IT changes unnecessary
Consider a Rice student’s worst-case scenario: It is 4 a.m. during finals and she is finishing up a 20-page research paper. Suddenly, her computer locks up. What does she do? Normally, the answer is to call a College Computing Associate. They are helpful, in the same building and are often up at 4 a.m. as well.
The same is not true of the IT Help Desk, which is in Mudd Lab and closes at 6 p.m., at the latest. And we are afraid that the transition from college-based IT to a centralized system of Student Computer Consultants will leave students sitting in the dark — or at least in the blue glow of a screen of death (see story, Page 5).
Administrators have listed several reasons for this change, including a need to balance inconsistent college coverage and a need to track the work done by CCAs. These are not convincing reasons for a system-wide overhaul and could be solved independently.
If some colleges had poor quality CCAs, then IT needs to fix its hiring practices. Moving the problem from the colleges to Mudd Lab solves nothing. Besides, forcing SCCs to work nearly half their hour at Mudd Lab could discourage some of the best college CCAs from signing up, merely aggravating the situation.
And the need to track CCA work seems more like a Slashdot joke than a legitimate concern. If CCAs did not file tickets for work provided, then that problem should be dealt with by itself, rather than initiating a wholesale structural change that puts the burden on the users.
In the end, the greatest concern is the short hours of the IT Help Desk — most students do not even know they have a computer problem until they start their work, which is often after 6 p.m. While college-based IT will still exist, we are afraid that an emphasis on centralized IT could be the start of a slippery slope to eliminating convenient, 24-hour college-based IT.
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