We at the Equinox wanted to start off the year on a strong note and talk about Enterprise Technology & Services (ET&S).
ET&S has been a slow shift towards integrating the Information Technology (IT) departments of Keene State College (KSC), Plymouth State University (PSU) and University of New Hampshire (UNH) into one consolidated entity.
This broad aim throughout USNH consolidation is an effort to streamline their current IT system and to increase cost savings, as they seem to be pinching every penny they can.
The Equinox is deeply concerned with the ramifications this will have on staff and the student body as a whole. We are also concerned about possible issues or biases that may be in play for these decisions.
As part of the consolidation, IT services main base of operations is in Durham at UNH. That is where most of the large issues will be solved as the skeleton crews in KSC and PSU are primarily there to fix the hiccups in the system.
USNH has also revoked the administrative clearance of Elise Morrissette, head of IT at KSC, along with all other faculty as well, not because of conduct issues, but as part of their centralization of the system. This means if faculty of any sort need to alter a program or add a program to their college computer they would ultimately need to have someone in Durham fix this for them; either remotely or in-person.
Although streamlining the system makes logical sense, it has no real practical application. If USNH is not going to have any sort of faculty on-site at PSU or KSC with administrative access to fix a problem, that would mean someone from Durham would have to travel two or more hours to Keene just to turn around and head back, when we could have very well just kept the IT department as is was. KSC IT did not have a good turnaround time on problem solving but at least they were in the same county as the campus.
With all this potential traveling, has USNH really saved any significant amount of money? No, they have not. If these people would like to seriously consider saving money, we at The Equinox feel they could start by adjusting the pay of these high-salaried, high-ranking faculty at KSC and, more broadly, throughout the USNH system.
The top 10 highest-paid faculty as of 2023 made approximately $1.8 million combined, the top five made approximately $1.1 million dollars combined. This is just at KSC; including UNH and PSU, we are talking about millions of budgeted dollars tied up in salaries to the people who ultimately have the final say in what stays and what gets cut.
We also fear this will lead to the prioritization of some students or a campus over others. If IT will need to travel from Durham to the other campuses to fix an issue, who is to say whether they are going to ignore the problems that are farther away and prioritize the issues at UNH? This would leave students on other campuses severely disadvantaged from important services necessary for their education.
