No Bard by the Bay: Online on Campus

By Carl Irving
Everyone has to have access to a computer at Cal State Monterey Bay because "papers" must be done with keyboards and monitors. All faculty, staff and students use them, and they lie at the heart of campus communications, according to Robert Van Spyk, director of the Institute for Communications Science and Technology, housed in a large former Army artillery storage depot.Everyone has to have access to a computer at Cal State Monterey Bay because "papers" must be done with keyboards and monitors. All faculty, staff and students use them, and they lie at the heart of campus communications, according to Robert Van Spyk, director of the Institute for Communications Science and Technology, housed in a large former Army artillery storage depot. This "100 percent" participation on-line means that much of the significant contact among parties takes place via e-mail. Students can be found hunched over terminals almost everywhere on the campus-from the library to their residences. Faculty assignments and corrected "papers" appear often on student screens.

Last year, in fact, the volume of e-mail messages got out of hand and everyone on campus was asked to cut back.

More than half of the students-as well as many faculty and staff-enroll in a "tech tools" course offered by Van Spyk's center. Van Spyk, who previously taught at Cal State Hayward, said no other campus in the system has so complete a computer tie-in. All offices, classrooms and on-campus residences have been wired to make use of the latest in computer technology.

The emphasis on high tech has lured two Silicon Valley firms-Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics-to the campus to share equipment and exchange teaching and research. Van Spyk hopes that is only the beginning.

The large amount of space surrounding the campus, he and others here say, eventually will bring more such firms to the former Army base. They also expect Cal State Monterey Bay to become a center for off-campus "distance learning" that could involve thousands of students living and working elsewhere in California.