UNR cuts e-mail system
For about 20 years, upon entrance into the University of Nevada, Reno, students have been provided with standardized e-mail addresses in order to make it easier to communicate with professors and administration outside of class.
At a time when e-mail was not free and readily available in homes, UNR implemented the service to provide students with a quicker way to receive notifications of events and announcements and to have direct communication with professors outside of class, according to Steven Zink, vice president of Information Technology at UNR.
Nowadays, with e-mail being such a necessity in everyday life, providers such as Google, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo and a number of others offer e-mail addresses for free, Zink said.
The free alternatives, infrequency of use by students and need to cut costs are the motivation behind the decision to eliminate the Fallon Webmail e-mailing system from the university’s standards, going into effect in the fall 2010 semester.
“Best we can tell, only about 20 percent of existing UNR e-mail accounts assigned are used,” Zink said.
However, Zink mentioned that usage, in the majority of cases, means that a student logs into his/her e-mail account once to insert a command to have those e-mails forwarded to a personal account.
The most recent e-mailing system at UNR is provided by System Computing Services, part of the Nevada System of Higher Education, and in comparison to what the other large companies offer to the public, Zink said it is a far inferior system.
By inferior, he said that the system doesn’t provide enough storage, is inefficient in terms of speed and is costly to the university.
System Computing Services hasn’t provided hard numbers yet, but Zink said, “This will save a couple of million dollars in the next two years.”
UNR will be following a growing trend among colleges and universities throughout the country, Zink said. More than 1,000 colleges have already converted their standard e-mailing systems to outsourced ones provided by professional services like Google and Microsoft, according to a 2008 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a Washington D.C. based news source for people in academia.
However, the article predicts that by outsourcing the services, it still confines students to a standardized system, and who knows, those companies could potentially charge the school in years to come.
The constraints are why UNR administration has decided to give students the freedom to choose the e-mail service provider they want, Zink said.
Actually, students already have the option to change their e-mail addresses to their personal ones through ePaws, Zink said, which will be the way current students will have to update those e-mail accounts when the time comes closer to this going into effect.
“My philosophy is, why make the student jump through this hoop? Let them get the
communications to the mail box they want … give them the choice,” Zink said.
Alison Harvey, professor of English and core humanities, brought up the issue of identity associated with the students’ UNR accounts but agreed with Zink that it wouldn’t affect students all that much.
“(Students) may wish to have their e-mail reflect the fact that they are a student at a university. (However) I suppose with e-mail available free from Gmail, among others, it would not necessarily be a hardship for students not to be provided an e-mail account through UNR,” Harvey said.
On the contrary, Jennifer Ring, professor of political science is very displeased with the decision.
“It sounds like a very bad idea. There are times when I need to reach an entire class quickly, and the only way I can do that is if they have UNR e-mail,” Ring said.
For 18-year-old freshman Vince Fernan, the university e-mailing system makes it easier to separate school-related emails from personal, everyday usage, but won’t be much of a loss to him after it is cut.
“It helps me so that I don’t get those things mixed up, but I won’t mind when we don’t have them anymore.”
Harmony Hilderbrand, a 21 year-old photography major, also agrees that eliminating the wasteful system won’t bother her.
“For me, I don’t mind either way. If it saves money, keeps classes and teachers from being cut and prevents tuition from rising, then by all means cut the student e-mails.”
Zink and other UNR administration are working on a coordinated communications campaign that will announce the issue school-wide in the coming weeks.
Danielle Pearson can be reached at news@nevadasagebrush.com.
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18 Responses to “UNR cuts e-mail system”
I suppose this will eliminate any access to student discounts on sites that use your university email address to verify the discount.
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Exactly! I won’t be able to get Foreign Affairs at a discount anymore.
You know, no matter how much you try, you can never get past the brute fact that this university is pretty much…crap. Outside of a few things.
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Looks like the university hasn’t thought through the unintended consequences of this plan. Or it has and it doesn’t care that students won’t get discounts anymore because they won’t have a .edu e-mail address.
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This is pretty ridiculous, does it really cost “a couple million dollars” to run it every for two years? This isn’t the 90s any more.
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I really like my fallon email. I use it all the time for professional and school use. I think it’s more impressive to get an email from .edu than .hotmail. Just my thoughts!
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This is very disappointing, I could understand overhauling it to make it more efficient, but really…how low-rent are we to make our university students rely upon gmail for their e-mail? I thought we were trying to become a world class university, and the appearance of being so is pretty important. Fakin’ it ’till you make it…
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The support costs probably come from maintaining inactive accounts or the accounts of those no longer at the school. I agree the $2 million figure is fishy. I’d like to see more justification.
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More than 5 million students have already gone with Google Domain Apps. I can’t believe our IT overlords did not chose this option. This can also replace the Exchange accounts they currently have for faculty and staff.
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/appsatschool.html#utm_campaign=gonegoogleuni&utm_source=en-print-na-us-gonegoogleuni_print&utm_medium=print
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Mr.Thornley,
You may leave at your convenience. Nobody is holding you here.
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Didn’t you graduate?
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Mr. Russell ~ I’m thinking they don’t know of this option or didn’t bother exploring if they did. This only seems like the natural option.
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Mr. Russell,
While the Gmail Apps is a great resource that schools are using more and more, it still does cost money. And it does take time to input all the new students, remove old ones, etc… So the costs would be generally the same. I agree it would be a much better option, but if the University’s goal is to not provide any email services for students, it’s highly unlikely they would consider it (which is sad).
I know that the Boyd Law School used the Gmail Apps for a time, but discontiuned the popular service this year due to costs (it was costing around 2 full time people to manage the system.)
If you feel passionatly about this subject, I would recommend petitioning the Board of Regents to make a system-wide email for students, with sub domains of NEVADA, UNLV, etc…. but managed by the system. It would probably lower costs, and prevent duplication. They’ve done this with registration services (or will soon) with iNtegrate. This would be a lot less costly, (iNtegrate is costing around $20 million) and probably a better service.
Providing a .edu address for students should be a service that Universities provide. I suspect they will rethink this move in the next couple years when they receive complaints. I know one of the first things that made me feel like I was really in college was when I received my UNR email account. It’s a sad day for nerds…
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My being an alumnus is irrelevant. If you don’t like this school, you’re welcome to leave. If you choose to stay – by all means, improve it yourself. (ASUN Senate, perhaps?) If you remain here and keep on complaining while doing nothing… Well, let’s just say it won’t help your already less-than-stellar image.
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Ahh, but you see, I have tried to do some things, but they have been ignored.
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Details.
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IT Guy,
I was under the impression the e-mail services for students were managed by the System, not each campus. (@unr.nevada.edu, @unlv.nevada.edu, etc.) (http://www.scs.nevada.edu/)
Maybe the System does centralize e-mail but shifts the costs to each campus. I would guess this is the case since Zink wants to eliminate costs.
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http://www.scs.nevada.edu/major_projects/documents/SCS-Services-Catalog.pdf#page=15
There we go. An even better link. So where are these cost savings coming from for UNR if the System supports this? Is the whole System crapping this service?
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Alpha Wolf,
That’s really strange. Maybe it’s a system wide cut? I haven’t heard if they are doing it at UNLV too. Or it could be that each University IT department is responsible for managing their own system, but it’s hosted on system servers. Either way, I seriously doubt the costs are close to what Steve Zinc says.
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