Since you’re in “administrative affairs” you don’t have any real pull, but I would have isolated things into three interconnected networks for admin, faculty, and students, with faculty given access to the student area, but students blocked out of any other area. The faculty could deal with students in their area, but you don’t worry about raids on grades or other protected information. One common network is a bad idea for a number of reasons, but funding may have made it necessary.

There are solutions, but they require time and money, which isn’t going to be forthcoming in todays tax environment. People what problems resolved, but they don’t want to pay for them.

The flipside of that is that my boss is now having to pay an extra $10 a month for the dubious “privilege” of getting a gigabyte of mail storage for himself, his assistant director, and me. With disk space dirt cheap these days and more and more business being conducted on the internet, I can’t fathom why they still think a 500MB mailbox is supposed to be good enough (and that’s the upgraded option). One proposal description file from one of the 100+ faculty I work with on coordinating submissions can easily suck up a couple of megabytes, without even really trying. Those 100+ faculty submitted well over 100 proposals last year, and we’re on track to do the same or a few more this year. Not to mention the fact that if they’re doing their jobs correctly and I’m doing mine, there are going to be multiple drafts of that narrative flying back and forth between us as I make suggestions and they incorporate them.

The end result being that, until I got the super-deluxe 1GB mailbox, I was having to archive everything more than a month or two old, just to keep a reasonable amount of space free for incoming and outgoing correspondence. It’s a major pain in the arse to archive with our pitiful e-mail client, and since I archive to our network drive so as to ensure daily backup with secure off-site storage, just in case, that also means I can’t access my e-mail archive unless I’m physically on campus somewhere.

As far as I’m concerned, the students ought to have one gateway and one set of fiber, and the administrators ought to have a completely separate gateway/fiber set. But I know that will never happen.

As an administrator, I would have loved to have banned all high volume downloads because it slows the entire system, but at my level it would have been a pain to try to discriminate between a video/music download that was illegal and the same thing being sent as part of a class assignment. There are things done in almost every discipline these days that require massive data transfers and university IT departments are not usually very high on the pecking the order. I received a lot more respect as an assistant professor than as the system administrator.

Every university IT shop I know about has posted rules about sharing copyrighted materials of any kind. These days UWF has warnings about copyright violations posted on every copy machine on campus. If you find out about it, you stop it because of the effect on the network, as much as the law, but too many IT departments depend on student aides for much of the operational work, because the budget money just isn’t available to hire full-time people.

Though of course the flipside is that what the students are doing is illegal. Whether it should be or not is another question, and whether it’s an effective marketing strategery for the recording industry to be this heavy-handed is totally not a question at all. But if the students weren’t trying to boost music without paying for it, they wouldn’t have gotten themselves into that situation.

It occurs to me to wonder, however, whether the provision would even stand up in court if passed and signed into law. Seems to me there was something in one of the telecommunications acts that made ISPs unreachable for bad acts of customers who were using their services to commit fraud or other crimes. As long as the university has a policy in place about not using its resources for illegal downloads, they should be able to claim immunity under that provision.