ITS: Students to the Rescue
Letter from the Editor

Beyond the usual grumbling and griping about Information Technology Services, the tensions between ITS and students seems to have been especially exacerbated this semester. Nary a week has passed that this fine publication has not had a piece or letter on the subject. Things came to a head last week with the student supervisors of ITS not only sending in letters to the fine folks at The Student Life, but also sending out mailbox inserts and using ITS newly acquired poster printer to announce the launch of the new ITS Supervisor's website. While I won’t get into whether or not the supervisors paid the exorbitant ITS fee for these posters, things seemed to be looking up for the relationship between students and ITS.

This simple website provides more pertinent internet related news than any other ITS service before, even seemingly more than calling the help desk. The information is relevant and helpful, albeit slightly too technical for the average student to fully understand. The website however is something of an enigma. The entire project seems to have been the undertaking of the student workers. I applaud the initiative that the students have undertaken to provide a useful service to the student body that has heretofore not been available.

What is less laudable is that without this student initiative, the students would still be in the dark. The organization has a list of projects that it is currently undertaking including making personal faculty portals and more cryptic projects like "wireless phase II." The staff of ITS works very diligently on a variety of projects and improvements, but in the hustle and bustle of these projects the full time paid staff seems to have forgotten what I consider to be its number one priority: providing consistent and reliable internet to students.

It seems that the organization has begun catering to their own technical forays and the administration and faculty instead of its largest customer base— the students. Unlike the faculty and staff, nearly every student lives on campus permanently, and relies on the internet for academic research, familial and circular communication, as well as entertainment. Also, besides being on campus much less, the faculty and staff relies on the internet much less than those of the students' generation.
This year, ITS took on new responsibilities regarding multimedia presentation and services. Maybe these new services have caused ITS to lose its student focus. Along with losing its student focus, it also eliminated jobs that were previously held by students working with other organizations. If the ITS organization as a whole is any indicator, then it is the students that provide the most valuable services to the campus as a whole, so before taking on more duties and technical improvements, a focus on smoother operations of the servers and email connections would most benefit the campus. It is difficult to enjoy all the new technical features of ITS without having the internet or email work at all.

The students of the College not only enjoy but require consistent reliable internet services. While the student may benefit by the awkwardly creepy prospect of their teachers seeing their Look Book pictures online, or by using their laptop by the pool, the easiest way to keep the student happy would be to focus the staff on the most rudimentary of ITS services: the plain and simple internet. Thankfully, the students have taken care of their own, and the proletariat has solidarity once more.