Vassar plugs in: One technology at a time

Most students at Vassar College in 2010 neglect the small white boxes featuring a menagerie of shaped holes for technological plug-ins that come affixed to each dorm room's wall. The wireless Vassar world has essentially rendered it useless, or at the very least unnecessary. Phone jacks and Ethernet cables are already a thing of the past, even though the history of getting them located in the privacy of dorm rooms was a long time in the making. The history of communication is tightly intertwined with the experiences of each Vassar generation. Let's take a look at them all, one plug-in at a time.

The first communication connection to the world beyond campus is dated on the Sesquicentennial website's timeline at 1873 when the Western Union telegraph line was extended to Vassar. The telegraph's inventor, Samuel F.B. Morse, had another great idea: investing in women's education by being a founding trustee of the College. According to Dean Emeritus Colton Johnson, the famous Maria Mitchell utilized the telegraph to communicate with other major observatories in the East. By 1872, she was responsible for keeping Poughkeepsie on exact time, sending it to a local jeweler who then transmitted it to a dial in the Poughkeepsie post office, from which people in the business district would set their watches accordingly. Johnson also noted, "The extremely accurate clock in the Observatory—a very rare one that's still keeping time on the second floor—was critical to her scientific observations." Beyond that, the campus was penetrated only by hand written letters delivered via "snail mail."

Telephone service was established in 1880, but was limited to one phone per hallway, as chronicled in the Vassar Encyclopedia. The entry explains how operators and switchboards managed both internal and external lines before 1956. At that time, phones were installed in professors' offices upon request, and the dormitories and operators were only responsible for calls to and from campus. More direct off-campus lines were added in 1972, the entry continues, to alleviate pressure on the manual switchboard, which was eventually replaced by a computerized system in early 1982. The completely automated voice-recognition system that we now know and love (at least when it properly recognizes what we're saying) came in 2005.

Private telephone lines for students in their dorm rooms came late as well. Joan Kjelleren '71 recalls, "I did not have a phone in my room until junior year. Otherwise, the phone was in the dorm hallway. Even after the installation of phones in the room, one generally used it for long distance, not necessarily to call another student, and almost never a professor." That public location in dorm hallways meant that messages were left with whomever happened to answer the phone when it rang.

Dorm messenger service was institutionalized in the "white angels," one of the most popular distinct Vassar features shared by alumnae/i of the time with current students. Instead of a V-Card swipe, messengers dressed in white would greet dorm enterers in the lobby, and keep track of any phone or in-person messages left for residents. World War II took its toll on this service; "messengers" were cut as part of an overall reduction in non-academic staff in order to meet the need for civilian workers. Students compensated for the loss on campus during the war, shares Johnson. Each student was required to work at least seven hours a week, either as a messenger or in some other work around the residence hall.

One communication method that has withstood the test of time can still be found on dorm room doors. Currently, most door message boards are sleek white boards made for erasable markers. Their predecessors, though, were much more rustic. "Doorblocks," as President MacCracken called them in 1950, were "oak-bound" tablets fastened to the doors of students' rooms, stemming from the 18th century Oxford tradition. Vassar slang converted this to "sporting the oak," translating to closing one's outer door to indicate that one didn't wish to be disturbed.

Of course, the most recent system that has come to dominate communication is the Internet via the computer. Johnson estimates that "the first personal computing came in 1982 when the College adopted the DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) "Rainbow" as its official—i.e. ‘supported'—personal computer." As his story goes, "A Vassar team had gone to California to look at Apple's top-secret Macintosh development program, but, being sworn to secrecy, could only say when they returned that they'd seen it, so Vassar bought the ‘Rainbow.'" From there, "A course, Computing as a Resource, entered the curriculum in the spring of that year, and e-mail at some level must have come along about the same time." This was over a decade before the general public gained access to the World Wide Web, which Vassar's Sesquicentennial website dates at 1993.

The arrival of the Internet shouldn't be confused with the dawn of social media, though, as Jennifer Henion '98 points out: "We would [still] arrange meetings either via e-mail or in person. We had the Internet the whole time I was at [Vassar] but no social networking yet." She has fond memories of the email program Eudora, and "some of [her] friends actually still use it—it was like [Microsoft] Outlook but probably pretty primitive."

Also notable is the fact that computers in her era were still tethered to the wall; Vassar didn't go wireless until 2006, just four short years ago. We are still very much in the thick of technological change—the Vassar Info Site only started experimenting with Twitter on August 31, 2009.

So, next time you lament that the Vassar Bubble reigns supreme while you're surfing the World Wide Web from the comforts of your bed, on your handheld smartphone, far, far away from that little white box of jacks on the wall, take a moment to remember what the past 150 years were like and think about what it would be like to have a white angel greet you when you stumble into your dorm at 2 a.m. We are indeed in a new era of Vassar communication.