Music download service a bad idea for UA campus

After reading the Nov. 24 edition of the Wildcat, I was quite dismayed to discover that the UA was contemplating providing the Napster online music service to students for free. This is a bad idea, not in principle, but in execution.

It is an excellent idea to make music freely available to students, but it has to be available to all students. The online services available today are not available to all computer users. Napster, for example, will only run on systems that run WindowsXP. If the UA were to adopt this service, it would be unavailable to students who use Apple computers or those who chose to run Linux/UNIX in lieu of Windows.

The exclusion factor only grows if UA follows the Penn State model. Napster is only available to students who live in the dorms. This might not be such a large problem for Penn State, but at UA this would become a major issue. Our campus houses roughly 6,000 students in residence halls. If we follow the Penn State model, which uses a yearly tech fee assessed each year to pay for the service, about 30,000 students would pay for a service they would not be able to use.

What's worse is that the service probably will not greatly curb illegal downloading. In order for the service to offer music, it has to have a contract to sell a particular song. As of now, Napster offers about 400,000 songs. In the music world, that really is not a big number. More obscure songs are not available, which means that students will once again turn to peer-to-peer services to get their music. On top of that, Napster has some very tight restrictions on the songs one downloads, the most prominent of which is the limit on CD writing. A particular song can only be written to a CD five times.

Forcing students to pay for a service that about 20 percent of the campus will have access to is very bad policy, one that almost asks for a lawsuit. In addition, they should choose a service that is available for a largest number of computers. iTunes, from Apple, is available for both Windows and Macintosh computers, but even this service has its problems. It won't run on older systems and it still does not accommodate users of Linux and UNIX.

If the administration plans to offer such a service, I strongly recommend they take a long hard look at the Penn State model and the problems it presents.

Edward Scott
philosophy sophomore

UA efforts can't compare to private universities

The Wildcat's editorial on Nov. 25 could have been a good one, but it missed the point entirely.

While the Board of Regents and Likins may like to whine about some perceived bias towards private universities, they and the Wildcat seem to ignore the obvious solution to the UA's low rankings.

Do what those highly ranked private universities do.

Highly ranked private universities don't do things like cut library hours for some programs to the point that the library is only open five days a week and only four hours a day, like the UA did with the CCP library.

Highly ranked private universities focus on the students and not on other things like building new parts of the campus and making sure the football team wins big.

Highly ranked private universities have comprehensive majors that make sense - unlike the UA, which seems to have an oddly high number of co-convened classes. Most universities, even the bad ones, don't think that people in graduate programs should be learning the same things as undergrads.

Highly ranked private universities don't do things like demand that people go in twice in person and wait in line like they did in the 1950s to register for classes in their majors.

Highly ranked private universities have teachers that care about students. Now, the UA does have some of these, but at the same time I have run into professors who seem not only inept at teaching but also seem as if they feel that students get in the way of teaching.

Highly ranked private universities have advisers who actually know what they are doing and don't give you a different story each time you visit.

Highly ranked private universities care.

These rankings aren't about bias or spending a bunch of money on new, cleverly named programs that most likely won't do anything at all. They are about reflecting the experiences of the current and former students. It is time to face facts. The UA is not that great.

Programs have been hacked at to the point where some students can't even use their own libraries! Curriculums sometimes seem to be designed more around cost-effectiveness than teaching. The bureaucracy is so bloated and Byzantine that it boggles the mind. In fact it seems the UA has no idea what it is doing sometimes. Since when does the difference between undergraduate work and graduate work come down to "take the same class, and grad students write an extra paper?" Sure sounds like a half-assed way to save money.

Honestly, how would you rank a school like the UA against a school where the library is open almost all the time, the class sizes are guaranteed to be under a certain size, the teachers give a damn and are required to mentor students from the day a major is declared, and the staff work with students with the goal of actually getting them through college?

Robert Kennedy
photography senior