FAS IT Cuts Hours, But Not For Budgets

Due to recent changes in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Information Technology Department’s scheduling policies, students looking for help with computer troubleshooting on Saturdays and Sundays are no longer able to take advantage of the Science Center’s computer clinic.

Yet according to Noah S. Selsby ’94, a spokesperson for FAS IT, the cuts in weekend hours resulted not from FAS’s economic woes, but rather from the results of a statistical evaluation of the Clinic’s weekend traffic, which indicated an average of only three client-calls per hour worker shift on weekends.

The clinic, located on the building’s second floor, will now only be open from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m., Mondays through Fridays.

Referring to the conceivable connection between the change in hours and the University’s current budgetary concerns, Selsby said, “There is obviously a savings to us there, but I don’t believe [the change in hours] was a direct repercussion of the current economic situation.”

The impact of this change on undergraduate User Assistants—FAS IT’s student employees who staff the help desk and the clinic—remain unclear. Selsby denied that the economic crisis has significantly affected student employees, adding that the eliminated shifts were often left unstaffed after the lottery process used to assign shifts at the beginning of each semester due to student preferences.

Selsby indicated that FAS IT will prioritize its infrastructure and provided services in responding to the economic crunch, though he emphasized that the UA program also remains high amongst those priorities, since the department already considers the program a cost-saving measure in itself.

Selsby mentioned, however, that FAS IT might actually see a trend of increased student employment as economic realities reverberate, especially for undergraduates with webmaster experience.

“I deal a lot with departmental Web sites that want small design projects done by students, because the students are in many cases just as talented as professionals,” Selsby explained, “but you pay them a student rate.”

Due to strict policies within the UA program concerning employee-press communication, it is difficult to ascertain whether some or all workers have been asked to work fewer hours in response to the truncated schedule. But a University-wide emphasis on cost cutting, however, seems to indicate that placing additional workers on weekday shifts in compensation for the lost time is unlikely.

—Staff writer Edward-Michael Dussom can be reached at emdussom@fas.harvard.edu.