Vice Provost for Information Technology Ron Kraemer moving on

UW students are losing a friend in the administration this summer with the departure of Vice Provost for Information Technology Ron Kramer for a similar position at Notre Dame. Ron actually has three titles at UW: Vice Provost for Information Technology, Executive Director of DoIT, and campus Chief Information Officer.

Ron became CIO a few months into my tenure on the Information Technology Committee, and immediately made clear that he was going to consider student issues central to his approach to the job – both in shared governance and in the focus on the application and deployment of information technology across campus.

I’m not sure what Ron would consider his biggest accomplishment – certainly, the development of a campus IT strategic plan was important, and all in all there have been some great advances these past few years, but there are three important things for students I want to highlight.

First, early in his tenure were the RIAA lawsuit threats of a few years back. Ron was very supportive of developing an education campaign that was realisitic in its approach. It wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky “Drugs are bad, mmkay” approach to copyright infringement – it recognized that the RIAA was specifically targeting university students and UW students were at greater risk. He was a good leader on campus and nationally in the response to the RIAA.

Second, Ron has lead the fight to finally abolish the use of social security numbers on campus, and to continue to be vigilant on the protection of personal information. Not only will students individually be able to rest easier knowing that the likelihood of identity theft due to university data losses is greatly reduced, collectively we have saved considerable sums of money from having fewer data loss incidents. This is money that can be focused on the teaching and research mission of the University.

Finally, Ron was the driving force behind the SITIAC shared governance committee that finally brought student involvement to the distribution of student technology fees. As more and more of the educational experience becomes tightly coupled with technology, it will be vital for students to have a direct say in how the infrastructure evolves. Our seat at the table would absolutely not have happened had it not been for Ron fighting for us.

Ron will be difficult to replace, and it will be a national search process. There will be two students on the search committee – look for more information on that later.

Personally, I’m proud to consider Ron a friend, and will miss him when he leaves for his new post in August. Notre Dame has made a great hire, and I wish him all the best in his new job.

Erik Paulson