The political science building is old and overcrowded and we have to fight to be able to hire new professors, but Duke has money for the more important things… like iPods and plasma TVs. Yes, welcome to the priorities of the 21st century university.

The student newspaper here, The Chronicle, recently reported on the free iPod experiment that took place this year. The return on investment was, uh, not exactly high:

As the year-long “experiment” of providing 20-gigabyte Apple iPods to all freshmen winds to an end and the media frenzy slowly dies down, administrators have begun to evaluate the future of the project. Critics ask: Have students used them for educational purposes? Did teachers find innovative ways to integrate this technology into their curricula? Was it worth the $500,000?

Answer: No.

Freshman Anita Pai loves her iPod. She records lectures and listens to her music as she walks through the Duke campus, bopping along to her tunes. She even dressed as an iPod for Halloween. But many freshmen have been less enthusiastic about the technology, using it more for entertainment than academic pursuits.

“I could count on one hand the amount of freshmen I saw recording classes last semester. Nobody uses them for academic purposes,” freshman Janie Lorber said, adding that her recording device has never been opened. “I think it is kind of embarrassing that every freshman got an iPod. I think it makes us look rich and silly.” Several students agreed with her sentiment.

But many teachers have embraced the iPods, integrating them fully into the curriculum. Futhey said CIT assisted 11 classes last fall with technical support and loaner iPods, given to upperclass students without iPods, but more than 30 courses used the devices to varying degrees. This semester, O’Brien said 17 classes have been approved for support from CIT.

$500,000/28 classes that used them enough to require support = $17,857 per class. And I guarantee that virtually every one of those classes could have done the same thing with the Internet — the only difference is that students can download the audio files on to their iPod versus playing them on their computers. That’s just a matter of convenience — it makes no pedagogical difference. What an insane waste of money. (People did the same thing a few years ago, trying desperately to make PDAs academically useful — with similar results.)

And just to make sure that SUV-driving students aren’t denied the perks to which they have become accustomed, the Duke student government put up plasma TVs in the gym with a wireless radio transmission system:

Duke Student Government allocated nearly $24,000 last night to the Wilson Gymnasium Audio-Visual Project, cash intended to purchase and pay for the installation of six 42-inch plasma-screen televisions in the gym’s main exercise hall.

…Gym patrons will be able to borrow headsets to tune into FM radio waves transmitted from the muted televisions. Students’ own radios will also function on the FM transmission system.

It’s a hard-knock life.