‘Chisel our notes on some stone’ | East Tenn. college students dealing with no technology two weeks into spring semester – WVLT

JEFFERSON CITY, Tenn. (WVLT) – We are almost two weeks through the start of spring classes at Carson-Newman University. Almost that entire time, the campus network has been offline.
“I was saying just the other day that we were going to actually chisel our notes on some stone but we’re out of that so we’re going to papyrus,” sophomore Maggie Bice said.
On Jan. 14, just one day after coming back from break, Carson-Newman had to shut down its servers, leaving students without technology.
“It’s been kind of crazy, I haven’t really been able to do like much work, you know they still have us in class but you can’t really do anything, it’s like kind of old school,” one Carson-Newman freshman said.
With no laptops, computers or other electronics to work with, students are now throwing it back to the days of paper and pencil.
A statement from Carson-Newman administrators reads:
In the early hours of January 14, the University experienced an anomaly with its network.
Our IT team identified the interruption quickly and responded immediately. There are multiple avenues to explore and in the interest of protecting our systems, the difficult choice was made to shut down the entire network. That decision was necessary to assess the scope of the issue and attempt to identify the source, which presently appears to be external.
The University team, in conjunction with an outside partner, have worked around the clock on the investigation of our system.
We know the burden this situation has presented for our students, faculty and staff, especially at the start of the semester. There is not a member of the Carson-Newman community who has not been negatively affected in some way by this situation.
Until the scope of the impact has been determined and we can return to normal operations of the network, unfortunately, this shut down remains necessary. We understand the frustration. We are a society connected by instantaneous technology. We rely on it and maybe even take it for granted. When we lose access, it is a disruptive force.
We desire to find ways to ease the burden of the disruption caused by the network shut down and return to normal operations as quickly as possible.
Even though systems are shut down, classes are still ongoing, just with different procedures.
“With the school thing, it has been insane, our professors have just adapted,“ Bice said. ”One of my professors has printed off like her entire slide show for us.”
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