Over the past two weeks, students flooded social media with complaints about the university’s Internet network going down sporadically, sometimes for up to an hour. Officially, the network was down twice according to Director of Communications Renata Nyul. Students on Twitter and Reddit suggest the Internet was down three times.
Regardless, when the Internet went down so did all the available services on the network, including myNEU and Blackboard. It’s hard to fully emphasize how critical these services and the Internet in general are to the student body’s education. The university should treat this problem very seriously.
Rehan Khan, vice president of information services, sent an e mail to the student body last night addressing the problem, but no university official would give comment on why it happened, only saying in the e mail, “We are working with the vendor to determine the cause of the outage.”
This recent series of outages only sheds light on a larger issue on campus. Anyone who’s watched a confused professor fiddle with the hook-up to the projector, only to yet again go through the routine of calling facilities and waiting for an employee to bring a new cable knows: The technology at this school isn’t completely streamlined. There’s a lot to be desired and completely reliable Internet should be first on that list.
How heavily students use Blackboard and myNEU would make any future network outage, especially one lasting longer than an hour, a burden for students, faculty and staff.
Northeastern is planning on expanding the campus with the YMCA project and opening satellite campuses all over the country, but the students paying tuition dollars right now are still, by and large, on this campus. Though it’s only been a problem for the past two weeks, it should have been fixed the first time, and the student body should have been sent an e mail immediately after.
With tuition inching a few thousand dollars above the $50,000 mark – and a certain administrator’s salary rising above the $1 million mark – students shouldn’t have to deal with a shaky campus network. It is possible, though, to imagine students trading a couple thousand off their yearly tuition for a network that crashes every once in a while, even if it crashes for two or three hours.
Yeah, there are some Huskies out there that could get behind that.
