By SHANNON O. WELLS
A recent Faculty Affairs committee discussion concerning the future of Zoom video conferencing software services at Pitt led to post-meeting clarifications from Pitt IT on what current Zoom services will remain and what will change following the University’s Zoom contract renewal.
Committee members expressed concerns during the March 12 meeting based on Pitt’s impending renewal of its Zoom software contract and IT’s interest in containing the services’ costs.
As shared in the March 6 Faculty Assembly meeting, the Senate Computing and Information Technology committee and Pitt’s Information Technology department sought feedback from department chairs and school deans about which tiers of Zoom they would prefer to maintain.
Pitt adopted Zoom as a videoconferencing service in 2020 in response to the COVID pandemic. Pitt IT representatives met with the Council of Deans on March 7 to present options for renewing Zoom.
“Based on a broad consensus from deans, Pitt IT will purchase a base Zoom service for all students, faculty and staff. The base license … significantly reduces the University’s renewal cost,” Pitt IT said in a memo on March 14, following a conversation between Senate President Robin Kear and Mark Henderson, Pitt’s chief information officer.
The base license enables meetings with up to 300 participants and “significantly reduces” the contract renewal cost, the IT memo said. The base Zoom license does not include advanced features for large capacity meetings (301 to 500 participants) and webinars with additional features for one to 500 participants.
Between now and June 30, Pitt IT will cover the cost of currently scheduled large capacity meetings and webinars to ensure uninterrupted service. Individuals who don’t have a webinar or large-capacity meeting scheduled but need to schedule one prior to June 30 can contact the Technology Help Desk for assistance.
Committee conversation
At the March 12 meeting, Faculty Affairs committee members shared concerns that renewal considerations, including levels of service and costs, were based on individual schools rather than the University as a whole — as well as a perception that the Teams platform was being prioritized over Zoom. Faculty Affairs Co-Chair Frank Jenkins asked Kear for greater clarity.
Kear said she thought the schools-based approach was being set up “as a cost savings (measure). And since the price is increasing, the renewal was up, and IT thought, ‘We’ll try to give the schools a choice (about) what kind of level and service that they wanted.’”
Kear added that she sees a general trend toward presenting options to schools to give them more input into what they’re getting for their money, as in “Is there another choice? And this was one of those kinds of software that was presented as a choice,” she said. Schools have much more control over their budgets under the new responsibility centered budget model, which shifts revenue from tuition, fees and grants to the schools and gives them more decision-making power about how money is spent.
Faculty Affairs pro-tem member Seth Weinberg, professor in the School of Dental Medicine, expressed strong concerns about how some decisions from Pitt IT and the administration, such as the early communications regarding the Zoom contract renewal, are leading to “unintended consequences.”
“I understand this may be where they’re coming from, in terms of they’re not thinking that this is a big deal (and) ‘Oh, we’re just giving people choices,’” he said. “I gotta tell you, though, when you listen to people’s responses to this type of thing, when this kind of thing happens, where you feel like this might be up for grabs (and) things that you’ve come to rely on (are) being taken away, faculty are so stressed.
“I have never heard more angry people and angry responses than when this was being discussed in my unit,” Weinberg added. “I don’t know if Mark (Henderson) hears this stuff, but this makes people not trust the IT group. It brings out just a level of resentment that … I’ve never heard before.”
After clarifications on the future of Zoom services were shared, however, Weinberg told University Times he felt it was an “acceptable outcome.”
“The arrangement moving forward preserves the most important components of Zoom for Pitt users,” he said. “It is essential that Pitt IT continue to support the use of tools like Zoom at the enterprise level. Zoom is an absolutely critical tool for our faculty, staff and students. Its loss would diminish the institution.”
Reiterating what he expressed on March 12, Weinberg added that the message he’d convey to IT administration is that “in weighing such decisions, it is essential to consider more than just dollars saved. The loss of productivity caused by technological disruptions and the stress that these kinds of changes inflict upon the entire user community represent real costs,” he said. “Many of us would argue that these costs exceed any financial benefits that would be gained.”
As part of its Zoom contract update, IT said after June 30, individual schools and responsibility centers (RCs) will need to purchase premium licenses for all individuals who require advanced Zoom features. IT has notified deans and RC heads about the changes and said representatives “will reach out soon to help responsibility centers optimize the purchase of Zoom premium licenses to meet their unit’s needs.”
In the meantime, IT asked responsibility center to consider the following options:
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Shared Premium License: These allow multiple faculty and staff in a unit to host events through an account they share. Shared licenses cannot host simultaneous Zoom meetings.
- Individual Premium License: An individual license is associated with only one person and allows them to host unlimited events. A professor who teaches large classes and makes lecture recordings available through My Pitt Video might be a good candidate for an individual license, IT said.
A premium Large Capacity Meeting license costs $572 per year, while a premium Webinar license is $683 per license each year. The costs are the same regardless of whether a shared or individual license is purchased.
“Thank you for your support in helping us to ensure that Zoom continues to meet the teaching, learning and research needs of the University community,” the memo from IT said.
At Faculty Affairs, Irene Frieze, emeritus psychology professor, said a sentiment shared by many on the committee is that “Zoom works much better for collaboration outside the University than Teams does.”
Many outside the Pitt community, she noted, “don’t have access to Teams. … We can’t go to them and expect them to use Teams, but they do have Zoom, so we collaborate with people on Zoom. I don’t think IT is aware of how much stuff we do outside the University, not just within the University,” she said. “Teams is much more oriented toward an internal, University kind of system.”
State tax exemption and airline fares
In other topics, Faculty Affairs revisited questions concerning recent updates to the Concur Travel & Expense system requiring that Pennsylvania sales tax be exempted or removed from Pitt-approved expenses. Initiated in fall 2023, the changes require that Pitt not approve expenses with sales tax applied, as Pitt is classified as “sales tax exempt” in Pennsylvania, except for airfare expenses.
Weinberg said communications have lacked clarity regarding how the requirements apply to airline tickets, which he and some other committee members noted don’t include state sales tax in the first place.
“We were looking for one simple thing: Basically, when you buy an airline ticket, do you have to get (it as) tax exempt. That’s all we were looking for, and we could not find it anywhere — (in) the FAQs, nothing,” he said. “And that’s because people in our unit, in the business office, were telling faculty members that they had to get tax back from all the airline tickets they just purchased, which makes no sense because they don’t even levy taxes, as far as I know, on airlines.”
Rather, he added, they are “fees, which are totally different. And they’re federal (taxes).”
Weinberg said he wanted to “get the final, definitive answer on things like this,” he said. “There (is) some guidance with hotels. It says hotels are excluded from this. Hotel taxes, you have to pay (state tax). I found that.”
To provide clarity, Jenkins said he has invited Maureen Pastin, director of compensation in Human Resources, to the next Faculty Affairs meeting on April 9.
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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