Faculty prepare for Y2K

Academe, Nov/Dec 1999

ADMINISTRATORS AREN'T THE ONLY ones readying campuses for Y2K. At several colleges and universities, faculty are doing their part to ease colleagues' transition to the new millennium and purge hardware and software of the dreaded two-digit date fields, which might misconstrue 2000 as 1900.

"Part of my job around here has been to dispel some of the misguided idealism," says Byron Brown, a professor of economics at Michigan State University. "Telling people by earnest interoffice memo what they have to do or simply dropping off the needed software and expecting it to get installed isn't going to work," he says.

Brown is the faculty representative on the Y2K preparedness task force at Michigan State, whose ten-member core group has been meeting weekly since 1998. Realizing the strains of faculty workloads and the inconsistency of colleagues' computer expertise, Brown was instrumental in shifting the onus for departmental Y2K-related computer alterations away from individual professors and onto administrative computer coordinators, whose ingenuity is more of a known quantity.

"People thought this was going to be a hardware problem," says Brown of the early naivete about the massive fix that began to loom before programmers in the early 1990s. "But a lot of problems are really in the software." One major goal at Michigan State has been to install a Y2K software repair kit and an antivirus program on each of the fourteen thousand university-controlled computers. As the days tick down, Brown sees reaching the remaining "few thousand" as a doable task.

"We've used the scattergun approach to get the attention of faculty, and we've done it several times." Besides the sense that teamwork and sound strategy can cut even Herculean tasks like campus Y2K preparation down to size, Brown says he's drawn one other insight from his latest bout with leadership: I was struck by how administrators hadn't learned the message of Pepsi, Coke, or the local tire vendor: repetition." One thing a project such as preparing colleagues for Y2K teaches you, says Brown, is that "you can't just contact people once."