Wiring The Ivory Tower

WHEN CALIFORNIA State University administrators drew up plans for their newest campus, scheduled to open this fall at the old Fort Ord site in Monterey Bay, one building was conspicuous absent from their blueprints: the library. But as Barry Munitz, chancellor of the 22-campus system, sees it, why bother wasting all that money on bricks and mortar and expensive tomes when it could be better spent on technology for getting information via computer? "You simply don't have to build a traditional library these days," Munitz says.

Few places are so awash in information technology as the nation's college campuses. And thanks to the explosive growth of the Internet, universities have intensified their efforts to become fully networked. As a result, the last few years have seen sweeping changes in the way computers and computer networks are being used in both administrative functions and instruction.

It's now de rigueur for a college or university to have a presence on the World Wide Web, the interlinked digital archive for thousands of Internet users. Those that don't have their own home page (an opening screen with a list of contents) are considered hopelessly backward. Many students now set up personal Web pages. And more and more instructors are putting syllabuses, lecture notes, tests and student comments on the Internet. A couple of years ago the University of Pennsylvania, like many institutions, provided all students with e-mail accounts. "It was a small jump to say, "If you'd like to use some of the space we've allocated for e-mail to set up your own home page, we'll show you how'," says Daniel A. Updegrove, Penn's associate vice provost for information systems and computing. "The effect on students has been tremendous; they go from passive browsers to writers, reporters and publishers."

Even those fields that were traditionally low tech are increasingly dependent on computers and networking. "We used to be able to teach an architecture student with a T square, a few pencils and some triangles," says Lawrence Speck, dean of the school of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. "Now we need a $5,000 workstation, with peripherals and software, and a staff to run the laboratories. It's a mind-boggling change in the educational enterprise." And an expensive one. At a time when tuitions are already out of sight, colleges are having to spend millions to keep up with the state of the art.

Term papers are now multimedia events. For her microanatomv class, Molly Armstrong, a junior at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, took images of the heart of a chick embryo from microscope slides, transferred them to a computer, created a rotating, 3-D model and presented it on videotape. Writing students at Stanford University use "computer-mediated communication" to exchange essay drafts over a local network. "Electronic discussions encourage more widespread participation," says Richard Holeton, coordinator of Stanford's computers and writing project. "It gives students a more visceral sense of audience, a community of readers who take their ideas and their writing seriously."

Then there was the mapping project at the University of Pennsylvania. For his senior project there, Nathan Gasser took a standard outline map of the campus and turned it into a Web site. Click on an outline of the building and you see a color photo of the building with historical information. Click on the library and you're linked to the electronic catalog. Gasser's reputation as a Web wizard spread and a Philadelphiawide group asked him to create a similar map of the city.