The more decentralized model has received a boost through the support of Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, according to sources close to the dean.

But having support handled within departments makes it difficult for IT contacts to coordinate their efforts and trouble-shoot problems together, says Franklin M. Steen, the director of HASCS.

"[HASCS] should play the coordinating role we can play," he says.

Nevertheless, Steen says he supports the more decentralized model, in part because it means departments will be allocating their own resources to information technology, rather than HASCS providing the only resources for the entire Faculty.

But resources are a key question for the departments as well.

Leo Damrosch, chair of the English Department, says he would like to hire someone to do innovative computer work in the humanities but has been unable to fund the position.

"Some of us have been pushing for quite a while, but without much success so far, to get a humanities computer specialist who would educate faculty members about what is possible, rather than just trouble-shooting on specific problems," Damrosch says.

Faculty and administrators say the IT contacts only assist with day-to-day problems and do not generally help develop new projects.

"Currently there's not enough staff to do projects with all the everyday stuff we have to get done," says Associate Dean of the College Georgene B. Herschbach.

Faculty and administrators also say there are good reasons to move support out to the departments, rather than have them planned centrally.

"The community is not monolithic. The University is a complicated place," Martin says. "You don't plan what an individual researcher needs, [just like] it would be wrong to ask what should be spent on books."

But even the IT Committee's report acknowledges the drawbacks of phasing out support to individual departments.

"[Information technology] is so tightly intertwined with every University activity that IT activities cannot be intelligently planned and prioritized in isolation," the report says.

Student Needs

Although the committee wants a computer on every faculty desk, the idea of providing students with computers is not receiving the same level of support.