Daniel Sullivan, the president of St. Lawrence University, recently published an essay in the Educause Review entitled "Why IT Matters to Liberal Education" . In the face of the latest backlash against bulging IT budgets reinforced by books such as Nicholas Carr's "Does IT Matter?" , Sullivan's essay is useful because it articulates not only why IT does matter for higher education in general, but specifically looks at the connections that exist between the goals of liberal education and the instrumental value of various technology, services, and facilities that can help achieve those goals. My favorite quote from the essay has to be
"The role of technology in liberal learning is decidedly as complex as the university's mission" which at one level seems like a dodge, but at another level explains why the activity of explaining why IT matters requires more time and attention than many have to attend to. He goes on to document the particular challenge of doing IT on a small campus (lack of economies of scale), but suggests that even in the face of that challenge, it is a critical mistake to not understand the strong connections between IT and the evolving 21st. century liberal education.