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Email still backlogged, FSEC learns
By DONNA BUDNIEWSKI
Reporter Assistant Editor
UB's central email delivery system is still suffering from a backlog after administrators discovered two Trojan-type viruses, Rick Lesniak, director of Academic Services CIT, told the Faculty Senate Executive Committee yesterday.
About 35 computers on campus—10 administrative computers and 25 computers in the residence halls—were infected with a virus that causes the machines to send thousands of undeliverable, bouncing spam email messages, causing severe backlogs in the volume of legitimate mail waiting to be sent. The attack occurred on Nov. 12 and by mid-day the following day, UB was in the middle of a major spam storm, with more than 400,000 spam messages clogging the university's servers, Lesniak said.
"We built a tool to go through the campus email to identify the offending email and set them aside so they wouldn't be sent through the campus," he reported about one of several measures put into place to deal with the problem.
While almost all legitimate email has been forwarded, about 130,000 bouncing spam messages continued to impact forwarding time as of yesterday.
While making the machines healthy again is not a trivial or well-documented process, Lesniak said, CIT was able to identify the infected computers and take them off-line until they could be fixed.
"We couldn't have prevented this particular problem," Lesniak told senators, "but we should be able to handle them better." He said that CIT has implemented a number of measures to help prevent future spam attacks or lessen their severity.
Further raising anxiety among campus users was the fact that a pre-emptive email, sent out over campus networks by a CIT analyst, said that all email had been delivered when, in fact, a backlog still existed, causing some to believe email that they hadn't yet received was permanently lost.
John Ringland, professor of math and chair of the Faculty Senate Computer Services Committee, told Lesniak that it took 17 hours to deliver email sent from his computer. Lesniak noted that CIT is in the process of writing standards to install protections for on-campus, individual workstations to prevent such attacks in the future.
In other business, FSEC members were updated on the University Honors Program, which has grown from 20 students at its inception in 1981 to 255 admits this year, with a total of 1,000 members at present. The program includes the general honors program for freshmen, the performing and creative arts program, and advanced honors. Clyde Herreid, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences and academic director of the Honors Program, and Josephine Capuana, administrative director, spoke to senators about the entry requirements, demographics and goals of the program.
All freshmen admitted to the honors program must have an SAT score of at least 1300 and a GPA of 93 or better. All students receive at least the minimum yearly scholarship of $2,500, but some may instead, depending upon academic performance, receive either a $4,000 yearly scholarship or a Distinguished Honors Scholarship, which provides tuition for four years and covers all university fees and room and board.
To be considered for one of the 15-20 Distinguished Honors Scholarships awarded each year, candidates must have an SAT score of at least 1470 and GPA of 95, said Herreid. Performing and creative arts honors scholars receive $2,500 per year for four years, provided they maintain a major in art, dance, media study, music or theatre.
In order for students to remain in the honors program, they must maintain a GPA of 3.2 their first year and 3.5 every year after. After completing 45 credit hours with a minimum GPA of 3.5, students can apply to participate in the advanced honors program, but must complete 60 credit hours before being admitted. A personal essay is required for entry and a senior thesis or project is required for graduation.
Early entry is strongly encouraged for both general honors and advanced honors, said Capuana. For the first time last year, there were more qualified candidates for the general honors program than the university could accommodate because of a cap on the total scholarship money offered for the honors program.
The program also features a major public service component in which students are required to design, research and implement a project, said Capuana.
About 60 percent of the students admitted to the program each year are male and 40 percent female, said Capuana, with the biggest competition for students coming from schools like Cornell and Penn State.
Also at yesterday's meeting, Jeffrey Dutton, assistant provost for institutional analysis, reviewed some of the findings of a triennial faculty survey developed by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles that UB faculty had participated in during Spring 2002. Dutton concentrated his remarks on the findings concerning faculty attitudes toward students and personal and professional priorities, and compared UB's results with other SUNY institutions.
The survey is designed to determine faculty attitudes and beliefs on such topics as job satisfaction and performance, research productivity, pedagogical techniques, student advisement, information technology, university-community relations and institutional priorities, among others, and provides data for national benchmarks.
Of the 1,191 surveys mailed to UB faculty members, 450, or 37.8 percent, responded. A higher percentage of the respondents were women and over the age of 60, said Dutton.
Interestingly, he noted that UB faculty members were slightly more altruistic than their peers and rated the following traits or goals as more important than faculty members participating in the survey at other SUNY institutions: developing students' moral character, enhancing students' self-understanding, instilling in students a commitment to community service and preparing them for responsible citizenship and employment. Personal goals, such as being considered an authority in one's field, being well-off financially and receiving recognition from peers, also were ranked higher by UB faculty than their peers, reported Dutton.
The emphasis on research being more important than teaching, the quality of research facilities and rank offered at hiring were rated higher by UB faculty. Priority issues for the university, according to the faculty members surveyed, include enhancing the university's national image, increasing institutional prestige, promoting intellectual development of students and hiring faculty "stars."
Sources of stress for faculty? Time pressures at work and home ranked high, as did institutional procedures and red tape, as well as keeping up with information technology.