<< Front page Commentary February 20, 2004

New printing system: good idea, poor execution

To the Editors:

The Oberlin Review staff editorial column last week brought up an important issue: the use of public printers on campus and the change in College policy from laissez-faire quotas to rigid per-page pricing.

But the article largely misses the point. The Review laments the new printing policy because it is thought to be inconvenient for students, rather than addressing the fact that the electronic reserve system itself needs to be re—examined.

The College would do well to open a campus-wide discussion on ERes. There are several compelling reasons to do so.

Not only has ERes resulted in voluminous paper waste — I recall a CIT staff member’s letter to the Review some time ago stating that paper consumption from public printers has at least doubled since it was implemented — but web-based course readings should be considered in the context of developments in copyright law and the increasing reliance of modern pedagogy on sophisticated, but fallible, technological equipment.

It was only a matter of years ago that “readers” were photocopied for students and professors used blackboards; now the former is illegal and the latter is rapidly falling out of vogue.

The Review’s alarm at the perceived inconvenience of the new printing policy is also misplaced. First of all, swiping a card which automatically deducts seven cents from your account per page is nothing if not streamlined.

Someone eventually needs to pay up for toner and paper, and the College’s response is not a bad one. Students have been free-riders for years on a system that did not properly connect them to their consumption.

Just as stealing plates from CDS indirectly increases tuition, the same occurs with printing. Better that the incentive to print wisely be given at the point of use, rather than indirectly through our parents’ pocketbooks.

Instead of the beginning of the end, the new printing policy is probably an effective first effort towards a saner and fairer use of public facilities.

The problem was not the idea of point-of-sale payment, but its implementation. “Smoldering plastic and disabled printers” were a result of CIT mis-management more than anything else. If the software tracking students’ accounts on OCIDs could not be tested and ready for the beginning of the semester, it should have been delayed until September.

It does not take very much thought to realize that the printing frenzy last week was due entirely to this delay. Had it begun Feb. 9, no plastic would have smoldered and the transition would have been smooth.

Best of all, though, would have been the avoidance of the terrible irony of wasting thousands of dollars of paper, toner and staff time devoted to fixing printers before the system that is supposed to control costs came online.

Any savings that would have accrued this semester and possibly for the entire year as a result of the new pricing scheme quickly vanished within a week.

Now that it’s here, the system is behaving promisingly, but it is not perfect. Through some unknown combination of poor management, ineptitude or simply being understaffed, CIT invested in a system that does not properly support portable document format (PDF) files.

Pharos was certainly not tried-and-true prior to the outlay of probably tens of thousands of dollars for the card-swiping hardware and installation. This is another problem that will need to be addressed, the cost of which will not be small.

But before we do anything else, we ought to consider the problem in its whole context. Do the benefits of accessibility from web access really outweigh the costs?

Actually, do we have any choice now that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is in effect?

How has this legislation changed the practice of teaching?

If we move away from ERes, are we obliged to augment the profitability of major publishing houses by buying books or is there another solution?

Philosopher Langdon Winner, a notable proponent for broadly approaching problems involving technology, coined the phrase “technological somnambulism” to describe our culture’s often blind acceptance of new technology.

I sincerely doubt that the allure of “effortless” electronic reserve played a small role in the College’s initial decision-making several years ago. It is now that, with some experience and perspective gained in the ERes experiment, we should return to the central aims of the liberal arts and with a critical eye, assess what role electronic reserve should have in our institution.

—Michael E. Murray
College senior


 
 
   

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