UBC Reports | Vol. 47 | No. 08 | Apr.
19, 2001
Tranquilility of a transit strike
The Vancouver Sun, April 5, B5
Out at the University of B.C., Gordon Lovegrove is
surprised. Lovegrove,
the director of transportation planning, predicted Tuesday would be
the busiest
day for traffic out to the Point Grey campus, one of
the top three
commuter destinations.
It didn’t happen.
“It has caught me off-guard,” he said. “I’m amazed at how well people
are handling this.”
He cited an e-mail survey of 35,000 students, staff and faculty that
showed 45 per cent of respondents felt they lived close enough to walk or bike
to campus.
“A lot more people are walking and getting on their bike than we anticipated,”
he said.
Women embrace law
The Province, April 8, A24
Reports that women are crossing the 50 per cent enrolment mark in American
law schools have Canadian administrators wondering what took them so long to
catch up.
“That bench-mark was surpassed here a decade ago,” says UBC
law professor
Elizabeth Edinger. “We’ve been like this for at least 10 years. We’re at 56
per cent women this year.”
“Our incoming class of 2001 has 67 women and 38 men. That’s a pretty impressive
statistic,” says Yvonne Lawson, the law faculty’s career development
officer.
Going green
CAUT Bulletin, April, Feature
The UBC campus has saved more than 900 trees in the year
2000 by using
recycled paper.
Environmental considerations have even influenced the design and
construction
of buildings.
Freda Pagani, UBC’s sustainablity director, is proud of
the progress. Though she still sees room for improvement, she says
it’s important
for universities to take a stand.
“If a university can’t start
acting sustainably,
how can we expect other institutions to?”
Asked what she would say to a university that is reluctant to set up a
sustainability program, she answers, “Why would you not? You can save money,
you can have fun, you can build community and you can help save the
environment. It’s a bit of a no-brainer to me."
