Previous Justice Department Favors Recording Industry's Position in Copyright Case |
Next |
March 23, 2009, 04:33 PM ET
U. of Virginia Plans to Phase Out Public Computer Labs
The University of Virginia has begun a three-year process of shutting down all of its public computer labs as part of an effort to cut costs.
In an explanation published on the university’s Web site, information-technology officials say that students’ changing habits have rendered the public labs obsolete. A survey conducted last fall revealed that 99 percent of new students brought their own laptops to the campus. And while the labs are still heavily used (students spent 651,900 hours in the labs last year), internal data indicated that 95 percent of the time those students used the lab computers to surf the Web and read and compose text documents—tasks that officials say they could easily do on their own computers.
“In these budget times, we have to distinguish between providing essential services and providing ones that are merely convenient,” said James L. Hilton, vice president and chief information officer at the university.
While some students do rely on the lab computers to run specialized programs—such as MatLab, Eclipse, MathCAD, and SPSS—Mr. Hilton said he believed the university would be able to negotiate licensing agreements with the software companies that would allow students to run the programs on their laptops through the university’s network.
Mr. Hilton said the university now spends about $300,000 per year maintaining the labs. But it is difficult to predict how much the university will save by closing those facilities, he said, since it is not yet clear how much the new system will cost to implement.
What about the 1 percent of students without computers? Or students without printers who now rely on the labs to print out their papers? Mr. Hilton acknowledged that some issues will need to be worked out during this transition. “Printing is the bane of everyone’s existence everywhere, and we will continue working on finding better printing solutions,” said Mr. Hilton. “But there are solutions out there.”
He said that the university would be open to adjusting the plan as necessary, depending “on what impact we start to see it having.” —Steve Kolowich
Categories: Leadership
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.