There are some things in this college life of ours that we always complain about in vain: that smell on Daniel street outside CO’s; the hordes of drunken, scantily clad, tanned, bleached beauties dressed as cowgirls on Tuesday nights announced by the sound of collectively clicking heels; the egregious misuse of bike paths by fellow students. These are but a few hallmarks of campus life that are, at a distance, endearing.

But there’s one thing we all deal with and complain about here that doesn’t have to be the way it is. That is the University’s approach to networks, passwords and all things computer-related. Now, granted, I am a total n00b when it comes to understanding anything about information technology. I just know that have to create 11,000 different passwords that must all have a capital letter, a lowercase letter, a number and must be more than eight characters long. I have to use Web sites like Mallard and Compass that are fickle at best using most browsers, and sometimes, like on the Sunday after Thanksgiving Break, don’t work at all.

Alex Lambert, a sophomore in computer science who also assists in grading and teaching computer science courses, has explained some of this business to me in a way that I hope I can relay simply.

Bluestem, the password you use to sign in to Compass, external proxy servers for online Library resources, computers in the dorm networks and several other programs was the first system developed on campus in the mid-1990s to keep students’ information secure. It is actually a highly functional system, but it is not large enough to handle every single application students need. So the University made Active Directory, which is like Bluestem, but which you use to log on to things that don’t use Bluestem, like logging into NetFiles and engineering labs.

Your University e-mail, which does not always go through a browser, cannot be accessed through Bluestem or Active Directory, so this requires another password. Enterprise, the password you need to access the Banner servers which keep registration and financial information, is a University program for all three campuses, and this too requires a separate password. The CITES and EWS computer labs each require a separate password, too. WebBoard, a service similar to Compass, requires a different password than everything else too, even though Mallard and Compass both use Bluestem passwords. Altogether, this can mean having upwards of six passwords for every student.

Alex suggests that unifying the password system would not be too hard; it would not require re-working every existent program, but rather a meta-program which would exist simply to manage password use or make one master password for the Web sites. While all the systems and programs could remain functionally separate, our interaction with them would be universal. On the CITES password Web site, there is a cross-referenced list of password requirements; using this list, you can try to make just two passwords which would work for everything from Express E-mail to BlueStem to Active Directory to Enterprise to the ICS labs. CITES also suggests using PasswordVault, a service which would only help when you were on your personal computer. The problem, however, is that you must change some of your passwords every year, and so we must all relapse into the hunt for a new suitable password annually. And two passwords is one too many when they are often lengthy and easy to forget.

The ultimate and bigger problem, though, is that there are many different educational technological resources on campus, and depending on what our professors demand of us, we are forced to use up to five different ones at a time, be it Mallard, Compass, Tycho, WebBoard, or any number of professor-designed sites. For each of them we must learn rules, passwords and navigation. Why design seemingly University-wide programs like Compass and Bluestem when they are not good enough for every application or department to use? I think some integration or centralization is in order here and would make the academic lives of students and educators alike far more manageable.