Monday, December 18, 2000

The Paperless Campus Is the Future, Most Universities Agree, but a Few Obstacles Remain By SCOTT CARLSON It might sound like a simple plan: Stop printing all those official announcements, bulletins, and form letters that the University of Texas at Austin sends regularly to its 50,000 students. Stop stuffing all those envelopes and running them through the postage meters. Why not just send everything by e-mail instead? But as faculty members and administrators at Texas are discovering -- and as their counterparts at some other institutions have known for some time -- it's not so easy. Administrators must consider digital-divide issues and plot a strategy to get all students online. They also have to think about security and access. And although e-mail might seem like a cheap alternative to the U.S. mail, some experts say the savings are illusory. The University of Texas is following the lead of other large and tech-oriented institutions in creating a "paperless campus." Chief information officers at many universities say that in the next few years electronic deliveries might become the norm, even at the nation's small colleges. Thomas F. Edgar, associate vice president of academic computing at Texas, says that some of the impetus for the new policy came from the university's accounting department. Most of the university's students live off campus, and the department estimated that the university could save $500,000 to $1-million every year on postage and handling costs, he says. He also says that, once a system is set up, electronic transmissions would be much more accurate and reliable than the U.S. Postal Service. However, the trick is setting up that system. After a meeting with the university's technical staff last week to discuss the logistics of the proposal, Mr. Edgar acknowledges that going electronic is going to be more difficult than making a decree and flipping a switch. "We're going to be taking a while longer to resolve some issues," he says. The proposal raises a number of questions: Should the university provide a required e-mail address for students, or should they be allowed to pick their own? Should the university use existing mail servers for the plan or should it purchase or designate new servers? "You can kind of see where this is going," Mr. Edgar says. "It's pretty involved, and it's going to require a lot more discussion. There are questions of cost versus effectiveness, too. I don't think that we really resolved a whole lot of things. "We are going to do something," he says, "but I'm just not sure what it's going to look like." Even at small institutions, the idea of switching to electronic correspondence carries with it big considerations, says Martin Ringle, the director of computing and information systems at Reed College. "The question has come up several times, and the conclusion is that this is something that we and other small colleges will go to in time, but it's not clear that the time is right at this moment," he says. One of Mr. Ringle's biggest concerns is finding a way to authenticate messages, so that a student knows that an especially sensitive or important message was sent by the college and not by a mischievous friend. Although small colleges could save money by going to electronic correspondence, the motivation is much higher at large public institutions because of the sheer number of students, Mr. Ringle says. Each letter that isn't printed out, each envelope that isn't stuffed, is money saved, and at a large university the numbers add up pretty fast. "The smaller colleges don't have the economic drive pushing them to do this," he says. "It's not like they're resisting, they just don't have the motivation. They are content to sit back and wait a little bit until doing it is noncontroversial, a no-brainer." Other universities got into electronic correspondence early and have taken time to settle in. At Texas, "they are making a decision to turn a switch," says Tracy Futhey, vice provost for computing services at Carnegie Mellon University. "We have evolved into that situation over the past 15 years. Very little happens other than electronic here on campus." "Our culture has been an electronic culture, period. It's been this way long enough that many of us can't remember a time when business wasn't conducted electronically." Students, faculty members, and administrators at Carnegie Mellon use a combination of e-mail accounts and online bulletin boards to get and transmit information about classes and the university. Bulletin boards are the preferred method of communication for large groups of people. "The problem with e-mail distribution lists is that you have a simple message that has to go out to 15,000 people, so you send it out to 15,000 people. We tried not to go down that path," Ms. Futhey says, adding that sending so many messages could slow the university's mail servers and would take up large amounts of disk space. Having students check electronic bulletin boards instead lets them pick out the information they need, and prevents them from getting so much mail from the university that they think of it as spam. Ms. Futhey says that economics did not drive Carnegie Mellon's correspondence to the Internet, so the university has never analyzed how much money it has spent or saved by going electronic. "We did not do this as a cost-saving measure so much as a recognition that this was an effective and efficient way to conduct business and convey information," she says. "This is a no-brainer for a lot of us. I think a lot of universities saw this trend and got on the trend long before it was widespread." Even the University of Chicago happened onto its electronic-correspondence policy -- which makes e-mail the official method of communicating with all undergraduates -- somewhat by accident. During a building-renovation project, the university unexpectedly had to remove the undergraduates' mailboxes and decided to use e-mail instead. In the near future, the university's faculty members will receive their faculty-senate minutes and reports through e-mail as well. Although e-mail messages are fast and accurate, Gregory A. Jackson, Chicago's chief information officer, says that the notion of saving money through electronic correspondence can be "an illusion." "What we're doing is shifting costs from a central location, which used to print things, to the individual students, who print things out on their own printer when they get it," he says. "And the problem is that printing things out on a laser printer is far more expensive than making a one-penny Xerox copy. So if a lot of students still print out a copy, even though the university has saved money, the university community has not." "And as soon as you shift and say e-mail is the way that we're going to communicate with you, either you have to provide a modem pool or you have to go out and get I.S.P. service," he adds. "Running modem pools is much more expensive than postage." Nevertheless, Mr. Jackson agrees that most colleges will eventually decide to make e-mail their official mode of communication, if they haven't already, and that routing messages will become even more efficient through technology called "diffusion servers" or "distribution servers." These servers can let users pick the ways that messages from a central organization reach them, whether by phone, fax, e-mail, pager, or other device. Some airlines use such services to give passengers flight updates. "We want to get to the point where people can say, 'Given the different kinds of things I can get, here's how I want to get them,' and have that be automated," he says. "All I have to do is send a message to faculty and the server knows which faculty should get e-mail, or which should get fax, and so on. You see companies starting to do this kind of thing, but for university communities where everybody has their own personal way of doing things, this is a really valuable service." "This question of how should we notify people is messy, but there are solutions out there and they work." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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