Cable in the Ivory Tower

Despite the pleas of students, cable television at Harvard has always been a pipe dream. Last year, when a working group of the Committee on House Life (CHL) met to investigate the possibility of wiring Harvard with cable television, the idea was deemed unfeasible. Six months of research uncovered a price tag in the millions of dollars for the infrastructure necessary to bring cable television to dorm rooms.

Like Harvard, Northwestern University found it prohibitively expensive to wire its older dorms with cable for television. But while Harvard undergraduates are booking House television rooms and looking for south-facing windows to mount their satellite dishes, students at Northwestern are watching cable programming in their dorm rooms right now.

Northwestern is one of the first schools in the country to take advantage of “multicasting technology,” a process that digitizes cable programming and broadcasts it to students’ computers through the school’s network, according to the University’s television website. Unlike the costly process of running cable wires through all the buildings, the cost to multicast each channel is only around $15,000, according to Morteza Rahimi, Northwestern’s vice president and chief technology officer for information technology, as reported by the Brown Daily Herald.

This low cost allowed Northwestern to digitize twenty cable stations, which were voted on by students and included the Cartoon Network, CNN, ESPN and MTV. The result has been positive; students report being happy with the picture quality and with being able to watch their favorite shows in the comfort of their dorms. According to the Daily Northwestern, its students living in the dorms are getting all twenty stations for only $121.20 a year—or about $12.50 per month of school. With a price tag lower than a dinner at Spice each month, most Harvard students would be more than willing to pay.

The cost hurdle successfully removed, and the success of Northwestern paving the way, Harvard should bring cable television programming to all its dorm rooms by next fall. As Adam M. Johnson ’02, a member of last year’s working group, told me in an e-mail, the obvious next step “is to come up with a technologically feasible and cost-efficient plan and bring the issue back up with the Committee on House Life.” The CHL should issue a recommendation to help see this process to completion. And with Harvard constantly looking to improve its computer network and bandwidth, multicasting technology should be added into the planning of future upgrades.

With this new technology, the conversation has switched from whether cable television in student dorms is feasible to whether the College wants it, and what priority it should be given.

Cable television programming in all dorm rooms would be a marked improvement over the status quo. Presently, students seeking the distraction of some Comedy Central or ESPN, or the news reporting and analysis of CNN have to rely on their own satellite dishes or House common room televisions that are each meant to serve hundreds of students. But installing satellite dishes is difficult and expensive—besides paying for the service, students have to find a south-facing location to mount their dish. Satellite reception is further hampered by University rules, found in the Handbook for Students, which forbid objects from being placed outside of dorm room windows.

And while Houses and some first-year dorms are home to common rooms offering cable television, the rooms are often booked with students watching movies, or programming on a different station than you had in mind. Compared to the existing options, the convenience of cable television broadcast onto students’ individual computers is undeniable.

Cable programming provides a form of information and entertainment that is presently not available to Harvard students. CNN provides national and international coverage for students who don’t want to listen to NPR or wade through websites for their news. Stations like the Discovery Channel and History Channel are educational in nature. And there are dozens of channels that provide entertaining programming that Harvard students consistently enjoy when they’re home on break.

Critics of cable in the dorm worry about the effect of cable on students’ habits. “I’m not in favor of [students] having [cable] in their rooms because I think it’s too great a temptation,” Adams House Master Sean Palfrey, another member of the working group, told The Crimson last year. And while the University’s goal is to educate students—not entertain them—it is unlikely that students will abandon their studies or their house communities to become zombies in front of computer screens. Harvard students—like all undergraduates—need time to relax with some form of entertainment. They already have televisions in their rooms for video games, movies and—if they can get good reception—the occasional broadcast. Time spent watching cable is likely to compete with these other media and not with academics. Most students at the College were faced with the temptation of cable at home but it didn’t stop them from meeting Harvard’s admission standards.

This technology has made cable programming in Harvard dorms a matter of “when.” The Ivory Tower should have cable before the fall.

Judd B. Kessler ’04 is an economics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.