Occasionally I am very proud of the community in which I live. This week has been one of those times:
Two weeks ago a Harris poll revealed the following Republican attitudes about President Barack Obama:
As someone who grew up going to a fairly rural fundamentalist church Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night and whenever else the church doors were open, I am not shocked by the last finding.
What is the antidote? Surprise, surprise … it may be formal education. The more education you have the less likely it is that you believe this garbage.
Isn’t it rich?
Isn’t it queer,
Losing my timing this late
In my career?
And where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns.
Well, maybe next year.
As we come to the end of our little song and truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story, it’s probably a good idea to draw attention to the lessons that can be learned from this little parable.
When will we learn? It certainly doesn’t look like it will be anytime soon.
Well, maybe next year.
Don’t you love farce?
My fault I fear.
I thought that you’d want what I want.
Sorry, my dear.
But where are the clowns?
Quick, send in the clowns.
Don’t bother, they’re here.
Although I learned a lot about higher education institutions and how they operate during my Flatwoods meeting with WVNET staff, my main purpose for meeting with them was to learn more about something they called “shared facilities.”
I learned pretty quickly that shared facilities were nothing more than circuits across which multiple organizations’ video, voice and data traveled. As part of an agreement with the previous Chief Technology Officer to create WVSUN (West Virginia State Unified Network), WVNET had taken primary responsibility for managing them. Most shared facility circuits, I learned, were a lot more expensive than institution circuits. In part this was because they were bigger, but also because most crossed two of the State’s four LATAs and thus had to be purchased from long distance providers. (See “A Baby Bell” for an explanation.)
After meeting with WVNET staff in Flatwoods, I quickly figured out we had three problems: one financial and two legal.
The financial problem:
After identifying all the “free circuits” Verizon had given away on behalf of the Cabinet Secretary of Education and Arts and the shared facility costs that had been shifted to her, even though we were missing hundreds of thousands of dollars in invoices, I realized we owed about $6.5 million on a three-year appropriation of $4.5 million, and that appropriation was supposed to be coming to an end. So we convened a meeting of key stakeholders, including the people who had circuits they weren’t using. We told them we would pay for everything we could, but looked to be significantly short of money. We also told them we would talk to legislators about the situation.
Shortly thereafter, we met with key legislators and staff members and explained the situation. Fortunately, the legislators promised to continue the appropriation until we could get our house in order, at which point the subsidy would slowly be phased out. I have always appreciated those legislators and their staff members who trusted us to make things right.
The legal problems:
In addition to the rather large financial problem, we had two not-insignificant legal problems of the constitutional variety.
First, it is unconstitutional to use a later year appropriation to pay for an earlier year service. (Otherwise, the constitutional requirement to operate under a balanced budget would be meaningless.) So a continuing appropriation couldn’t solve all of our rather large financial problems. Indeed the only way some of these telecommunications providers were going to get the money they were owed was to file a claim with the Court of Claims, obtain a judgment, and then have the Legislature make an appropriation, which easily could take two years.
Second, the Legislature had funded the WV2001 Project from lottery revenue, which constitutionally can be spent only on education, tourism and a few other things. But these shared facilities circuits included other telecommunications traffic for which payment would be unconstitutional. Interestingly, quite a few shared facilities invoices had been paid by the Department of Education and the Arts in violation of the West Virginia Constitution before I arrived there. Did anything happen as a result of this Constitutional violation? No! As a good friend likes to say: Some laws catch on better than others. I would add Constitutional provisions to his list.
Luckily, we were able to exploit our legal problems to address our financial problems. We, for instance, offered AT&T a payment equal to the percentage of traffic that legally could be paid for from lottery funds if they would walk away from the remainder of their (quite valid) claim.
And that is a large part of the story of how WVNET staff and others saved the State of West Virginia more than $1 million, much of which it admittedly never should have incurred, but almost all of which it owed. And that is why the West Virginia Department of Education and the Arts escaped the telecommunications billing debacle largely unscathed….
Don’t you love farce?… My fault I fear….
Just when I’d stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,
Making my entrance again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines,
No one is there.
Newer, faster, better! If there’s one difference between higher education and state government, it is that higher education wants the latest technology, while state government seems more content to use current systems, even if cumbersome or unwieldy.
Don’t worry if higher education doesn’t yet have a good practical use for Internet II; institutions want it because no right-thinking research faculty member would come to a school that didn’t have it. Don’t worry if higher education doesn’t know what on earth to do with Blackboard WebCT Vista’s enterprise distance learning solution; just spend $750K for the license, and distance learning will take off like gangbusters. Don’t worry if you don’t have a plan to use new technology that West Virginia University is using. If West Virginia University needs it, so does Glenville State College and Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College.
What’s the only thing higher education loves better than technology? Someone else to pay for it, of course. So you can imagine the excitement in higher education Chief Technology Officers’ offices in the late 1990s when Verizon came calling with a too-good-to-be-true deal on telecommunications circuits that would be doing everything from supporting distance learning to handling back office data traffic to managing telephone systems to cooking students’ meals over the next few years.
The too-good-to-be-true part? Higher education and others could have all of this technology for free thanks to a little ole $1.5 million appropriation from the West Virginia Legislature in the West Virginia Department of Education and Arts’ budget. Every school from West Virginia University to Shepherd College (now University) to West Virginia Northern Community College got hooked up faster than Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire on double coupon day at the local BALCO store.
Surely students benefited from these expenditures, didn’t they? Well, not at some institutions. You’ve heard of the “Road to Nowhere.” At several of our higher education institutions, we had “Circuits to Nowhere.” Shepherd College, for example, acquired two circuits, to the tune of $600 per circuit per month, over which there was no telecommunications traffic for several years. And West Virginia Northern Community College was so enamored by these “free circuits” that they didn’t “buy” the cheap kind that Shepherd was buying. No, they wanted the top-of-the-line DS-3 circuits (cost: $3,800 per month), and they wanted one for each of their three campuses (cost: $11,400 per month/ $136,800 per year). Did West Virginia Northern need these expensive circuits? Let just say they dropped them like laundered nickels from a casino slot machine as soon as they learned they had to pay for them.
How did I discover these things? I certainly didn’t learn about them from Verizon, which must have known there was little or no telecommunications traffic crossing some of these “free circuits.” I certainly didn’t learn about them from IS&C, which couldn’t even find the bills, much less the circuits. No, I learned them from two WVNET employees who drove to Flatwoods (ironically WVNET’s future home?) one day to educate me about shared facilities.
Operating in higher education, WVNET has always had to adapt more quickly and be more aware of technological changes than its state government counterpart. WVNET was the first with mainframe, the first with internet, and its staff were the first to tell me what really was occurring with the WV2001 Project….
Making my entrance again with my usual flair…. Sure of my lines…. No one is there….
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