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Editor:
As a graduate student in computer engineering, I was initially pleased to read the story in the Nov. 12 Wildcat that detailed the improvement of online catalog information available from the UA ("UA to update, expand online general catalog"). However, I was astonished by the reckless proposal to eliminate the printed catalog.
Providing information in new forms to supplement the existing ones is a good idea. Replacing the existing forms with ones that may be difficult or impossible for certain segments of the student population to access is foolhardy.
Why should a student without a home computer be forced to come to campus to look at course information? What will the UA do about students in other states who do not have Internet access but wish to find out about the course offerings here?
This hardly seems like the right time to be discouraging enrollment.The catalogs are the contracts between the UA and the students. I am very uncomfortable with the idea that these contracts might exist only in electronic form, susceptible to instant and repeated modification by only one of the two parties involved.
The only conceivable motive I can imagine for eliminating the printed catalog is fiscal, since many of the catalogs are given away rather than sold. This is yet another example of the UA nickel and diming its students to death. Once again, the administration pays lip service to improving undergraduate education while acting in a diametrically opposed fashion.
James Sean Keane
computer engineering graduate student
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