The Graduate Student Association and numbers of graduate students protested the changes in operations within the Computer Services area made necessary by budget cuts and the resulting layoffs of 55 employees in the Computer Services area. Of particular concern was the $60-an-hour fee for statistical consulting, which replaced a system under which students received up to three hours a month of statistical consulting for free and paid $11 per hour for assistance beyond that. In addition, the elimination of the research and technology group, which included high performance computing experts, statistical programming experts, and document preparation specialists, was viewed as being highly detrimental to graduate students preparing dissertations.