As the editors sat down to produce the paper for this week, each of us turned on our computers to work on our sections. As the computers booted up, problems immediately began to crop up. Some of the computers didn’t even boot, and the ones that did were inevitably fraught with problems. Various software issues have been arising for years as the computers age and software no longer updates with the old operating systems. 

This issue compounds with our necessity to produce the whole paper in one night; if someone’s computer doesn’t work, they have to wait for one to be available. This means that editors could wait hours for one section to finish, resulting in their section not being finished until well past midnight. Further, if any of our editors make the mistake of not saving after each word typed, they risk losing all progress as a result of the random crashes to which we have become accustomed. These problems are entirely avoidable, but Villanova has done absolutely nothing to fix it despite continuous asking from our staff. Further, this problem is not one that is felt only in the offices of The Villanovan.  

Anyone who has had the displeasure of using one of the computers in Falvey Library or in the Tolentine computer lab knows the issues that are faced with using computers that were outdated before any of us were even thinking about college. The computer I am currently using was new when I was in seventh grade, and is currently one of the newer ones in our office. The majority of the computers in both Falvey and Tolentine were running Windows 7 as of last week, which of course was recently dropped from Microsoft’s support systems. These computers are in desperate need of an update, and despite a growing endowment and increasing pleading from students, absolutely no action has been taken by Villanova. 

Villanova, we as the Villanova editorial staff, along with faculty and students across the school are begging you: please update the computers. The student body is not getting any smaller and the technological needs of students and faculty are not going to diminish the longer you wait to update the infrastructure. For a school that is pursuing Research I status, shouldn’t students be able to conduct research and publish their findings without worries of being routinely hindered by the technology that is provided by the university?