yeah i dont really know what i'm talking about but is there a way to access newsgroups that the university has setup?

If you mean usenet news feeds, I think CIS got rid of them a few years ago. There are several pay-for-access services that are pretty cheap though. I've seen monthly deals like $4 per month and deals based on total data like $10 for 25 Gig.
You might take a look at the following:
http://www.newsgroupservers.net/
http://directory.google.com/Top/Compute ... _Services/
http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/pro ... iders.html
Or just google Usenet.

As I understand it, UMR's upstream usenet provider just up and disappeared about 2 years ago. The feed stopped working, CIS (now IT) tried to contact them repeatedly for several months to see why the feed was dead, and there was no response, phones were disconnected and no e-mails were returned. Another provider was searched for, but they all charged too much for the amount of use that the usenet feed had been at previously.

So, nope, UMR doesn't have a usenet feed.

maybe you should try looking at morenet's usenet servers. (they are the upstream provider)

if you are just looking for pr0n try http://www.fuper.com