Are students and faculty members missing the next big advance in teaching or research because of cuts in technology budgets?

In a time of shrinking budgets across academe, many college technology departments have laid off staff members, cut back on services, and restructured their operations. While college technology administrators say they are continuing to offer the bulk of their services, if at a reduced level, some say they have less time and fewer resources than in the past for new projects. And that could have long-term effects on campus computing.

"When budgets are soft, the first part -- right or wrong -- of the budget to fall off the edge of the table is innovation," says Richard N. Katz, a vice president for Educause, a higher-education technology group. "It's an absolutely essential part of a technologist's life to experiment with new stuff that is coming out."

A survey of chief information officers at 130 colleges conducted last fall by The Chronicle and Gartner Inc., a technology-consulting firm, indicates that innovation is down at most colleges whose IT budgets have been cut. Some 76 percent of the CIO's whose budgets were cut said they had canceled or delayed technology projects as a result. More than 60 percent of those with budget cuts said they had put off upgrading IT equipment, and 51 percent had frozen or eliminated IT positions.

Though few are arguing that IT departments should be immune from cutbacks when overall college budgets are down, Mr. Katz and others worry that too many colleges are making across-the-board cuts rather than strategic ones that might allow for some new investment in technology.

"Most institutions would fall into 'We're cutting technology the same way we are cutting everything else -- across the board,'" says Mr. Katz. "If we believe technology is a big part of our future and is a source of our competitive advantage, then we need to protect those investments."

Meanwhile, college technology administrators say they are doing their part to get the most bang for what's left of their technology buck. And others are looking to new sources of money for IT projects. Mr. Katz is helping organize a summit this week of chief financial officers and chief information officers from 35 colleges. At the summit, which is sponsored by Educause and the National Association of College and University Business Officers, participants will try to find better ways to maintain innovation while keeping costs down.

Reduced Service

John E. Bucher, director of information technology at Oberlin College, says his department's budget has been cut three years in a row. During that time, he has lost 5 of his 35 staff members to retirement, and hasn't been able to replace them because of a collegewide hiring freeze.

"A hiring freeze is an easy button for a chief financial officer to push, but it's not the most strategic thing," he says. "We're trying real hard to do the same with less."

Mr. Bucher says that some professors and students have complained about a reduction in IT service as a result of the cuts. "Everything seems to be just down a notch in our customer service," he says. "The backlog of work orders is longer than it used to be, and the time to answer the phone is longer than it used to be."

And forget about cutting-edge technology. Budget cuts are "keeping us from being able to pay attention to the ever-evolving, ever-increasing world of stuff," says Mr. Bucher.

One thing Mr. Bucher says he would like to experiment with, for instance, is open-source software that could replace the Blackboard course-management software Oberlin uses now. "I would be excited about looking into the use of open-source software to get out from under the potentially heavy licensing fees that we now have," he says. "Innovation takes some initial resources to even explore it."

Adding to the pressure on IT staff members are recent increases in worm and virus infestations on many campuses. "People are tired" from responding to such problems, says Michael Zastrocky, vice president for academic strategies at Gartner. "The budget cuts hit at a really tough time for IT."

Dennis A. Trinkle, a professor of instructional technology at DePauw University, says he is worried that reduced IT resources might soon leave college students unprepared for the technological demands of the business world.

"It is imprudent and ironic that many college leaders are pointing to technology as the future for their students and the future of the economy, but at the same time they're making big IT cuts," he says, noting that many public colleges in Indiana have recently felt the budget ax.

In a recent opinion essay in The Indianapolis Star, Mr. Trinkle wrote that although businesses are continuing to invest heavily in technology, even after the dot-com bust, colleges have largely reduced their IT spending.

"If you think about it strategically, universities have always had a historic mission to prepare students for life after graduation -- and that means you have to invest in IT," he says in an interview.

He is quick to point out that his own university has escaped technology cuts, thanks to a $20-million grant from the Lilly Endowment to support teaching with technology.

Mr. Katz, of Educause, says he worries that some colleges may miss out on ways to save money with technology because they are unwilling to make minor technology expenditures now. For instance, some institutions have spent millions of dollars upgrading their record-keeping and management software, and for a bit more money they could start to add services that could interconnect the new systems and increase efficiency.

One thing campuses could do is follow the example of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, he says. The university's expensive new human-resource system is paying off, he says, because it allowed the student-aid process to be put online, enabling faster processing with fewer data-entry personnel.

"Many colleges and universities I think have been stalled in taking fullest advantage of the significant investments in technology that we collectively made in the last seven or eight years," he says, though he declines to name an example.

And other colleges have spent millions on state-of-the-art technology classrooms but now cannot afford to train professors to use them. "You have underutilized investments because that last nickel or that last 5 percent is the 5 percent that's cut," he says. "It's like saving all your money and buying the new car and not having the money to fill it with gas."

More With Less

Many chief information officers paint a less dire picture, however, and argue that colleges can use budget cuts as an opportunity to adjust to changes in technology needs on campus.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, the central information-technology division laid off 60 people in February -- about 20 percent of its staff. But Jerrold M. Grochow, vice president for information services and technology, is optimistic.

He says the institute found ways to make cuts with minimal impact on popular computing services, and without cutting any high-profile programs like the OpenCourseWare project that plans to put materials from all MIT courses online. He also says his department sought advice from various campus users as it made its cutbacks. Among the resulting changes:

A service that provided printed manuals for various software programs was eliminated, but Mr. Grochow says that it had outlived its usefulness. "Demand had dropped off," he says. "Most people get their documentation via the Web these days."

A computer-repair service desk was consolidated with a software help desk that had been in a separate location, making both more efficient -- and more convenient.

Rather than adding computers to campus computing labs, new facilities were added that let students plug in their laptops to shared printers or large computer monitors. More students these days bring laptops to college than bring desktops, says Mr. Grochow.

"You can't make a cut that big without also going through some serious reorganization," says Mr. Grochow. "I'm not saying this is a cut I wanted to take, but when we're all done we will find ways to actually provide better service to the community."

Lev S. Gonick, vice president for information technology services at Case Western Reserve University, says his university is trying the same strategy -- making what he calls a "strategic retreat" from the sky-high technology budgets of the 1990s.

"It's a retreat from those days when we had unrealistic expectations that a blank check could be put in front of any board of trustees, and if it had IT, it would get signed off on," he says. "I look at this as an opportunity."

Mr. Gonick says his budget was cut by about 1 percent last year -- which he notes is not as bad as reductions on some other campuses.

Among the cutbacks he has made: reducing the number of audiovisual carts available during classes, handing off a passport-photograph service to another department, and extending the length of time computers are kept before they are replaced from about three years to four. That last change, which involved setting a campuswide policy to replace inconsistent practices in various departments, should save the university about $15-million over four years, he says.

"When we don't have a budget crisis, we don't have the mother of invention," necessity, which forces people to look for cost-saving measures, he says. Though he hopes that the changes will have a minimal impact on users, he says he is still "very concerned about missing out on opportunities for sparking innovations or supporting a breakthrough in scientific research."

David L. Smallen, vice president for information technology at Hamilton College, says budget cuts look like they are getting deeper. He is one of the leaders of the annual Cost of Supporting Technology Services survey of computing administrators, and he says initial data from the latest survey, whose results will be released this fall, show "pretty dramatic" IT reductions. For instance, while the percentage of college budgets devoted to IT and per-capita spending on IT had been going up for years, those figures are now coming down, though he would not elaborate.

Findings from The Chronicle's survey of IT officials were not quite so bleak. The survey found that 32 percent of the CIO's had budgets cut this year, and 43 percent had budgets that were the same as last year. Twenty-five percent said they had a larger budget this year than last.

State institutions face tougher budget cuts than private colleges, officials say, and that goes for IT budgets as well, officials say.

David Ernst, assistant vice chancellor for information technology services for the California State University System, says it has faced "some pretty incredible cuts over a three-year period," and that "IT is going to take its share of reductions." But he says the university has a strategic plan for technology that includes some ambitious new projects, such as the Academic Technology Initiatives. The project's goal is to increase the use of online course materials by professors in the system.

"That's going to take some investment, which might seem strange in a time of tight budgets," he says. "So much of what we do is dependent on having good technology available and meeting students' expectations."

New Revenue

Some colleges have also looked for creative ways to pay for new projects.

At California State University-Monterey Bay, for instance, the IT department recently started a partnership with about 40 local nonprofit groups to provide Internet access for them for a fee. That will bring in more than $550,000 in revenue over the next five years, says Gilbert R. Gonzales, chief information officer at the university. And he says the arrangements might help the university conduct service-learning projects at the nonprofit groups.

"Our strategy is to be more entrepreneurial," he says.

And though he says he has had to cut back on some support services, he has not had to cut any staff positions. "We're spending a lot more on IT than we have in the past," Mr. Gonzales adds.

Mark Olson, executive vice president and chief operating officer for the National Association of College and University Business Officers, says many IT departments are "looking for sources of new money -- development grants, state grants."

"We're getting asked more and more about revenue-generating activities," he says. And more colleges are forming consortia to collaborate and cut costs.

As Mr. Ernst says, the goal is to stay current enough so that when budgets improve, the colleges can easily roll out ambitious projects rather than having to play catch-up.

"We're trying to position ourselves so we can bring everything up again," he says. "Because IT is such an important part of how the CSU does business, we will try to protect it as much as we can."