It’s exam week, and you have a term paper due for sociology 20 minutes. The class is in the brand-spanking-new Martin J. Whitman School of Management. You stop in the lab to print it before class, but quickly learn a sad truth: Even though there is only one other person in the lab, you can’t log on because sociology majors don’t have computer privileges on Whitman Computers.

My gripe is with the computers we can’t use. While there are hundreds of computers spread strategically over campus in clusters of varying sizes, certain computers, like those in Newhouse and Whitman, are off-limits for general student use. A few exceptions aside, this policy is not fair.

Every student who visited campus and took a tour probably heard about the ample computer terminals available for students to use. I know, because over the summer I gave tours and that was an explicit part of them.

But the labs are usually packed, especially around exam time. I also didn’t know when giving tours that special labs were reserved for special students. It wasn’t until I tried to print a paper before class that learned what my boundaries were. Apparently in the Whitman School of Management, my Syracuse University Net ID would not log me on to the network. I didn’t have the privileges.

In the brand-new, still glossy, School of Management there are several clusters. Some are for specialized use and some are part of classrooms, but a couple appear to be intended for general Whitman student use – I would imagine for word processing and Internet use. But they are only available for Whitman students.

This isn’t fair and I don’t think I’m just being whiny. Not every school has labs designed exclusively for its particular students’ use. Those of us who don’t have special access must share the same public terminals with those who have access. I can visit Olsten’s Caf in the Whitman, and I have had more than one class in the new building. It’s aggravating, though, when I walk into a lab with no one else in the room and can’t use the system.

Engineering students, back me up here. The two labs in the front of Link Hall are for public use, but they double as multimedia classrooms for computer science courses. Signs are prominently displayed on the walls and doors proclaiming that if a class is scheduled to meet, other students must vacate. This seems like a logical policy. Why can’t it apply to the new building?

There are exceptions though. Specialized equipment like editing and graphics computers in Newhouse as well as the chic day-trader computer lab in Whitman are designed for specific programs and classes, and it would make sense to limit access there. The same logic doesn’t apply to word-processing equipment.

It angers me to think that somehow certain majors are not as entitled to SU equipment as others, especially when the equipment is easily shared and can lighten the load off the Kimmel, Link, and library clusters.

Ben Peskin is a featured columnist whose columns appear Thursdays in The Daily Orange. Email him at [email protected].

Published on March 7, 2007 at 12:00 pm