Frontpage

Future of Capital Scholars Program uncertain with admittance of general education freshmen
This year's graudates should recieve honors designation

By Ron Felten - General Assignment Reporter

With the original class of UIS Capital Scholars set to graduate this spring, some students are finding themselves uncertain about the future of the program and what it will mean to them after commencement.
One of the most important issues currently being discussed, though, is whether or not Capital Scholars graduates will be designated as honors students. For this year’s class, it seems as though it will be up to each Cap senior to decide for him or herself.
Karen Moranski, director of the UIS Capital Scholars program, said it is most definitely her goal to make that option available to the current senior class. “It is still my plan to somehow, someway make sure this class has the opportunity to have the [honors] designation.”
That opportunity, Moranski said, will almost certainly come in the form of an optional symposium. Students who would like the honors program designation on their transcripts would have to give a satisfactory presentation of five to 10 minutes to a panel of professors on an academic paper they have already written.
Moranski explained that the symposium is not required of Cap students to graduate but that anyone choosing not to participate would only receive an honors curriculum designation on their transcripts and not that of the full honors program. “The difference between the two is the closure exercise,” Moranski said, “which is required of students in a complete honors program.”
Some students are upset that there will be no Capital Scholars designation on their diplomas but, as Moranski explained, that is not even a possibility. “There simply can’t be a designation on the diploma – all UIS diplomas appear the same.”
Moranski said the primary reason these issues are now being discussed is because UIS plans to admit approximately 250 new freshman students, which is 150 more freshmen than the program currently has, in 2006. While these new students will be under the umbrella of the Capital Scholars, they will not all be participating in the honors curriculum. As a result of this addition, students currently in the Cap program are demanding recognition for the honors-level work they have already done to distinguish them from the new, non-honors students.
Tyson Roan, president of the Student Government Association, said that while neither he nor the SGA have any “official capacity” with the Capital Scholars Steering Committee, he has been working with Moranski to “determine how to turn the current program into a legitimate honors program.”
Roan echoed Moranski’s pledge to get the current senior class of Cap students the honors program designation if at all possible. “We have the honors curriculum in place,” Roan said, “but just not the final exit requirement. [The upcoming graduates] need that [honors program] designation when applying to other schools. If we wait to apply that designation retroactively in a year or two, it’s not going to do them any good.”
Roan acknowledged that this spring’s proposed symposium is not very demanding. “While the closing requirement may be a little lax this year,” Roan said, “I think all the work [the Cap students] have done in their four years here more than makes up for it.”
Both Moranski and Roan spoke of the commitment the university and the Capital Scholars program has to its current Cap students. Roan, though, likened the version of the UIS course catalog in place during a given student’s freshman year to a contract between that student and the university.
“It would be unfair to impose any new requirements that are an unduly burden on any Capital Scholars student,” Roan said. “When I entered the university, the catalog didn’t say anything about a closing project. It did not say anything about a minimum GPA [specifically for the Cap program]. Retroactively imposing a new set of conditions would be a breach of contract.”
Moranski said the overall goal of the university is to develop two distinct programs. “In the fall of last year,” Moranski said, “the Chancellor [Richard Ringeisen] asked us to change the scope of the Capital Scholars program to include both honors and non-honors students.”
While Moranski and Roan seem to agree this growth will be a positive thing for UIS overall, there is still uncertainty as to how everything will unfold, specifically as it relates to the current Cap program. Whereas most universities spend years and years developing entirely new curriculums, UIS will have to do the same for both their incoming non-honors freshman and for their upper level Capital Scholars students in a fraction of the time.
“This is a long-term plan and we won’t have it in place this year,” Roan said. “[For the Capital Scholars] it requires us to develop honors courses for the 300 and 400 level. It requires a change in infrastructure; there are a lot of practical facts that need to be worked on.”
Despite the challenges, developing a non-honors undergraduate program, Roan said, may help UIS retain a number of the freshman students who currently choose to leave the school after only one semester in the Capital Scholars program. “Some people come into the [Cap] program and realize they’re not honors-level students,” Roan said. “And we just don’t have anywhere to send them at this school.”
Roan also said that because of the expected increase in enrollment for 2006 and 2007, UIS is planning to build a new dorm adjacent to the LRH. Furthermore, as a result of a larger student population, UIS is expected to receive additional funds from the University of Illinois system. “The board of trustees have allocated $2 million for the fall of 2006 to hire faculty and support services,” Roan said. “And that will not be a one time thing.”
Moranski and Roan both said that while they will do everything in their power to make certain current Capital Scholars students will have the opportunity to receive the honors program designation, ultimately that decision, as well as those pertaining to any program change, is not theirs to make. Their recommendations will have to be approved by the Capital Scholars Steering Committee, the Undergraduate Council and the Campus Senate.

RAID system failure blamed in campus Web server outage

By Tom Cronin - Public Affairs Reporter

     The contents of main campus Web server were inaccessible for more than three days on the week of Jan. 31 because of the apparent failure of the multiple hard-disk RAID system that was put in place to optimize the performance of the Web server.
Michael Bohl, director of financial and information systems, said that his staff has not been able to determine for certain what caused the server to stop functioning on Feb. 1, but it is his “best guesstimate” after speaking with support personnel from Dell that a failure of the RAID system caused the malfunction.
The server outage, which affected files on both www.uis.edu and people.uis.edu, ended on Feb. 4 when Campus Technology staff members transferred the files from the old server to a replacement server. Campus Technology personnel were able to partially restore the original Web server, Bohl said, but they were not ultimately able to bring the server back up.
Campus Web functions such as the Brookens Library home page and Outlook Web Access e-mail were not directly affected by the outage, Bohl said, but these and other functions could not be accessed by clicking on the links on the campus home page – a method of navigation that has become routine for many students, faculty and staff.
Bohl said that two of the biggest concerns about the outage were that prospective students were unable to obtain information about the campus from the Admissions and Records Web site, and that faculty members and students were unable to obtain course-related information from people.uis.edu.
In a campus-wide e-mail dated Feb. 4, Bohl said that the files on the replacement server were restored from a backup of the old server that was done on Jan. 26 – six days before the server stopped functioning. When interviewed on Friday, however, he said that no data was lost in the transfer from the old server to the replacement server.
Bohl said that when he sent the e-mail, his staff thought that they would not be able to restore the files that had been on the old server when it malfunctioned.
“It was really kind of frustrating ‘cause you could see the data out there, you could see it on that server … but you couldn’t get to [the files], and it was driving us nuts,” he said.
According to Bohl, Campus Technology personnel are planning to implement a new state-of-the-art campus Web server by August. The server would operate under Windows Server 2003 and would use Microsoft IIS 6, the newest version of the Web page operating system. The current Web server uses Microsoft IIS 4, he said.
In implementing the new server, Campus Technology personnel will explore different content-management options that would allow UIS faculty, staff and students to publish information on the Web more easily and more professionally, Bohl said. As of Friday, campus officials had not selected which software program to use for content management, he said.
Campus Technology personnel are also considering establishing a set of standards for campus Web publishing, Bohl said. One potential standard would require all individuals and groups with Web pages on the main server to use index.html as their default Web page.
According to Bohl, some home pages on the main campus server use files other than index.html as their default page. These non-standard default settings had to be individually restored by Campus Technology on the current server after the files from the old server were transferred there following the outage, he said.
“There’s always this fine line of standards versus the needs of the community, and you always have to figure out where that line is because we’re here to provide support to the campus community,” Bohl said. “… So you’ve got to figure out where’s that line so that we can continue to get our job done of teaching students. And, that line changes all the time, but we have to keep asking ourselves, ‘Where is it?’”
UIS Chancellor Richard Ringeisen said in a Feb. 7 campus-wide e-mail that he understood that the process of restoring the Web server was time-consuming and frustrating, and he wanted to thank the campus technology staff for working intensively to restore the Web server.
“Everywhere I go, I tell people that we take great pride in our technological capabilities here at UIS,” Ringeisen said. “It is mission critical that we be as sophisticated as we can be, and I am committed to working with others to make sure that happens.”

Future of Capital Scholars Program uncertain with admittance of general education freshmen

RAID system failure blamed in campus Web server outage