Monday, March 10, 1997
RESPONSIBILITY:
Administration’s wasteful spending ignores needs of students,
who must foot the billUCLA paid a design firm big bucks for a new
Joe Bruin logo that makes people yawn. Then UCLA paid bigger bucks
for a new web site that makes people too angry to yawn. The
revamped home page, which includes new second-level pages, a UCLA
"virtual community" and an enhanced search engine, was created by
an outside design house for $100,000. It should be noted that
companies do pay six figures for web sites in the corporate world.
It happens the same way people pay six figures for impractical
two-seated sports cars.
For our six figures, we were given a cold, flashy home page with
all the friendly appeal of a Manhattan office building. The site
does not suggest academia or even a multi-faceted academic and
research community. It suggests corporate-mindedness. It is another
disturbing indication as to the administration’s commercial
obsessions.
To outside contractors, UCLA must seem better than sex. Our
school is beginning to epitomize the easy money made possible by
extravagant spending. The Kerckhoff Hall retrofit is running well
over budget, echoing the heavy costs associated with the Ackerman
Union expansion. UCLA is spending far too much in order to bolster
its image and, as a result, the school’s image is getting slicker
all the time  just have a look at our new home page!
We appreciate the facelifts, but a little frugality is not much
to ask. Ultimately, UCLA students foot the bill for the
administration’s grand ideas.
And it is not like we lack the resources here on campus to build
an impressive, user-friendly new web site. Truly, there are
benefits to having an outside company design the site; all UCLA
organizations want to be highlighted on the campus web and an
objective contractor can help avoid the politics. But a
collaborative effort between groups such as University Relations,
Library Information Systems, the Office of Academic Computing and
the Center for Digital Arts, with a core team to mediate, would
also have worked.
But we do not feel the option was thoroughly explored and the
opportunity to become involved in the project was not well
publicized here on campus. It’s a shame; it would have worked
better, cost less, given valuable, hands-on experience to UCLA
students, and assuaged the many of us who feel UCLA’s indulgent
behavior is in need of more than a little curbing.
Indulgence and user-friendliness often do not go hand in hand.
The flashy new pages are a pain for the average student with the
average computer. Unlike the previous web site, the new pages load
with agonizing slowness. Logging onto the new home page is like
standing in line at Murphy Hall  it is an exercise in
patience. And the images do not fit on smaller monitors. We are
happy for the designers that they have quick computers, T1 lines,
and IMAX-sized screens. Most of us do not.
We appreciate the facelifts, but a little user-friendliness is
not much to ask.
It all boils down to a question of more bang for the buck. We
didn’t get it. UCLA is supposed to be an innovator in Internet
technology. So what happened? The garish, slow, unfriendly, overtly
image-conscious new home page can now join Joe Bruin Jr. as a
strong example of how not to spend money.
The ongoing construction and expansion of an academic community
should not feel like the production of a big-budget Hollywood
movie. But, here at UCLA, that is exactly what it feels like, and
we’ve got the web site to prove it.