On Saturday, Sept. 14, ULM was supposed to have a campus-wide Internet/network outage for technology upgrades. The email was sent out to all the students to alert them of the coming disruption. However, a follow-up email was sent later about its cancellation.
“We’ve had some upgrades that were supposed to happen recently they have not happened because we didn’t get software in time, something happened with the system,” said Dr. Alberto Ruiz, the vice president of Academic Affairs.
To reduce problems like these, the university has decided to limit the classes in maymester to only two classes for the coming summer.
“I’d rather get those two weeks in May to where we can get all those upgrades performed if we can and not penalize students in any way,” Ruiz said.
Short classes like maymesters exists in order to “increase semester credit hour production” which is linked to university’s revenue production.
The decision came about by discussion between Ruiz, the executive council which are the president and the vice presidents, the academic deans’ council which consists of deans from all the schools at ULM and faculty senate executive committee which is made up of faculty and staff.
The Student Government Association was made aware, but there was no voting.
“We kind of understood that the attendance was not there. I don’t think it was a vote, I think it was just a discussion,” said Cory Atkinson, an SGA senator.
As per the change, all the classes that were going to be offered in the maymester “will be offered (in summer),” Atkinson said.
All the maymester classes will be moved to summer courses. “We are going away from May, you can take it in June,” Ruiz said.
Similarly, the decision “does not affect ULM financially” and the vice president doesn’t “foresee students being put at a disadvantage. It’s gonna have minimal to zero impacts on our students.”
Although this decision is being put into effect for the upcoming summer, the decision may not be permanent. “We’ll see if it works. If it does, it does. If it doesn’t, we’ll come back. We are being proactive in that scene,” Ruiz said.