1998 CAC Charges

• Establish a university computer replacement policy that will provide for a current computer on the desk of every faculty member at the university. The first priority should be to place a computer on the desk of every person who does not currently have one. The second will be to establish a campus-wide plan to keep computers upgraded on a three-year replacement schedule. Issues that we need to consider include ways of dealing with `ability to pay' issues (preliminary estimated costs per department exceed the entire Other Than Salary budget of many departments and colleges) and whether term faculty should receive the same priority as continuing faculty.

• Study the question of how to promote departmental expertise in computing. Every department (or, in some case, college) has one or more people who have come to be responsible for the welfare of the computers in his or her environment. In some cases, these people are self-taught and perform these services (such as installing new software, troubleshooting networking and printing problems) in their `spare time'. Often, if these people are faculty the work they do is not in their job description (and hence not in merit evaluations). If they are graduate students (or even undergrads) they may leave when they finish their degrees, taking their expertise with them. In yet other cases they are Civil Service or Administrative/Professional employees hired explicitly to do this work. Or not hired to do this work, but doing it anyway.

• The Chancellor has asked us to come up with ways to officially recognize these people. In addition, Associate Vice Chancellor Winters has asked us to make an inventory of these kinds of resource people for Academic Affairs. Some of the issues that Chancellor Argersinger has asked us to look at include whether there should be some explicit training, and whether there could be rewards such as summer months of salary in exchange for taking such courses.

• Finally, the Chancellor would like to bring in an outside consultant with expertise specifically in user-oriented questions to look at the whole relationship between IT, the faculty, the students and the administrative side of computing. Do we think this is a good idea? If so, can we recommend specific groups on campus to whom such a consultant could turn for information and brainstorming? Chancellor Argersinger has some possible names for such consultants if we want to recommend this.

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