The Class That Went Online: Harvard’s Class of 2000 Plugs In

When the Class of 2000 stepped foot in Harvard Yard in 1996, they entered a university on the precipice of internet connectivity.

Exactly a decade before, Harvard had linked 13 Faculty of Arts and Sciences buildings with data cables. The university had gone officially online in 1992 with its connection to the World Wide Web, and by 1993, 68 percent of the incoming class had college email addresses.

In 1995, a faculty committee called for every staff and faculty member to have access to a computer and the internet, just in time for the arrival of the Class of 2000 on campus.

An annual survey conducted by FAS Computer Services revealed that, in 1997, 74 percent of seniors were connecting to the internet from their dorms. The same survey in 2000 did not ask that question — assuming that nearly all Harvard students living on campus were plugged in.

It’s a shift that shapes, in many ways, the Harvard we know today.

“When I started my freshman year at Harvard,” recalled Wellie W. Chao ’98, “it was, ‘Hey, if you’d like an email address, you fill out this form and we’ll work on giving you an email address.’ And then, similarly for internet, there wasn’t internet in the dorm rooms.”

Now, students are assigned an email address upon enrollment — and Wi-Fi is a given on move-in day.

Modernizing Harvard

The late ’90s and early 2000s at Harvard were marked by dual efforts to give students and faculty access to a customized website for their Harvard-related needs — an initiative known as the Portal Project — and to connect the Houses using physical cables.

Dean of the Division of Applied Sciences Paul C. Martin ’51, who both chaired the Portal Project committee and led the initiative to connect the Houses, “was among those who realized that the internet was going to change everything, and he brought that to the attention of the faculty and the president, and motivated Harvard to get prepared,” said Harry R. Lewis ’68, who served as dean of Harvard College from 1995 to 2003.

Lewis cited Harvard’s colonial architecture and remote athletic offices as significant challenges to the effort to connect each of Harvard’s Houses and faculty offices to the internet, which would enable them to go online and send emails back and forth.

But, in the end, he added, “universal connection means universal connection.”

“Everybody, every Harvard office, and every Harvard dormitory room in the College and in all of the graduate schools has got to have a connection,” he said.

David B. Alpert ’00, who was one of the undergraduate representatives to FAS Portal Project, described its goals to The Crimson in 2000 as to create “a single Web page customized for each student where students can go access all sorts of information.”

Alpert, at the time, said the system would be like Yahoo’s personalized sites, My Yahoo. The new system “is like My Harvard,” he told The Crimson in 1999.

Harvard students’ records and course registration are still accessed through a portal called my.harvard.

Students like Alpert played an increasingly key role in developing online resources for their peers. Jeff C. Tarr ’96, who co-founded the student group Digitas, told The Crimson that “Harvard did not have any real web presence or anything. They were late getting online as far as offering information for students.”

In 1993, he and his friends created the first course website on campus for the general education course Greek Heroes by Professor Gregory Nagy. Three years later, in 1996, Digitas launched the Course Decision Assistant which digitized both the Q reports and the course catalog, which had previously been “many inches thick.”

The shift from analog to digital student services and increasing access to the internet amongst the student body was a significant one.

“So you had an internet that was designed really for what happened in the science labs on campus, suddenly having all these student computers online,” said Kevin S. Davis ’98, who coordinated residential computing at the FAS’ computer services office from 2000 to 2005. “It was a kind of an era of discovery for everyone.”

Job Hunts Go Digital

The advent of the internet, in particular, shaped the world that the class of 2000 joined as graduates. By 2000, Cambridge had become a hub for technology and internet startups, many fueled by MIT and Harvard students, enticing new graduates with stock offers and benefits.

“It was an exciting time,” said Robert D. Austin, a then-assistant professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School. “There were a lot of people who were trying to get in on what was happening.”

The majority of Harvard students who initially got involved with these startups, said Austin, were not necessarily computer scientists. “Harvard historically has been more about investment banking, consulting, private equity — and their part of the tech industry story might have been venture capital,” Austin said.

But established startups along Massachusetts’ Route 128 — arguably a second Silicon Valley — were not the only ones staffed by Harvard students.

Lewis highlighted a 2000 rule change he proposed to the faculty — to reverse a policy barring students from running their own startup businesses out of their dorm rooms — as one byproduct of Harvard’s internet connectivity.

Pushback to Lewis’ proposal came because colleagues worried what could happen to Harvard’s tax-exempt status if students used Harvard resources, like the internet, for personal profit.

But, Lewis argued, because students on financial aid at Harvard were required to work during the semester, with the advent of the internet, many began telecommuting to Wall Street or Silicon Valley, where they had interned during the summer.

“How would you ever know the difference between a student who was working for himself or for herself, or doing something, and the student was working for McKinsey?” he said. “Why is one something which we kind of insist people have to do if they’re going to get Harvard scholarship money, and the other one is something that you say you absolutely are not allowed to do?”

Student entrepreneurs also participated in the College’s effort to bring its job recruiting system online.

Chao, alongside two cofounders, launched the site eRecruiting, a job recruiting site where students could apply to jobs recruiting at Harvard via the Office of Career Services, in 1997.

The opportunity he and his peers seized upon for digitization, Chao said, was a common thread “with a whole bunch of different sectors in the economy.”

With Crimson Solutions, students could access OCS services outside regular business hours, and from their dorm rooms or from home.

Over time, Chao said, “people saw, ‘oh, the system works, and it provides some significant benefits.’”

But the breakneck pace of money and excitement flowing into tech didn’t last forever.

In the spring of 2000, the NASDAQ — a market indicator especially geared toward tech companies — plunged by nearly 75 percent of its initial value, signaling the burst of the “dot-com bubble.” The drop, which signified the tapering off of the immense venture capital cash flow into the tech industry, resulted in difficulty raising money for new startups, said Austin.

“There were companies that reneged on job offers,” Austin added. “That’s just not done.”

“It was just boom or bust,” said Chao. “And after that point, it was really difficult to raise money because people were just fearful.”

Connecting Online, Disconnecting in Person?

With the advent of the internet came debates about how best it could be used to support the student body.

One such conflict came with Chao’s job-search service: OCS’s 1997 decision to completely switch to online recruitment resulted in pushback from some students, which he estimated to be “10 or 20 percent” of the student body.

“Some of them felt, ‘well, I understand the existing process, I know how I’m going to do well,” Chao said. “And they would point out, you know, shortcomings or risks, like, what if the internet goes down, or what if these other things happen that prevent me from utilizing the system?”

As a result of student pushback, OCS shifted back to paper recruiting in the fall of 1997.

“The objections were maybe a little bit valid, but over time, they became less and less important because the system provided significant advantages,” Chao said. “It became very, very reliable.”

Another debate surrounded concerns about how online interconnectivity would reshape house communities. In 1998, Pforzheimer House became the first to move its communications online with the creation of the “PfoHo Open,” in which residents could send emails to the house in a “virtual common room.”

Benjamin W. Dreyfus ’01, a former Pforzheimer House resident, told The Crimson in 2000 that the email list had benefits and drawbacks

“Even though I do not attend many House events, and indeed do not even spend many waking hours in the house,” he said, “PfoHo Open follows me around everywhere there is telnet.”

But though he might find the emails annoying, Dreyfus added that “PfoHo Open is like a member of the family.”

And, with the advent of cell phones in the late 90s, students and professors alike began questioning whether phones were eroding students’ social interactions.

In a Crimson op-ed in 2000, Noah Oppenheim ’00, a former Crimson editorial chair, wrote that cell phones were “destroying our way of life” and that technology was becoming a flashy status symbol rather than truly promoting community.

Other students felt that the phones were more useful than distracting.

In a 1999 interview with The Crimson, Esther L. Healer ’00 said that her phone was “a really wonderful tool for multi-tasking.”

But, the rise of the cell phone also forced instructors to begin reckoning with course policies to contend with the added distraction.

For some faculty — including Eric W. Robinson, then a History professor at Harvard — cell phones were not a meaningful distraction.

“The phone rings, I roll my eyes, the students giggle and hopefully within five seconds the student switched the phone off,” he said in a 1999 interview with The Crimson. “It’s an annoyance, but hey, it’s not a big deal.”

But, in the introductory chemistry course Chemistry 5, “Introduction to the Principles of Chemistry,” a ringing phone during an exam was enough for course staff to ban phones during tests.

“People shouldn’t be disturbed in classes by an idiot with a cell phone,” Healer told The Crimson in 1999. “I guess as an idiot with a cell phone I can say that.”

By the fall of 2000, Lowell, Mather, and Cabot Houses asked students to turn off cell phones in dining halls and classrooms.

Lewis told The Crimson at the time that “the concern is not just the ringing but the holding of telephone conversations in dining halls which tend to ignore the presence of others in a way that is rather discourteous.”

And some longtime traditions began to fade away. Before Harvard went online, the men’s crew team would learn their boat assignments for the day’s practice by checking a schedule posted in the window of Leavitt and Pierce — Harvard Square’s gentlemanly tobacco shop since 1883.

“By connecting that boathouse, you know, that that was the end of that tradition,” Lewis said in an interview. “People could just get up in the morning and look at their email.”

—Staff writer Kaitlyn Y. Choi can be reached at kaitlyn.choi@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Sophie Gao can be reached at sophie.gao@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sophiegao22.