Letter

To the Editor:

One item in the amended budget as described in Eric Smith's article "Amended budget goes to board," (Reporter, March 13) strikes a raw nerve: The University is considering using the five million dollar income from the sale of the HostExplorer Software, developed at McGill's Computing Centre by Pierre Goyette, to reduce its deficit.

Common sense suggests that some significant portion of this money should be reinvested by the University in the excellence of the programs that attract and produce students like Pierre.

McGill's School of Computer Science, where Goyette and hundreds of others studied, has only 15 professors (the same as in 1986) while its registration numbers are growing out of bounds: 356 registered undergraduate students, 119 graduate students (8 per professor!), and 440 WSUs (a WSU is a weighted student unit and measures roughly the number of students that were taught a full course load in one year). This figure of 440 represents an almost 50% increase in the last five years and breaks down to 29.3 WSUs per staff member, 50% more than the average in the faculties of Engineering and Science.

By contrast, the universities of Montreal, Toronto and Waterloo have roughly the same number of computer science students as McGill, but have over 40 professors each.

The next century belongs to information--the storage, exchange, retrieval, manipulation and processing of vast amounts of data in the most efficient way possible. The demand for computer science graduates is greater than ever.

For example, over 75% of the placements last year by IYES, McGill's internship program in engineering and science, were in the fields of computer science or computer engineering. Computing Canada, in its February 1997 issue, reports that over 20,000 information technology jobs are unfilled in this country.

Montreal's software industry is booming, and many of the recent local successes are due to McGill's School of Computer Science graduates. McGill University cannot afford to see Computer Science and Computer Engineering choked by overwhelming odds at this crucial moment in history.

Luc Devroye
School of Computer Science