Terminated with Extreme Prejudice

For the past 15 years, I have provided pro bono technical support to the faculty and students of School of Journalism and Communication (JCOM) at Utah State University in Logan Utah.

A week ago, the USU IT Security Team, spearheaded by Ken Andersen, unilaterally terminated that long-standing relationship in favor of a non-negotiable dictat in which they become the sole purveyors of computing resources for the Hard News Cafe and related academic resources previously provided via two machines housed in the JCOM department and operated by the faculty and staff.  The USU IT Security Group abruptly shut down JCOM's own independent servers without notice, without consent, without appeal, and without a plan for restoring the lost services or recovering the lost resources residing on those now-disabled machines.

Significantly, the technical support which I routinely provided, pro bono, to the JCOM faculty and students can no longer be provided from my quarters, as I am now locked out of all remaining on-campus academic computing resources.  This lockout has also left me without access to my own collection of scholastic files that I had accumulated over the past 15 years on the now-disabled JCOM machines.

Update:  A week after shutting down the JCOM machines, USU IT Security agreed to let the JCOM faculty pull the hard drives from their machine and send them to me so that I could recover my files.