Fee renewals, PeopleSoft top trustees meeting

IU Student Body President Tyson Chastain pressed the IU board of trustees Friday for thoughtful deliberation over the next few months as they consider renewing a number of student fees, including last year's $30 athletics fee.\nThe board's monthly meeting, held Thursday and Friday in the Indiana Memorial Union, addressed a number of issues for 2005, including designs for new campus apartments, frustrations with the PeopleSoft system and what should become of vacant fraternity houses in Bloomington.\nChastain spoke about working with the University to reinstall waitlist and raincheck options for classes during semester registration, which have been absent since IU switched to PeopleSoft software. He also touched on the IUSA Congress' recent support for priority registration, which would allow student-athletes to register before other undergraduates.\nBut the bulk of Chastain's presentation before the board asked them to remain mindful of a student-led fee review committee, which will examine student concerns pertaining to future fees or fee renewals.\nThe University should consider implementing fees that would allow students to receive what Chastain called "direct benefits," he said, such as the IUSA-proposed transportation fee that would allow students to ride all campus buses for free. \n"Students like fees that give services back," Chastain told the board. "None of us would expect to go to McDonald's and not get a hamburger if we paid for it."\nTrustee Jamie Belanger said that while he wasn't currently going to take sides in fee-renewal debates, such as the athletics fee, he asked Chastain -- who chairs the fee review committee -- to consider what he called "the bigger picture."\n"I would ask though that the students make a concerted effort to think about the larger picture," Belanger said. "Without trying to support or not support the fee, I understand what you're saying, but I also don't think it's fair to say that students don't receive any benefits from the athletics department."\nBelanger said he hopes all the issues surrounding the renewal of fees, specifically the athletics fee, are examined closely by the students working on the fee review committee. \n"Try to think about what's driving the deficit in a larger context instead of, 'We're not getting anything for this fee other than what we're already receiving,'" Belanger said.\nThe board also heard from Michael McRobbie, vice president for information technology, who said the latest reports indicated no significant problems with financial aid processing within the University for the spring semester.\n"The problems are being smoothed out," McRobbie said. "You're never out of problems, but we're in much better shape than we were three or four months ago. There's no such thing as a perfect system."\nMcRobbie cited more experience and more training on behalf of University IT workers, as well as more vigilance to ensure technological processing went smoothly. He also told the trustees that the Oracle Corporation's acquisition of the PeopleSoft software systems could be a positive move for IU.\n"There's a sort of view here that Oracle taking over PeopleSoft is like PeopleSoft being taken over by the mongrels," McRobbie said. "Oracle is one of the top technology companies that we've worked with, and one could argue this could be a good thing. They're one of the premiere IT companies in the world, with very deep pockets."\nTrustee Cora Smith Breckenridge said she had asked at the trustees' afternoon luncheon with faculty what the worst problem was on the Bloomington campus.\n"They said, unequivocally, PeopleSoft," Breckenridge told the board.\nIn additional business, and in a relatively quiet move, the trustees approved the IU Foundation to lease the long-abandoned Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity house at 1469 E. 17th St., near Bill Armstrong Stadium.\nThe three-story, fraternity chapter house will be leased over the next 20 years at an annual rent of $57,763.\n"We plan to make it available for student housing, either through lease to a greek organization or through Residential Programs and Services," Lynn Coyne, assistant vice president for University real estate and economic development, said following the meeting. \nThe IU chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi was the organization's first national chapter, a fact that Coyne said wasn't lost in the bid to acquire the house for leasing.\n"The organization is understandably very proud of this location, and there is an agreement that the historical significance of this house will be memorialized in a manner, like an appropriate plaque or monument," he said.\nThe board also formally approved designs for an apartment-style student housing complex center where the Ashton Center is located, a $950,000 renovation project to the psychology building funded by the Commitment to Excellence Funds, which will include an MRI suite and a Clarian Cancer Hospital on the IU-Purdue University Indianapolis campus.\nThe trustees will next consider the IU Foundation's potential leasing of the abandoned Beta Theta Pi house at 919 E. 10th St., which was tabled Thursday for reconsideration at their March 3 meeting in Bloomington. A tentative agenda will have the trustees considering the implementation of University-wide criminal background checks for staff and faculty.\n-- Contact Senior Writer Tony Sams at ajsams@indiana.edu or Staff Writer Lindsay Lyon at lrlyon@indiana.edu.