UBC Reports | Vol. 48 | No. 5 | Mar. 7, 2002

Letter

Loss of Calendar cause for regret, says reader

Editor:

I was dismayed to read a notice in your Feb. 7 issue stating that "UBC Reports will no longer publish the Calendar as of March when it changes from a biweekly to a monthly publication."

While I understand that a monthly calendar might be too incomplete and unreliable to be useful, the sudden demise of this service seems to me a cause for real regret.

An informal canvas of colleagues and students suggests that I am not alone on this campus in regarding the Calendar as the best reason for picking up UBC Reports and using it as my main guide to extra-curricular academic events.

We are told that "Members of the campus community are welcome to submit events information to Athletics and Recreation's LiveAtUBC on-line calendar at www.liveat.ubc.ca." Surely even in this so-called Information Age some distinction might be kept between academic programming and sports, if only for the sake of tax-payers' perceptions of what goes on at UBC?

The final sentence of the notice announces that "Public Affairs is currently working with other campus groups to consider improvements in how the university's events listings can be accessed on-line." Which groups?

Neither of the university's two graduate colleges, which between them have accounted for a large share of listings in recent years, had been consulted at the time the notice appeared.

And why is it assumed that on-line media by themselves satisfy all calendrical needs? (Has the daily consultation of refrigerator doors declined in recent years?)

A university that makes as much fanfare about "learning communities" and "interdisciplinarity" as ours does these days ought not so carelessly to discard its best means of convening groups of people outside classes, courses, and the routines of established disciplines.

Even if we can only afford a monthly newspaper, please may we at least have a bi-monthly printed calendar?

Assoc. Prof. Mark Vessey

English Dept.