Slowly Changing Roles

In 1990 we were one of the first boarding schools in the country to put Ethernet wiring in our dorms and bring connectivity into the living areas of students and faculty. The full internet and web did not yet exist but having email and new resources was a revolution.

At that time there was only one phone per floor in the dorms and students were only allowed to use it until 11pm, which was “lights out”. And of course only one person could be talking at a time and the conversation could hardly be private.

Before cell phones, students really were isolated after 11 o’clock. Some students would hide a light near their bed to read later or maybe study, but in general all lights were out at 11. Being able to email and text with others in the privacy of one’s room would be revolutionary.

Since almost no school had done this, there was no guidance about what the rules should be or how this was to be monitored.

I had helped the maintenance people get information about how to install the wiring and the plugs, but this really was new for everyone. Wifi would not be invented for nearly a decade. 

Basically one wire had to run from each student’s desk down through the walls to a closet, usually in the basement, where it would be plugged into an ethernet switch box. The same for the faculty apartments. This meant feeding 35 or so wires down some vertical opening into the basement and creating a place where they could all be connected. A switch could have up to  24 ports so there had to be at least two to serve all the students. I decided to get a separate 12 slot switch just for the faculty apartments so they would be isolated and so that they could have 3 or 4 outlets in each apartment. 

The work was done over a break and soon we were ready to roll this out to the campus. I let the administration know and they told me that the Boarding Life committee would discuss how to run this and get back to me. The basic idea was that the internet would run from 6am until 11pm just like the light’s out policy.

They met, without me of course, and called me in to tell me their decisions and new rules. The consensus was that this could be a great way to further incentivize boarding students. For most of the students the internet would be turned off at 11, just like normal, but for students who had been given good recommendations by their floor faculty, they would be allowed to use the internet until 12. The dorm faculty would give me a list each week of the chosen students and I would arrange it every Sunday.

I sat for a few moments thinking about how to do this, and then just said “No, I’m not going to do that. It goes off for everyone except the faculty at 11. Faculty is on 24/7.”

There was stunned silence in the room. This was unprecedented. No staff or worker had ever questioned an administrative decision. If the Boarding Life Committee wanted breakfast at 4 am, the kitchen would just say yes. If the athletic department wanted the football field hand dried, the gardener just said yes. Not that they made such crazy decisions, but the law was that the admin made rules and the staff followed them. No questions.

I had just pushed back on an administrative decision. They looked at each other. Since no one knew what it would take to do what they had asked, including myself, there was a pregnant pause. Finally the boarding dean just said “OK, well then, we will do that.”

This was a revolutionary moment. It meant that the technology person had input and power to influence academic and student life policy. It meant that the technology person was not staff but part of the strategic planning group.

While there were some new devices that allowed for port by port control, I was not about to either buy that, learn it or worse, spend several hours each Sunday turning individual students on and off.

I went to the hardware store and bought 14 lamp timers for $100. I plugged each student switch into one and set it to go on at 6am and off at 11pm. My only challenge then was to adjust this at daylight savings time.

The new access was so popular that I would get students cornering me the morning of the time switch and reminding me that they had lost an hour. It took an hour or so to adjust all seven dorms so there was a tiny delay.

It was a brilliant and economic discovery and a revolutionary culture change.