Open Letter to President John Petersen
From: Louis J. Gross, UTK Faculty Senate President
Re: Lack of UT System Organizational Response on Email Problems
Date: May 2, 2007
cc: UTK Faculty Senate Executive Committee, Chancellor Crabtree, 
Interim CIO Muly, Chief Financial Officer Rogers

As you are aware, the UTK campus has experienced significant email
system problems over the past year. I and numerous other faculty
leaders have expressed concern directly to you about this matter,
as well as to the UTK campus leadership. We have consistently 
encouraged the administration to provide the resources necessary 
to avoid the various problems, including complete outages and 
major delays in email receipt, that have occurred over the past year. 
The UTK Faculty Senate Executive Committee sent you a formal
request regarding these issues on February 26, 2007.  

While outages at any time create significant difficulties for 
faculty, staff and students, the failure of both the old and new 
systems yesterday, at the critical period of the start of final exams,
has led to so many faculty concerns that I feel it is appropriate 
to again request a formal administrative response. I would hope this 
response includes a plan of action as well as a guarantee that 
the resources necessary to deal expeditiously with the ongoing 
problems are provided rapidly.

It was through your desire for a UT System-wide email system
that the new email transition was initiated. The System/campus
IT organizational has created consistent difficulties throughout
the transition. On this matter, you promised at the January 8 
meeting of the University Faculty Council that all IT operations
and resources necessary to complete the email transition would be
transfered to the UTK campus. As of now, four months later, this 
still has not happened. The prolonged uncertainty of the reporting
and organizational structure for IT on this campus has been 
detrimental to progress in dealing with the ongoing problems. 
I encourage you to rapidly transfer to campus control all IT 
responsibility for matters pertaining to this campus, along with
the additional resources needed to develop the email system 
mandated by your office. 

I and other members of our Senate leadership will be happy to meet 
with you concerning this matter. 

Sincerely,
      Louis J. Gross
Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
    and Mathematics
Director, The Institute for Environmental Modeling
President, UTK Faculty Senate