Back in late 2014, the UNC computer science department had some serious budget cuts, causing them to significantly reduce the number of students they could accomodate in their classes. I knew some students who all of a sudden couldn't get into classes they needed to graduate, and I knew that the seat cuts they had made to intro classes would discourage more newcomers, especially women and other underrepresented minorities in tech, from studying computer science. I wanted to take pretty drastic action: turning off UNC Class Checker and UNC Class Finder (both very widely used at UNC at that point) and put up a note to the effect of "Like using our service? Click here to write to the administration to tell them to fund the CS department, because it's students in this department that make websites like these possible". Li and Tara convinced me not to do this, which was probably the right call (maybe we would have made an impact, but we would have pissed off a university who we still were very much subject to). I did provide some data to my friend, Matt Leming, who wrote an article about what was going on. I was also interviewed.
These are the notes I planned to post.
read moreThe UNC Computer Science department is drastically underfunded. As a consequence, there are not enough seats in Spring 2015 Computer Science classes for a majority of Computer Science majors and students with an interest in Computer Science. We’ve helped you get into your classes, now we ask you to help us get into ours.
Please send this email to get our department the funding it needs.
The UNC Computer Science department is drastically underfunded. As a consequence, there are
Please send this email to get our department the funding it needs.
Have Matt email the CS club.
Have someone email the CS listserv.