It's less than 600 days until January 1, 2000, when computer software programs that record years using only two digits instead of four could fail because they won't know whether "00" means 1900 or 2000. If nothing were done to correct the Year 2000 problem, hundreds of Princeton students might receive late notices for tuition. Those who qualified for financial aid might not be granted it, because the computer system would think they haven't been born yet. Faculty and staff members might not get paid.

The university started addressing the problem in early 1997, said Leslie Greenbaum, who is heading Princeton's Year 2000 Project. The Office of Computing and Information Technology hired Hexaware Technologies Incorporated (HTI) to analyze the programs within all the university's central computer systems. That involved reviewing roughly 3 million lines of program code to determine areas that require attention.

Were they not fixed, some information systems would fail as soon as the clock changed from 1999 to 2000; others are already coming upon problems as they use future dates.

The university has already installed a new mainframe. Its operating system is Year 2000 compliant (able to operate with dates both before and after December 31, 1999), but the older application programs that run off the operating system are not. Leslie Greenbaum is responsible for addressing such programs, which include those for admission, financial aid, the registrar, housing, and billing.

Scanning lines of code

The solution is a lot more complicated than just changing a few dates on a few programs, said Greenbaum: before programs can be changed, contractors scan every line of code in a program using a piece of software to find lines that contain dates. Next, they determine how to fix those lines of code and manually make the changes. Once programs are modified, the changes must be tested, which is about 40 percent of the effort, he said.

In most cases the Year 2000 team is fixing the problem by "windowing," that is, instructing the computer to add "19" before any number greater than a specific number (for example 25) and to add "20" before numbers less than that.

While most of the effort is focused on the mainframe, the university is also upgrading its personal computers and the software that runs on them, said Douglass W. Hocker, who is in charge of PC problems.

The Gartner Group, an information technology advisory organization, estimates that nationwide it will cost $300 billion to $600 billion to fix the Year 2000 glitch. Some companies, said Greenbaum, have done little to address the matter. Federal and state governments are working on their programs, but not all of them are expected to be corrected in time.

Over a three-year period, the university will spend roughly $4 million on salaries, consultants, and software to correct the problem, said treasurer Raymond J. Clark. Because of the ample budget and lead time, the university expects to solve its Year 2000 problem, so that campus computers will go on humming contentedly at the stroke of midnight, December 31, 1999.

Viewpoints: Do computers improve teaching and learning?

PAW asked four professors how computers have affected the nature of teaching and if they have seen any changes in students' work since the use of computers became widespread.

Michael S. Mahoney *67, professor of history

At Princeton and similar institutions, what we teach and how we teach it reflects what we study and how we study it. Except for word processing, the computer currently plays little role in research in the humanities and the qualitative social sciences. It is not surprising, then, that with a few exceptions, computers seem so far to have had little impact on teaching in these areas of the curriculum. Courses may have Web pages, but putting texts and pictures online, even in some linked structure, does not in itself mean we are using those materials in new ways both pertinent to the subject and reflective of the power of the computer.

Unless and until the computer offers more than clerical help in carrying out research, there will be little incentive to use it extensively in teaching. That's especially true given the time and effort required to learn things unconnected with our subjects and the lack of persuasive evidence that the educational benefits warrant the costs.

Thomas Y. Levin, associate professor of Germanic languages and literatures

While new media increasingly are being employed in classes as a convenient and speedy state-of-the-art delivery system for syllabi, reserve readings, etc., it is the use of e-mail discussion lists and/or newsgroups that has produced a fundamental -- and extremely salutary -- transformation of the space and character of intellectual community and interaction. By providing a continuously available discursive site where students can exchange thoughts provoked by readings, help each other make sense of puzzling passages, and further develop ideas raised in class, new media have radically extended the space of learning beyond the one or two weekly meetings in so-called "real-time." "I feel like our class is really never over," one of my students in Writing 353, The Rhetoric of New Media (whose homepage is located at the URL www.princeton.edu/~wri353), recently told me.

The pedagogical use of the virtual discussion spaces made possible by new media is really changing the character of class-related interaction, empowering students by giving them responsibility for their own forum and, almost as a byproduct, heightening in a most wonderful way the sense of the class as an intellectual community.

Marguerite Ann Browning, associate professor of the Council of the Humanities and linguistics

E-mail and the Web have certainly affected the ways in which I convey information to students: readings, assignments, copies of handouts, and lecture notes are all online, as are almost all administrative aspects of my courses (e.g., office hour sign-up). The actual types of courses that can be offered have also been expanded: Linguistics and Language Acquisition, a course that satisfies the Science and Technology requirement and that focuses on the acquisition of first languages during childhood, could not exist without an online database collected by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

Nevertheless, it's not obvious to me that my teaching has actually changed. My goal has always been to acquaint students with the complex properties of human language, the nature of linguistic research, and the analytical skills that are the standard tools of intellectual workers. Computers may offer new channels of communication and new resources for course development, but they haven't affected the nature or purpose of my interactions with students. But they have affected students' work in the following ways: bigger fonts, wider margins, and more decorative cover pages.

James L. Gould, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology

Computer technology has transformed the way I teach. The ability to use digital images means there is almost no lag time in getting a new "slide" ready, and digital images can be rearranged, edited, and relettered for greater clarity. QuickTime video clips allow me to show animals in action. HyperCard simulations let me demonstrate complex processes with multiple variables in real time. The Internet allows me to archive all of the slides (with commentary) for students to consult, along with lecture outlines. Though they may or may not learn any better, the students do seem to enjoy the experience more -- which, considering what we charge in tuition, is probably a good thing.

However, the presence of material on the Web may lure some students into thinking they can skip lectures or omit taking notes in class. And because digital material allows me to move faster through material, some students may find the pace too rapid. As for students' work, the quality of proofreading has declined, perhaps because students depend on spell-check programs. But the understanding of material presented through hands-on, question-guided, interactive simulations is better. Overall, the average scores on tests have not changed much and are still best predicted by the proportion of women in the class -- the more women, the higher the scores. (For more on Gould's teaching, see PAW's current Feature.)

Faculty File: A medievalist enchants his students

"This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no foolin' around!" is what the undergraduates in History 341 this spring heard on their first day of class. (For the record, it's a line from a rock song played by the Talking Heads.) As they entered a candle-lit classroom, a masked man dressed in black and wearing a cape jumped from student to student to hand them their syllabi. This mysterious figure was Teofilo F. Ruiz *74, a professor of history at the City University of New York and one of two recipients of President Shapiro's 250th Anniversary Visiting Professorships for Distinguished Teaching. The course, titled The Terror of History: Mystics, Heretics and Witches in the Western Tradition, 1000-1700, is designed to enchant, stimulate, and otherwise engage its students.

The Terror of History looks at aspects of elite and popular cultures in medieval and modern western Europe. Together, Ruiz and his students explore how people sought to "explain, order, and escape the terrors of their lives by embracing transcendental religious experiences, by dreaming and working for the coming of the apocalypse, and by the widespread belief in witchcraft and Satanism," explains Ruiz.

Ruiz's path to becoming a teacher took several twists and turns. "I always thought of myself as a revolutionary, and I still think of myself as a revolutionary," says Ruiz, whom the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching named an "outstanding professor of the year" in 1994. Indeed, he was actually a revolutionary during his teen years in Cuba, a supporter of Fidel Castro and a student representative of the Castro-led July 26 Movement.

His enthusiasm for the revolution was short-lived, however, and his subsequent anti-Castro activities landed him briefly in prison. Upon release, he emigrated to Miami, where he supported himself painting hotels. Soon he moved to New York, where he spent his first night sleeping in the subway. He eventually enrolled at City College while holding down a job as a taxicab driver.

After he graduated, he applied to graduate school at Princeton, and only Princeton. Ruiz was denied admission the first time, but undeterred, he applied again and was admitted to the university in 1970.

Ruiz credits Carl E. Schorske, a charismatic social and intellectual historian for whom he taught a precept, for teaching him how to capture students' imagination by playing music, quoting well-known authors, and showing slides. A course taught by Professor Theodore K. Rabb *61 introduced him to the concept that people resort to mystics, heretics, and witchcraft as a way of "escaping history" during periods of great change and social upheaval.

Ruiz uses the word "performance" when he talks about teaching. "Acting is absolutely a part of teaching," he says: a teacher must bring passion into the classroom to really connect with the students, but the performance has to be based on ideas.

As a historian of medieval Castile and 16th-century Spain, Ruiz is never without ideas. His most recent book, Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) won the American Historical Association's "Premio del Rey" for the best book on Spanish history in 1995. And he is just finishing two more books, A Social History of Spain, 1400-1600 for Longman and From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society and Culture in the Late Middle Ages for Princeton University Press.

Ruiz claims that he became a medievalist "for all the wrong reasons." As a boy, he loved to read 19th-century French romances. "I thought of the Middle Ages as a world of knights and ladies and all the rest that the romantic writers described," he says. But somehow, he came to study peasants, not ladies and knights.

Next year, Ruiz will take his black cape to the University of California at Los Angeles. Before he goes, he is offering graduate students a series of seminars on how to interview for jobs and teach. He gives them this advice: "Be available for the students. Show them that you care. Don't sit when you teach. Try not to use notes....Don't spend half the time writing on the board, giving them your back."

Although he is a learned scholar and experienced teacher, Ruiz still gets nervous before he enters the classroom. Often he cannot sleep before a lecture. "Then I walk into class, and it's like something possesses me. I cannot explain it," he says. "When I'm finished, I'm totally exhausted. It's like magic."

It does indeed look like magic, but it is also hard work. "I am always working to capture the students, in a sense, to enchant them into being enthusiastic about what they are learning," he says. "A good teacher should subvert the students, question them, encourage them to question themselves and question me, and to disagree with me as vehemently as they can."

In Memoriam

Geoffrey Stuart Watson, a prominent statistician and chair of the statistics department, emeritus, died on January 3 following complications from heart surgery. He was 76 and a resident of Princeton. Watson was a specialist in the application of mathematics and statistics to the natural sciences. Watson, who earned a Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in 1951, assumed the chair of the statistics department in 1970, and transferred to emeritus status in 1992.