Hard Times For Hardwiring

The recent successful effort to provide Internet access to the nearly 1500 rooms in Eastchester Campus Housing at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine demonstrates undeniably that this University is fully capable of equipping its residence halls with Ethernet connections when it wishes to do so. Regrettably, Yeshiva College's Uptown Campus, which is host to less than half the number of rooms found in the Eastchester complex, remains a desolate technological wasteland, bereft of the computational resources so essential to contemporary university education.

If the University wishes to ostentatiously tout its top tier ranking in the U.S. News rankings, it must, at the very least, afford its undergraduate students educational facilities befitting this designation. We know of no other top tier American universities that have yet to furnish undergraduate students with direct Internet access from campus housing units. It is therefore disingenuous, we believe, for the University's public relations arm to claim that the Main Campus is being updated to "meet the needs of the 21^st century" when there are, as yet, no plans afoot to install dormitory Ethernet connections.

Many Yeshiva students, who already encounter significant time constraints as a result of the dual curriculum, must battle mightily during their precious few moments of free time to gain access to the handful of available computer terminals in the overcrowded library and computer laboratories. To our way of thinking, it is unacceptable for the University to withhold educational resources from students, especially when the effect is measurably adverse.

The University's successful efforts at Einstein suggest that administrative foot dragging at the Main Campus is attributable either to blind greed or gross ineptitude. We find both of these explanations to be repugnant. Residential Ethernet connections must be installed in short order on the Main Campus.