Bat Cave Therapy Project on Rocky Ground

The University of Waterloo’s plans to install a Bat Cave for Terror Therapy seemed problem-free a few weeks ago. However after slight student protest, plans seem to be up in the air.

Yesterday the University of Waterloo revealed that the Bat Cave initiative, announced a year ago, has a possible opening date for the winter exam period of 2014. However, the great minds behind the Bat Cave Therapy project will have to overcome many obstacles in the upcoming week. Bat Cave Therapy is theorized to cause a boost in adrenaline, causing a sensation of primal terror, which is intended to put the terror experienced during exam into perspective. But with a projected cost of $155,000, the therapy project was met with immediate criticism from both students who felt that the project was too expensive, and faculty, who felt that the project not innovative enough.

The Centre for Innovative Stress Reduction (or CISR), a joint project with Brock University, issued the following statement earlier this week: “the Bat Cave project has hit several potentially fatal walls.” These “fatal walls” were not listed in the statement, but an anonymous email to the Waterloo Honk said that one of the major setbacks in the project was the discovery that not all bats drink blood. “We just figured they all did. Fruit munching bats are way less scary.”

Students Unsatisfied with Delays

Responses among students were varied. The majority of Arts students were critical of both the grammar and poor use of metaphor. Some did voice concerns that the Bat Cave would only be open to Math and Engineering students.

“I mean if a hundred some people came out to support those socialists at WPIRG last term, I really don’t see why we can’t mobilize students to support the Bat Cave,” said the head of the Business Outreach and Economic Student Union. Three members of BORESU, including one very lost looking German exchange student, protested outside the University of Waterloo President’s office for over an hour until a cleaning lady informed them the President was not in the building.

Project Manager Britanica Smith was very uncooperative when the Waterloo Honk attempted to contact her by phone over the holidays. She inexplicably refused to answer any of the Honk’s questions even when contacted at home on Christmas Eve, saying merely “where did you get this number?”

What do you think? Could Bat Cave Therapy be Waterloo’s most innovative achievement yet?

Innovation Meets Tuition: University of Waterloo’s New Innovative Plan

The Innovation Reserve will add a further 8 floors beneath the Math and Computer Building. This will bump it to #1 on the Most Confusing Layout list of UW buildings.

The University of Waterloo is considering a new idea for students applying for first year in the near future: alternatives to tuition money.

“We have to acknowledge that we’re going to run out of innovative ideas in the future. I mean there are so many new and exciting innovations happening all the time at the University (of Waterloo) that we may hit a point where innovations simply run dry” said President Furidaun Hamdullaper in a phone conversation with The Honk yesterday morning. President Hamdullaper went on to say “our Committee for Innovation has projected a potential drop in new ideas in the year 2034. This is assuming that our rate of Innovation Consumption continues at our current rate, of course. We’re really trying to ensure that we don’t hit Peak Innovation too hard.”

The University is currently looking at a system in which applicants can present a series of ideas for research to the University which, upon acceptance, will be cataloged and stored by University of Waterloo Strategic Innovation Reserve and can be drawn upon in the case of a university wide drop in the number of ideas being generated by professors. The students will then be given a deduction from their tuition, based on a scale currently unknown, depending on how good an idea they present. Once the ideas are recorded they are submitted for copyright and catalogued, then placed in the Innovation Reserve facility, currently being built underneath the Math and Computer Building.

Dr. Jim Lamanche, a sitting member on the Committee for Innovation and professor of Metaciviltronic Engineering, highlighted some of the problems currently facing professors at UW during a recent interview with The Honk. “We have about 100 years of innovations left, that’s undeniable, but with the higher number of graduate study students and the continued development of colleges into more traditional ‘university’-esque areas of study we’re seeing a growing stress on various universities Innovation reserves. That’s a scary thing, especially since these colleges are outside the influence of the United Universities and want to expand their use of Innovations at a potentially exponential rate. Also they have a great deal of Innovative ideas readily at hand, while universities are having to expand far beyond traditional comfort zones into potentially bizarre, mundane and potentially dangerous areas of study”

The United Universities, a council that, according to their website, is committed to “maintaining inter-university peace and security, developing friendly relations among universities and promoting social progress, better research standards and academic rights” released a report in 2011 stating that many of the top universities have already have similar reserves. The report believed that there could be up to 4.1 million ideas in reserves similar to the one UW is implementing. Approximately one hundred thousand ideas are used globally every day, so there is currently debate over how long those ideas will last once Peak Innovation is reached.

None, however, have implemented the “Innovation for Learning” program that UW is considering. “It’s just another way we are a top innovator in our field” President Hamdullaper said, “we want to attract the most idea-rich students from all over the world while maintaining ahead of the curve.”

The proposition is going to a general debate in May, with a hopeful implementation date of 2015.