When Alexander Johnson, a college freshman studying for a career in animation, began pondering colleges to attend, the opportunity to use modern computer technology tools in his classes played a major role in his consideration.
Today, Johnson considers himself lucky to be among the students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) with access to an array of computer-animation facilities and tools, as a student at Morgan State University.
“At my last college (a private technical institute), we really didn’t have that at all,” says Johnson, as he took a brief break from working on an animation program in the new Animation Lab at Morgan State’s School of Communications. “It would have taken about 16 hours to do what now takes three or four seconds,” Johnson says, comparing the school he transferred from with Morgan State.
Morgan State is one of just a handful of the nation’s more than 100 HBCUs on the front lines of plowing millions of dollars each year into computer technology as a means of recruiting and retaining students, providing students learning opportunities and helping their schools’ back shops run more efficiently for students, staff and vendors.
Despite the technological gains, even schools investing heavily say they have a long way to go in upgrading and maintaining the technology infrastructure of entire campuses. They also say finding a reliable stream of money to sustain their computer technology innovations is quite elusive.
“We don’t have all the bells and whistles because of lack of funding,” says Dr. Joseph Popovich, vice president for planning and information technology at Morgan State. “But we have a strong foundation,” he says, ticking off a list of technological gains the school has made since the dawn of the Internet era in the 1990s – a campus completely wired for Internet connections; new classrooms equipped with computer-age tools to help bring more life to teaching; distance learning classrooms that allow real-time visual and audio exchanges between teachers and students in classrooms miles apart; a “robust” e-mail system; and a central database system that services administrative departments handling registration, financial aid, accounts receivable and payable and housing.
While Morgan State spends about $6 million a year on information technology, Popovich notes nearly a third of that money comes from grants, a reality that keeps the school chasing short-term solutions for funding what tech savvy students and some larger vendors are expecting as basics for the long haul. “A lot of things you might consider basics on most campuses, we have to get grant money for them,” says Popovich, noting that state aid alone is not enough to support the school’s expanding physical plant.
