FACULTY SENATE UNIVERSITY COMPUTER AND ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE

MINUTES OF THE MEETING OF Nov 1, 2000, Room 217, Stockbridge Hall

Approved: with corrections Dec. 5, 2000

Present: E. Cutting, D. Damery, J. Dubach, M. Hanley, G. Hough, J. Kunkel (Sec.), B. MacDougall (Chair), E. May, R. Sailer, N. Sims, M. Wingertsman

Bruce MacDougall called the meeting to order at 12:07 p.m.

1. Election of Officers.

a. Joe Kunkel was nominated, seconded and elected to chair the committee.

b. Former chair Bruce MacDougall handed the gavel to Joe.

c. Bruce McCandless was nominated seconded and elected to be secretary of the committee.

2. Future of the Committee

a. A broad ranging discussion was opened on the function and potential roles of the committee. Should we follow up on the accepted mandate to form a TLTR? What has happened to the TLTR project?

b. John Dubach informed us that something along the lines of the TLTR is moving forward slowly and that the services side of the issue had first been involved in meetings (Library, OIT, AIMS?, Registrar?, CAS?, Cont.Ed.?, Dissability?, Space?) and recently faculty input into the committee had been sought.

c. Acting as Devil's advocate someone suggested eliminating the computer account fee. To some member's surprise John Dubach agreed that eliminating the fee would streamline several processes. Unless everyone has an OIT account (regardless of fee) it is not efficient to design protocols that assume each member of the university community has one.  The graduate student union has already determined that its members should not pay the fee.  Eliminating the fee for all students would allow OIT accounts to be assigned more efficiently tied simply to a students registration.  This would allow a proxy server to give access to our system to anyone/anywhere who could validate their registration.

d. OIT estimates that 85% of students have a computer.

e. Several faculty noted that students using other internet providers present problems in assuming they all have the same services available (e.g. local file storage capability).

f. The committee was reminded that the Board of Higher Education, as reported in a Boston Globe article, has mandated that each UMass student shall have a laptop.  This is counter to a sense of the committee in our deliberations several years ago.

g. Ernie May reminded us that unless we present a formal motion on which the Faculty Senate can vote, our deliberations can not result in any pressure for action by the administration. If the Faculty Senate passes a motion, the administration must respond within a time certain with its objections; or the motion essentially becomes a mandate on their action.

h. Norman Sims then restated the two issues on which we might fashion appropriate motions that would represent useful work by our committee:

(1) Removal of the computer account fee.

(2) The mandated ownership of laptops by all undergraduates.

i. The above two issues will be major agenda items for our future meetings.

j. We discussed efforts to broaden faculty representation on our committee. We are mandated to have 15 faculty members but our ex-officio members often outnumber faculty in attendance.  While our ex-officio members contribute valuable input to the committee, the Faculty Senate is looking for informed faculty deliberations over the important issues, rather than administrative deliberations which are already represented by the administration.

k. Open discussion of potential new members brought up names of several faculty in a broad selection of departments.  Ernie May suggested that the Committee on Committees will have further nominations for committee membership in the near future but that suggestions of particular members who are interested in serving would be appreciated.

l. As no particular day or time was found to fit anyones schedule we resolved to follow our last years practice in setting meeting times on a variety of days and times which will fit all members some of the time.

3. The meeting adjourned at 13:00

Respectfully Submitted

Joseph G. Kunkel

joe@bio.umass.edu