deal."
The Secret
Yaacov Iland: "A lot of the misinformation about which Douglas and others complain may be due to changing information."
Yaacov Iland: "This is a major benefit of not publicising the agreement. [...] Yes, I know that there, apparently, isn't a written agreement. [...] As long as both parties agree, it can be changed without anyone knowing what the old version said. "
[ Parent ]
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| Authored by: uws archive on Monday, September 16 2002 @ 09:41 AM CDT |
This is an archived comment posted by Bill Graham. You can view the original
here. UW -> UMSW (University of Microsoft at Waterloo)[ Parent ]
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