Paying Off the Hook

I’ve come to dread checking my mail. No, I have no irrational fears about contracting anthrax. Rather, I have come to fear the arrival of that bane of Harvard students’ existence—the phone bill. It seems that every time I check my mailbox, there it is again, the innocuous looking envelope with the pink sheets of astronomical fees and the orange envelope of doom that screams expectedly for yet another check. But, no matter how many I pay, the Harvard Student Telephone Office (HSTO) continues to inundate my mailbox with these annoying envelopes.

Like many of my fellow students, I always assumed that the HSTO was a bloodsucker of the highest order—what kind of profit were they making off my $5.75 23 minute phone call to my sister in Philadelphia? Who still pays 25 cents a minute for long distance? To add insult to injury, I was furious last week when I received the additional notice that long distance rates are being hiked up by 7.5 percent and that my monthly charge for local service is going up an additional $3 a month. Surely HSTO must be making a fortune off its gold mine racquet of the Harvard phone market.

Not so. Believe it or not, HSTO is a non-profit organization directly owned by the University. And, despite the ridiculously high rate of 25 cents a minute that they charge during the day for their most popular plan, (soon to be 26.9 cents a minute), HSTO is operating at a deficit. That’s right, they are losing money.

How is this possible? Well, part of the answer stems from the fact that for the past 18 months HSTO has been absorbing the costs of the Federal Communication Commission fees they are now charging students. According to Nancy Kinchla, director of telecommunication service, since the expiration of Harvard’s well-bargained telephone contracts, no vendors will offer service without charging the FCC fees, so now they are forced to pass these charges along to us. Another obvious reason for the financial problems is the recent cell phone boom. More students using cell phones means fewer using HSTO, and that means less revenue.

But these more benign explanations are not the only reason HSTO is in the red. The more insidious reason is that Harvard has burdened them with the debt incurred from the initial cost of wiring all of Harvard’s buildings. HSTO must apply its only income—the margin earned off of our long distance calls—to pay off this debt. So, while our dollars go to pay the usual operational costs of any non-profit—personnel, billing, etc.—we are also helping the University to pay for the telephone wiring in our rooms.

It is unreasonable for the University to burden the student body with this responsibility. Our room and board is not meant to cover construction of our Houses, so we should not pay for line installation that happened years ago. Regardless, hiking long distance prices in order to pay for line installation is either an underhanded attempt to hide this expense from students or an idiotic way to get us to pay. If the University is truly unable to afford telephone wiring in buildings, then they should include the fee with our room and board, not by differentially distributing the cost according to who makes the most long distance phone calls.

One could argue that financing the wiring in this way ensures that those who use the lines most pay more for them, but this argument isn’t true. People who make many local calls are using the same wires, but they don’t have to pay. Why should we penalize students who live far away?

This scheme will only hurt the University in the long run. The fee hike that will take effect in January will only make HSTO less competitive with the falling prices of the cellular phone industry. Even those who harbor the most stalwart opposition to cell phones (like me) will balk at the growing prices that HSTO offers and opt for the cell phone instead. As more students take this alternative, a vicious cycle will ensue. Fewer students will use HSTO for long distance service, lowering its revenue. In order to break even, HSTO will have to raise the rates, causing more students to leave. Kinchla says that additional fee hikes are unlikely in the near future, but it seems unavoidable if students continue to buy cell phones.

Thus, HSTO is an endangered species, and I guarantee that within five years it will exist in a completely different guise. It simply cannot continue to operate as it does currently. But there are advantages to having a centralized system for University telephones, including the ability to dial everywhere on campus with a 5-digit number and the ability to have a 911 option that, unlike a cell phone, can automatically locate you for emergency services. Creating a new vision for HSTO that includes these services but costs students much less will take time and energy, but a first step for the University would be to step up and pay its own debt. And the next time my mailbox is graced with that familiar envelope, I’ll spare HSTO my curses—those will go to the University.

Robert J. Fenster ’03 is a biology concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.