Senate Agenda, May 21, 1999 - EXHIBIT VIII

Report on the 245th Meeting of the Council of Ontario Universities

D.M.R. Bentley, Academic Colleague

At the meetings of the Academic Colleagues and the Council of Ontario Universities in Toronto on April 9, several matters of interest and importance to Senate were decided and discussed:













1. At the Academic Colleagues' meeting, some consternation was occasioned by the information that the COU Task Force on Secondary School Issues might recommend that after the abolition of OACs there be no minimum number of courses (for example, 4 university courses) for entry to Ontario universities. (At present the minimum is 6 OACs.) A further cause for concern was the information that, in the absence of clear guidelines from the Ministry of Education and the universities themselves about future entrance requirements, some school boards are giving students advice that is possibly erroneous and potentially damaging. The Waterloo School Board, for example, is informing students who will be entering Grade 9 next year that they need not take an English course if they are planning to go into Engineering.

On a different but not entirely unrelated matter, several colleagues expressed misgivings at the amount of money, time, and energy now being expended on recruitment, particularly, relative to their budgets, by smaller universities.