I would like to say that I think this is a poor choice, and that input from the campus community should have been solicited before it was made.

As nearly as I can determine, the central criterion for the decision is that “U-Web customers are better served by switching to one of these other services.” But as far as I can tell, no input was solicited from “U-Web customers” about what best serves their needs. Apparently, the basis for the evaluation that “U-Web customers” are better served elsewhere is based on the evaluation that other providers provide services that are technically equivalent to the U-Web service, insofar as other servers also serve HTML, CSS, and other files, just as the U-Web servers do.

However, there are a number of other ways in which other services do not adequately duplicate the U-Web service:

Having a U-Web web site provides an ontological guarantee of an affiliation with the University hard-coded into the site’s URL. Anyone can claim on their website to be affiliated with the University, but forcing a member of the campus community to host their website elsewhere removes an ability for the viewer of that website to confirm this assertion on the web designer’s part.

U-Web is paid for without direct cost to its users. Other services are not free (NearlyFreeSpeech), or require posting ads or corporate branding on the web site (Weebly), or unduly restrict the ways in which content can be created (Google Sites, which requires the use of their page-creation tools and prevents direct editing of HTML). I use my web service to provide instructional materials for my students. I believe that this is a valuable service for the students — and the students who have written letters of recommendation for my application for the Academic Senate’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award agree. Should I give my students the impression, then, that my course is sponsored by Weebly? Is this the image that the world-class University of California wants to give of itself? Putting corporate logos all over course website designs undermines one of the most basic assumptions of higher education — that academics and intellectuals are engaged in a disinterested search for truth. Requiring that course websites adhere to content guidelines for other services — which often place restrictions on what can be said beyond what is legally required by other sites — also undermines this basic assumption.

At the same time, the only other available non-restrictive option is to pay for hosting. This may not be a problem for some faculty members, but undergraduate and graduate students are already paying more for their education than at any time in the University’s recent history. Asking graduate students to pay out of pocket in order to construct course websites places an additional burden on people who are living on practically nothing in one of the country’s ten most expensive towns. Asking undergraduates to pay out of pocket to disseminate information that they need to disseminate has similar problems.

You also mention that you “understand the Collaborate project […] is developing a new service” to support needs related to course-related publishing, but their website says nothing about this effort, and it seems not to be working yet. What are we supposed to do in the time between when U-Web’s services and and whenever this project goes live?

In short, I disagree fundamentally that other services are equivalent in all meaningful ways to U-Web, even if technical equivalents exist elsewhere. I am disappointed that you have made this decision on our behalf without bothering to solicit input from us, and I think that the evaluation “we’ve decided other alternatives are better for you people” is patronizing, and suggests that the Instructional Computing department has lost sight of the fact that their job is to support educational objectives, not merely to make purely technical decisions. I also think that this decision illustrates perfectly what happens when a group of pompous technocrats makes technical decisions about services based solely on technical criteria and without considering the broader implications of those decisions or communicating with actual users of those services.

Finally, I also intend to publish this email on my blog under the title “An Open Letter to UCSB’s Instructional Computing Department About the U-Web Service’s Retirement.”

Thank you for your time.