Blame it on the IT department
While it sounds like a great story, it has one fact wrong. When I checked with representatives from both the University and PeopleSoft (the purported villains), both denied that any systems foul-up had anything to do with the unexpected freshman class bounty. Indeed, the PeopleSoft people maintained that Northeastern was a reference account for them -- which is hard to understand if you buy the Globe story.
Universities are like airlines: they count on a certain number of kids who get acceptances *not* to show up in the fall at their doorstep. This is because students obtain multiple acceptances, of course. (There are some air travelers who make multiple travel arrangements for the same day, but don't get me started down that path.) Something happened this summer at Northeastern and more kids decided to come than before, about 600 more kids in a class that is usually under 3000. That is a big jump, and the admissions staff is mystified as to why it happened.
But just don't blame it on any computer system. It has everything to do with human nature.
To me, this story indicates a new low in popular culture. We blame computers for so many frustrations in our daily lives, now we (or at least this particular reporter at the Globe) blame them for things that they don't have anything to do with. Maybe it is a problem for public relations people, who have to struggle to explain technical concepts that they themselves don't really fully understand. Or maybe it is because the average beat reporter doesn't really understand technology, and can find it an easy scapegoat. Or maybe it is just a simple mistake, and we are reading too much into this anti-tech conspiracy. All I know is, the computer isn't the villain in this case.
I am not saying that computers are perfect -- far from it. But let's just be a bit more responsible about what we attribute to them and what we don't.
David Strom was the founding editor-in-chief of Network Computing magazine and writes frequently on technical topics for a wide variety of computer and trade publications. He can be reached at david@strom.com.