ITS proposes fee increase for sur?ng

A proposed $9.84 Student Technology Fee increase could change the way Information Technology Services funds itself.

The fee would take into account how often students use their computers to surf sites such as Facebook and YouTube instead of doing academic work, and would allocate the funds respectively.

At Friday’s student fee advisory subcommittee meeting, ITS Communication Technologies requested a student technology fee that will cover students’ personal usage — approximated by ITS at 31 percent of all technological activity.

A decision on the fee has not been made, and it will be discussed at this Friday’s meeting.

Vice Chancellor for Information Technology Larry Conrad said ITS has not needed to make this type of funding change before.

“In the past, ITS has gone to the budget committee asking for one-time allocations of funds.”

But budget cuts have changed the landscape.

“The last few years this hasn’t been the case. We haven’t received those investments,” Conrad said.

In past years building maintenance has been deferred in the interest of cost saving. On Friday, Conrad described 3,000 building switches throughout campus, instrumental to the technological network, that will be obsolete if not properly funded.

“We feel like going to the budget committee and asking for leftover millions to upgrade the campus network is not going to be a winning strategy going forward,” he said.

“We’re putting forward a comprehensive funding model that will cover maintenance, operation and life cycle costs,” he said.

The model divides technology use on campus into 69 percent academic use, which will be funded by central academic funds, and 31 percent personal use, which the fee will cover.

A key philosophical change in the funding model, however, might detrimentally affect graduate students who are currently under the employment of their departments.

These students will have to pay their student share and might indirectly have to fund their department’s employment share as well.

Michael Bertucci, president of the Graduate and Professional Student Federation and a member of the committee, was apprehensive about the logistics of the fee increase.

“I just do not want to be double counted. It makes me not want to make a decision about this issue in our meeting,” he said.

Members struggled to come up with a solution, given that the fees are constructed to be distributed fairly between students and departments.

Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Winston Crisp said if they alter the count to only include graduate students once, every student will have to pay a higher fee.

“Grad students might argue that it’s fair for undergraduates to pay a higher number, but the number is the number,” Crisp said.

While the fee increase’s fate remains in question until the subcommittee’s next meeting, Bertucci has indicated his discomfort by relating it to another contentious fee that was approved earlier this year.

“I’m not completely comfortable with how this is being fixed,” Bertucci said.

“Like the transit fee, I don’t know how this can be fixed.”

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