Before computer screens lit up the first floor of Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, the hum of VCRs and clanking of card catalog drawers reverberated through the building. Looking back at the implementation of technology at Bowdoin since the beginning of the computer age in the 1960s, each wave of innovation reshaped how knowledge was created, shared and preserved on campus.

When Professor of Latin and Greek Barbara Weiden Boyd first came to the College in 1980, modern technology had yet to touch most of academic life.

“There were two people, I think, who worked here who identified themselves as computer people,” Boyd said. “I believe there was a mainframe computer where a lot of data, grades and enrollment and things like that, were kept. But that was it, basically, at least to someone who wasn’t particularly interested in that stuff.”

The College originally installed an IBM 1620 computer in Searles Science Building in 1964, then later acquired a PDP-10 mainframe computer from Digital Equipment Company in 1969. Some professors at the time had typewriters, but most official documents, such as letters of recommendation and fellowship applications, went through the department coordinator, then known as a secretary. This changed in the mid-1980s, when many professors began purchasing their own personal computers.

“We started doing our own typing, which in a way, I would say, made faculty work in some ways more tedious,” Boyd said. “Because, frankly, typing up letters of recommendation isn’t terribly exciting. It’s important. We all appreciate how important it is. But, you know, it would be nice to have somebody else do that. But that’s ancient history now.”

At some point, the College began providing faculty with their own computers, ushering in a new era of technology at Bowdoin. Professor of Constitutional Law and International Law and Government Allen Springer, who joined the College in 1976, agreed that the advent of personal computers was the first major technological change he saw at Bowdoin. From there, it was the internet that began dramatically changing academic life beginning in the mid-1990s.

“I had a colleague, a younger colleague, in [the Russian department] who said, ‘You’ve got to try this thing called the internet,’” Springer said. “For me, what I really loved about it, once it became clear that enough students were online enough, it was a great way to communicate with students.”

In particular, Springer felt that the internet expanded the ability to bring education outside the classroom, connecting with students about current events in real time.

“I was teaching contemporary international relations, and it was great to have an editorial come out in The New York Times and just send it out to everyone in this class and say, ‘read this tonight; we’ll talk about it tomorrow.’ It really picked up the pace of teaching,” Springer said. “So I think from a teaching perspective, it really made things much more exciting and much more immediate.”

Boyd noted that while some older faculty may have been hesitant to introduce new technology into their jobs, there was no alternative. She explained that as the College expanded administratively, faculty had to produce an increasing amount of information; new personal computers, and eventually email, became necessary to facilitate this. Still, faculty continue to maintain leeway around how much they choose to engage with these new technologies.

“Being at Bowdoin is good in a lot of ways. Nobody forces us to do anything, really,” Boyd said. “We’re going to get the computers that the College is going to buy for us, but beyond that, we can use as much or as little technology as we want.”

In 1984, Humanities and Media Librarian Carmen Greenlee helped the College implement its first language laboratory in Sills Hall. The lab offered students access to computers and VCRs to support listening and speaking drills, as well as the ability to watch foreign films that the library had purchased. Originally, students relied on reel-to-reel tapes to practice “kill and drill” exercises, in which they repeated language pronunciations from tape recordings.

“This was seen as really revolutionary. In those days, I wanted to collect foreign films in Beta and VHS formats. We were starting to catalog those, and I asked to use that money for an Apple 2C computer because there were a few database programs that we could get from Apple,” Greenlee said.

At this time, Greenlee also met with the dean for academic affairs to fund a database of foreign films, so that students could watch them individually rather than attend showings with the entire class.

“Language learning technology was the first technology that drove classroom computing because of the playback of films,” she said. “People will tell you at other schools it was the same way. It was the language departments that drove a lot of the computing and [Information Technology (IT)] innovations for classroom support.”

In the 1990s, watching films or the news was a collective, not individual experience. At the time, Bowdoin had a team of roughly three people working in IT and four satellite dishes on top of Sills Hall. The campus received television from Russia, Europe and South America.

“Since there weren’t TVs on campus, when big things—like the OJ Simpson trial—would happen, people would come to two or three places to watch the news. We would set up one here in the library. After 9/11, we did that so people could come and see what was going on.”

Aside from the changes in media consumption since the 1990s, students were also initially communicating through letters packed into Smith Union mailboxes. Mailboxes were originally located in the lower level of Moulton Union and in Coles Tower but were moved to Smith once the building was renovated to be a student center in the 1990s.

“Students were constantly going to Smith Union, and you heard the clicking sound of the boxes opening and closing all the time. But in those days, you received a letter, you got mail twice a day, and you dealt with it. Now it’s 24 hours a day. Sometimes,  I’m up at three o’clock in the morning. and I can approve bookings for the Media Commons room. I shouldn’t be able to do that at three o’clock in the morning,” Greenlee said.

The introduction of newer technology to Bowdoin over the years brought a newer staff interested in Bowdoin’s early adoption of key technology, such as Professor of Chemistry Richard Broene.

“One of the reasons I chose to come to Bowdoin is because all of the requisite technology and even some more was already here, as opposed to other places where I looked, where they may not have had a high field or a superconducting nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer,” Broene said. “Bowdoin was an outlier in many respects with the amount of instrumentation it had in the chemistry department.”

In addition to technology specific to departments, Broene highlighted that the implementation of Apple hardware across the campus has been highly effective, both for communication with students and outside of the College.

“iPads are a great thing for being able to communicate. I can draw things and share a whiteboard with a friend. A long ways away, we could only get together and do it by phone, or we could get together at a conference. Now, we can collaborate that way,” Broene said.

In July 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bowdoin provided every student with an iPad Pro and with a Magic Keyboard to make online classes seamless and accessible. In February 2022, Bowdoin launched the Digital Excellence Commitment, which expanded the previous iPad initiative, providing every student a 13-inch MacBook Pro, iPad mini and Apple Pencil.

“The decision was made that we had to standardize so that a student would have access to the same technology,” Broene said. “The instructor would have an Apple computer; the instructor would have an iPad. The technology going between the classes would be the same, and you might use a different either program or app on it, but generally, you knew how to use Notability, you knew how to use OneNote, you knew how to use Teams and everything was standardized.”

Regarding the rise of generative AI in academics, Boyd said that while she, among many professors, has concerns, she believes that the College’s work to educate students and engage with the ethical components of this emerging technology is necessary and important.

“I think what Bowdoin is trying to do with the Hastings Initiative [for AI and Humanity] is necessary. I think we can’t, as an institution, ignore it,” Boyd said. “I can as an individual, yes, but we can’t, because we have an obligation to the students who want to work in that area to help them be able to do that and to educate them in that area.”

Springer explained that while he historically has not viewed new technology with trepidation, he has concerns about AI, particularly its impact on writing.

“I do think for faculty going forward, particularly for things like first-year writing seminars, figuring out how to use AI constructively and well is going to be a real challenge,” Springer said. “I don’t think I’ve felt, with any of the technologies that were being introduced all along that I’ve seen, any sense of regret, danger, fear. I really only saw opportunity.… With AI, I’m partly tied to the concern I have about the way it might undermine students’ developing their own writing and analytical skills. I do feel more conflicted in a way that I didn’t with the other ones.”

With this in mind, Springer believes that it will take faculty time and thought to consider how to navigate AI in education, and that the Hastings Initiative plays an important role in this.

“I think folks are going to struggle trying to figure out how to do it well, and it’s going to be such a big part of what we’re doing that we do need to learn how to do it well. So, I think the Hastings Initiative is great,” Springer said.

Boyd suggested that AI may eventually be seen as just another tool, describing how some in the classics discipline use it to decipher writing on ancient papyrus scrolls.

“I’m hoping that what’s going to happen with this AI … whether it’s a fad or a craze, I don’t know, but that at some point it’s going to die down. It’ll just become another tool that can be useful for certain things,” Boyd said.

In contrast to Boyd and Springer, Greenlee expressed less concern about AI. She said that, while she was initially skeptical of new technological developments in the past, she realized the inevitability of technological developments—and instead chose to think about how best to implement them.

“The thing about AI and education is that we’re sort of building the plane as we fly it. That’s why everybody’s got to be talking and learning from each other,” Greenlee said. “We have to do it and not be so afraid. There are some things to be afraid about, but when you have the long view—like I do—you realize it’s just another step along the way.”