Hooking up on Tufts' campus is often impossible. By that, we mean hooking up to the Internet. Tufts lags behind most of its peer institutions when it comes to providing wireless Internet to students. In 2006, the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate Services Committee found that Bowdoin College, MIT, Cornell, Dartmouth, Emory, Harvard and Northeastern Universities already had campus-wide wireless access. Three years later, the Internet remains inaccessible in many common rooms and classrooms at Tufts, and it is only sporadically available in campus dining halls. The university has finally set a target date for solving this problem, as reported in yesterday's front-page article, "Tufts hopes to put wireless access in all buildings within 3 years."
Administrators recently announced plans to install wireless Internet in all Tufts buildings within three years. Wren Hall is the project's top priority, with most modifications scheduled to take place over Thanksgiving break. The Daily commends the project, although installing wireless across campus is something that Tufts should have done much earlier. As university officials have repeated as incessantly as the refrain of a catchy song, the project will clearly be expensive. But widely available Internet access is fundamental to an academic environment in the 21st century.
The Internet is an integral tool for students. Most Tufts professors use the online service Blackboard to post readings, class announcements and homework assignments that are otherwise unavailable. The Web is also crucial for research, as browsers and search engines have replaced books and card catalogs. In a 2007 TCU Senate survey only 7.2 percent of student respondents said that not having a campus-wide wireless Internet service was not an inconvenience at all. The survey was unscientific and did not use a proportionally representative sample, but the dramatic numbers are impossible to ignore nevertheless.
Like the Internet, mobility is essential to the modern collegiate lifestyle. Despite what a worried parent may think, Tufts students do not spend all of their time watching reality television and hitting the frats. We keep busy, rushing from classes to extracurricular activities during the week. We do find ourselves doing our reading over breakfast in Dewick Dining Hall, just before class starts. In the past, many of us have wished that we could work in the common room of our dormitories but have been thwarted because the Internet is not readily available there.
Group class projects in particular underscore the ways in which campus-wide wireless would benefit Tufts students. Because access in common rooms, dining halls and classrooms is often unreliable, convenient group-study spaces are limited. The campus center and study rooms at Tisch Library are excellent spaces to do group work, but they are often prohibitively crowded — especially during that dreaded time of year when the most projects are assigned. Campus-wide wireless would allow groups of students to work in comfortable, convenient locations that are quieter than the campus center and more openly available than Tisch.
In the past, financial concerns were cited as the main obstacle to extending wireless across campus. As Executive Administrative Dean for the School of Arts and Sciences Leah McIntosh has reminded us, outfitting Wren with wireless Internet will be expensive. Past estimates for instituting a campus-wide network have reached as high as $2 million (although McIntosh has called that appraisal overly liberal). But the high costs of wireless would undoubtedly be balanced by its benefits.
Our age group is known for multi-tasking, working on the go and staying constantly connected to the information superhighway. Allowing us to make use of these qualities should be just as important to Tufts as providing us with access to any other educational tool.
