Dean of the College Lee Pelton will decide by Spring term whether to implement recommendations from the College's Committee on Cable Television in order to provide cable service to all residence hall rooms beginning in the fall.
In order to install it by fall 1998, Pelton and other senior officers will have to make the final decision by May 1.
The committee's chair, Director of Instructional Services Michael Beahan, said within a few weeks, the committee will give Pelton a report on the cost and benefits of providing cable to dorm rooms.
The committee, which has met 10 times since October, is most concerned with the technical aspect of providing cable to the rooms.
Director of Residential Operations Woody Eckels, a committee member, said, "The worst thing we could do is go through all of the work we've done, and give [students] a picture in your room that's fuzzy."
Campus TeleVideo, a consulting firm specializing in college cable television systems, came to the College and evaluated its existing cable system.
The College presently connects cable to dorm lounges and classrooms. If it decides to provide it to the dorm rooms as well, more than 1,500 connections would be getting feed on campus.
Campus TeleVideo checked to see if the current 20-year-old system could support the increase in connections. It also looked at the College's six satellite dishes and the equipment it uses to send the channels throughout the system.
"Our current system is in pretty good shape, but it would need some improvement and upgrading," Beahan said.
The addition of connections would require updating the data networks and installing fiber-optic networks on campus.
Campus TeleVideo also recommended replacing the amplifiers on the system with new ones that would provide 550 megahertz of bandwidth.
This would allow for the use of 30 more channels than the current 24 that the College receives in the lounges and classrooms, but Beahan said we would "not plan to use all 54 initially because of the costs associated with activating that many channels."
The committee is considering either a "bulk delivery system" or one "that would be similar to what a lot of people have at home, where you can select from a lot of different piers of service -- basic, extended basic or premium channels," Beahan said.
The bulk system would cost less, both in the initial installation and in the price of operating and maintaining it.
It would also make the current educational programming, such as news programs and foreign language television, available to all students.
Film Studies Professor Mark Williams, another member of the committee, said students would be more likely to take advantage of educational programming, because they will not need to "lobby against everybody in the lounge" to watch it.
More academic departments would be likely to use the television as a teaching medium, he said.
"Television, and especially the channels that we're interested in programming, is an extraordinary source of news and information and will greatly enhance the overall availability of news and data," Williams said.
Beahan said the College would be more likely to implement the bulk system. With that system, all students would have cable in their rooms, which is important to many committee members from an educational standpoint.
With the tiered system, students would subscribe to cable on an optional basis.
While this would allow them to make their own decisions, it would be difficult to organize because the Dartmouth plan causes frequent changes to residents of particular rooms.
"College campuses are somewhat unique in that you have a lot more turnover in residents than you would in a town or a regular residential population, so there is a lot of cost related to the subscription-type service," said Beahan. "There's also a lot more hardware involved."
Along with making sure that cable television is technically feasible, the committee wants to be positive there is student interest.
Eckels said a lot of technical work would have to been done for the system to be operational by Fall term 1998.
"Are students going to want it badly enough to allow us to do the wiring while they're in their rooms?" Eckels said.
Matt Benedetto '00, a Student Assembly representative, and Maurissa Horwitz '98, a film studies major, are the two students on the committee.
Benedetto said, "People are very excited at the idea of this happening, but you can't give them any certainties. I do see some interest in it, both as an educational source and also as a source of entertainment."
The members of the committee said they have not extensively discussed the sociological debate surrounding the connection of cable to the dorm rooms.
Undergraduate Adviser Kirk Klausmeyer '00 said the fact that cable is only available in dorm lounges can cause conflicts when UGAs try to program events for their groups.
"Having one television is not enough, because sometimes you have conflicts, like if you have a study break to watch "ER," and people are watching football or a movie," he said.
Another UGA, Jodie Lee '00, said she does not think students would isolate themselves in their dorm rooms if they had cable television.
"Right now people invite other people into their rooms to watch movies or television, and they chill out together, so I really don't think that would happen," she said.
UGA Jill Schoenblum '00 said, "People complain all the time about not having cable in their rooms and about not wanting to go down to the lounge all the time to watch television."
Lee said she would probably plan Thursday night study breaks on her floor rather than in the lounge if students had cable television in their rooms.
"We know the people on the floor better than we do the rest of the dorm or cluster, and this sounds sort of silly, but people don't really want to walk down three flights of stairs," she said.
The committee will soon be able to nail down the cost of providing cable to the rooms, and it will probably make a recommendation within the next few weeks.
