Recently, on a closed, private listserv list that I run, one of the subscribers complained that investing in technology is like having sex with a gorilla--you can't stop until the gorilla is happy. And while I'm not crazy about the image created by this simile, I do think it does a superb job of expressing the way those of us charged with acquiring technological resources for our programs feel about the costs of technology. So I don't think Charlie's completely accurate when he says that "what I say about tech and its costs is colored by my situation." Indeed, even though the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is a different sort of institution than Clemson University, I share Charlie's concern with the relationship between faculty salaries, tuition costs, and technology. We've hit precisely the same problems that Charlie articulated in his opening remarks.
For example, two years ago we were becoming victims of our own success at integrating technology into classrooms and scholarship. We had grown to the point where our Internet feeds were completely overwhelmed by the amount of traffic being generated by our faculty and students. The faculty I supported were complaining to me that they are unable to have their students completing projects in their classrooms because the networks were running too slowly. Their lesson plans were being destroyed, their classes were in shambles, and their students weren't learning. The problem had to be addressed or we were going to have to give up on our program-wide uses of classroom technology. But when I went to the administration to try to find ways to resolve this infrastructure failure, I discovered just how closely linked faculty salaries and technology costs truly are. I was told that the Board of Trustees had refused to allow us to charge students a "technology fee" since that would be the kind of hidden tuition cost increase that Charlie discussed. Hence, to fix the problem we would have to choose between adding additional T1 lines for the residence halls or making new hires to fill vacant tenure track lines for the next year. Confronted with that choice, we basically had to slow down our program's growth for a year until we were able to find a way to change the funding equation.
But while I think many institutions are facing these same kinds of funding choices, I don't think the moral of the story here is that you should choose to invest in people rather than technology. The problem is that the decision in this particular case didn't "make the gorilla happy," and ultimately we did have to invest in the upgrades. No institution can afford not to. The simple fact is that you can't recruit and retain high quality students or faculty without keeping the techno-gorilla happy. Our prospective students and job candidates don't ask about the student-to-faculty ratio anymore; they want to know about computing facilities. When they're choosing a school, they go to Yahoo and look for the list of "most connected" universities. Job candidates today want to know about the computers in their offices and classrooms before they ask about their insurance package. So even though you might be able to keep the gorilla at arm's length for a short time, you're eventually going to have to keep it happy in order to do business.
– Tharon Howard
tharon@hubcap.clemson.edu