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Representatives from Syracuse University’s Student Association will meet with administration in the coming weeks to discuss student concerns surrounding the university’s decision to decrease Google Workspace storage quotas for SU and SUNY ESF students and staff.

During its meeting with SU administrators, SA will present an appeal to the university’s decision, which it first passed during its Jan. 29 meeting. SA Comptroller Dylan France said during Monday’s meeting that SA leaders drafted the bill after receiving over 400 signatures through a petition addressing the changes to Google Drive storage.

Yasmin Nayrouz, vice president of SA, said while the association cannot amend the university’s decision directly, she hopes the bill will demonstrate students’ discontent with the decision to administrators.

“When we have those conversations, what we say has a bit more weight because it passed through assembly, showing that there is a lot of student support towards appealing this,” Nayrouz said.

SU students’ Google Drive storage decreased from unlimited to 10GB per user in January. Along with storage quotas, students are no longer able to create shared drives.

Tim Wong, SA’s chair of diversity and inclusion, said he wished the university had been more transparent about their decision.

“And just on the level of equity, I think everybody places a certain amount of trust in the university,” Wong said.

With the decrease in storage, students in majors that heavily utilize Google Drive, such as graphic design or architecture, are no longer able to store everything they need in their typical workspace, Wong said. He said his friends and colleagues in these majors are “alarmed” that the changes to storage will impact their ability to complete their classwork.

“I think to a certain degree, the university kind of ignored that in the sense that they wanted to hold on to more money for themselves rather than investing in the professional future of their students,” Wong said.

Wong said he’s looking ahead to see if there is an alternative, such as offloading some storage on OneDrive or external hard drives.

“At the moment, we have no perfect replacement, because unlimited storage is not the same thing as having an additional 100 gigabytes of data,” Wong said.

Wong said he plans to continue contacting administration in the coming weeks, hoping to find “common ground.”

SA President William Treloar wrote in a statement to The Daily Orange that he and the rest of SA hope to continue advocating for students to regain the access to Google Drive they once had.

“Many Newhouse students use Google Drive to create professional portfolios and the removal of access to the service has left an uneven playing field between students who can pay for it out of pocket and those who cannot,” Treloar wrote.

SU’s Information Technology Services recommends students who are over storage quotas to delete or export their data from their SU google email accounts. ITS refers students to Google Takeout, which allows users to download data for local storage or transfer it to another service.

“I think this is an opportunity for the university to kind of determine whether they want to be more about profit or more about their students,” Wong said.

Published on February 4, 2024 at 11:06 pm

Contact Claire: cksamsta@syr.edu