Susan Perry

Representatives from thirty-six liberal arts colleges in the Mid-Atlantic and New England area met at MHC last week to discuss the establisment of centers for teaching and technology that would serve the region's campuses. In response to an enthusiastic mandate from the group, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which called for the strategy session, agreed to move forward in the planning and support of new and expanded technology centers. The centers will be designed to help liberal arts institutions meet increasing technology needs, including equipment, training, and "technopedagogy."

MHC's Susan Perry, director of library, information, and technology services (LITS) and a national leader in the effort to wire the liberal arts world to the ever-widening world of information technology, has been guiding the discussion, along with Norman Fainstein, dean of faculty at Vassar College, and Clara Yu, director of the Center of Educational Technology at Middlebury College. "Mount Holyoke is getting in on the ground floor of something many institutions want—training to use technology so that their students and faculty have the greatest possible access to information and tools appropriate for a liberal arts education," says Perry. "There are many benefits to working with other like institutions to supplement our own technology efforts. This kind of participation keeps MHC on the cutting edge."

The group of Mellon representatives, college provosts, information technology directors, and library directors discussed how such centers might work collaboratively with selected institutions to meet some of the more sophisticated and costly technology needs. They also considered how centers might contribute to the sharing of ideas; provide enriched programs; and help integrate technology into college curricula. The group's immediate goal, says Perry, is to develop a proposal for the expansion of two existing centers in Vermont and Texas, and to create a new center in Michigan. The proposal will be submitted for consideration by the Mellon board in September.

Perry has for the past fifteen years worked nationally to encourage the marriage of liberal arts values—"teaching students to think, read, write, and analyze well"—to technology. She is an active board member of New Media Art Centers, a group that represents leading higher-education institutions and vendors who are experimenting with cutting edge technologies (MHC was selected to be one of the first liberal arts colleges in the organization); and of Educause, a national organization devoted to transforming education through educational technologies; and on the steering committee for the Coalition of Networked Information (CNI), comprised of LITS directors of the major educational institutions in the country, who work to advance scholarly communications and intellectual productivity through networked technologies. In February she cochaired and planned the MHC conference The IT Revolution: Women, Work, and Social Change, and last June she spoke at the Summit on Technology in Liberal Arts at Middlebury College in Vermont. She lectures around the country on technology and the liberal arts and has also helped plan annual conferences and given talks at libraries in the Czech Republic and the Republic of Georgia.
Perry's primary concern is that liberal arts institutions in the United States remain attractive venues for students applying to colleges. "Liberal arts institutions are where we educate our leaders," she says. "This is where they come from." In order to "keep liberal arts fresh by using today's tools," she believes it is essential to forge partnerships between information technologists, librarians, and faculty. "Technopedagogy will enrich the educational experience for both students and faculty. They need access to information, and they need to know how to get access," she says, noting that this new partnership may very well be a defining aspect of twenty-first century higher education.

Since coming to MHC in 1994, Perry has worked to ensure that the College is a leader in the effort to "incorporate technology in a liberal arts way." Perry was previously director of the Departmental Systems Group at the Stanford University Data Center and taught courses at Stanford in learning strategies and library research. There she worked with cutting- edge computer technology. An earlier tenure as dean of library services and a member of the faculty at the experimental Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, first introduced Perry to the world of new media technologies.

It all began, she says, with her love of books. "I loved ideas and I loved to read, and I loved to put people and ideas together." Before Evergreen, "I lived in a really rarified book world," she says, recalling her earliest experiences in the pre-wired world of card catalogues, and as a librarian during the Vietnam era at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where she slipped antiwar novels to unsuspecting lieutenants. She participated in Civil Rights protests in the South, and eventually took her activist spirit and Volkswagen Bug and drove west. She settled in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury community of Beatniks and hippies, among writers, artists, and intellectuals at the center of the '60s youth rebellion.

Perry sees her vocation today as that of a "change agent," and the library as a unique domain that represents her ideals. "The library is the most radical concept we've got going in this country," she says. Despite the high costs of maintaining a library, "it provides information to users freely, making its resources readily available to all. Everyone and anyone can use libraries, and they represent and encourage all points of view. The library and the American Civil Liberties Union are the people who have kept the First Amendment alive." In order to preserve this democratic institution of freedom and access she will continue to devise ways of encouraging others to understand new technological tools. Good citizenship, she believes, means "not ignoring all of this new technological information."

But Perry is not a "gadgets and gizmos" type herself (well, until her very recent acquisition of a folding keyboard, Palm Pilot, and three-inch cell phone), and is wary of an overtechnologized world. It is the "content, not the technology itself" that matters to her most. Borrowing a metaphor from her favorite Philip Larkin poem about libraries and progress, "New eyes each year," she says,"We're all minting new coin. That's really moving for me." (The poem, on display for Poetry Month at Williston Library, proclaims, "… So youth and age/Like ink and page/In this house join,/Minting new coin.")