Mitrano

When I asked Diana Oblinger, president of Educause, what the biggest college-technology issue is for 2009, she said: "The most immediate challenges for IT in 2009 will be to show how IT can help address the financial challenges our institutions are experiencing. IT isn't just a place to spend money -- it can also provide an avenue to saving money."

Nail on the head! In keeping with the Chinese adage about crisis and opportunity, these uncertain economic times provide information technologies with a lemons-to-lemonade moment in which we can re-evaluate the integral, and even progressive, role that we play within our institutions. Many colleges are undergoing revised economic modeling, and so it's a good time to make sure that technology is part of the planning process and that IT leaders bring innovative ideas to the table -- such as moving to paperless communications, saving energy through monitoring devices and cutting travel costs by using remote video conferencing.

The most challenging aspect of this process is not the machinery. Rather, it is in selling the value of the ideas and forging the trust with colleagues to create effective partnerships. Our current economic circumstances might be just the time to forge collaborations to make real, positive change happen.

Certainly that is true in the realm of policy. What made the New Deal relevant and lasting was not its success in jump-starting the engine; in fact, politicians and economists are using the counter-example of the New Deal as the foundation of their current government stimulus plan. But New Deal legislation laid the foundation for a more modern political economy once the engine got rolling again in the 1940s.

Here is history's lesson. Isn't it time that we asked hard questions about universal broadband deployment and network-neutrality rules that preserve the value of free speech and open inquiry while still making Internet companies competitive? Shouldn't we address fairly the intellectual-property rules that mesh with the technology and restore a reasonable balance to innovation and incentive? Finally, who -- what entities -- will govern this global technology equitably? And how -- with what rules?

In these troubled economic times, higher education can act as a driver to meaningful progressive change. American society looks to historians, economists and other academics for ideas and direction. So let us use this moment wisely to call upon wisdom and knowledge to ask forward-looking questions and entertain fierce conversations to provide the kind of leadership that this society, and indeed the world, needs to create a prosperous global information economy.

So let's put all of these macro and micro pieces together: We need to integrate information technologies into other pressing policy issues of the day, such as environmental sustainability and international communications, together with affective, trusted relations. What is the first step in this direction? On a practical and strategic level, I suggest that the U.S. government create a regulatory federal agency devoted to issues surrounding the Internet.

Tracy Mitrano is director of information-technology policy in Cornell's Office of Information Technologies, where she also directs the computer policy and law program. This article was published online Jan. 6 on the Chronicle of Higher Education Web site, where Mitrano was a guest blogger.