They are content to sit back and wait a little bit until doing it is noncontroversial, a no-brainer. Other universities got into electronic correspondence early and have taken time to settle in. We have evolved into that situation over the past 15 years. It's been this way long enough that many of us can't remember a time when business wasn't conducted electronically. Students, faculty members, and administrators at Carnegie Mellon use a combination of e-mail accounts and online bulletin boards to get and transmit information about classes and the university.
Bulletin boards are the preferred method of communication for large groups of people.
The problem with e-mail distribution lists is that you have a simple message that has to go out to 15,000 people, so you send it out to 15,000 people. Having students check electronic bulletin boards instead lets them pick out the information they need, and prevents them from getting so much mail from the university that they think of it as spam. Ms. Futhey says that economics did not drive Carnegie Mellon's correspondence to the Internet, so the university has never analyzed how much money it has spent or saved by going electronic. This is a no-brainer for a lot of us. I think a lot of universities saw this trend and got on the trend long before it was widespread.