Where's the Red Tape?

By Nov. 15, the University will finally be able to declare that it has completed its three-year Columbia University ID project. A plan was proposed last spring to get new IDs to students by the fall, but no official date was set. When some first-years had problems with their new IDs at the beginning of the semester, it seemed as if the project might drag on even longer. But in the past month, Housing and Dining has managed to organize the distribution process in an efficient manner. Distributing 24,000 new ID cards in less than a month is no easy task, and students and administrators should look to the distribution process as a fine example of a large-scale operation that did not strangle itself in red tape and employ a similar spirit of efficiency in the coming project to extend Flex into the community.

Despite the original plan to distribute all IDs in Lerner Hall, Housing and Dining effectively chose to provide separate locations for each school, distributing IDs for Columbia College and SEAS students in the Hartley lobby. Barnard students will get their IDs through ResLife, and faculty and staff IDs will be provided through human resources; all other students and faculty members will receive theirs on the Lerner ramps. The activation process occurred in three quick steps. This is a big improvement over earlier this semester, when students had to visit several separate locations to acquire the swipe access privileges that they needed. Within CC and SEAS, students were given appointment times based on their residence halls, an especially useful measure given that students living in 600 W. 113th St., River Hall, Wien Hall, and on the sixth floor of East Campus all required an additional activation step to make their cards functional as room keys.

Barnard students have yet to receive instructions as to where exactly to pick up their IDs, and many more faculty, graduate, and General Studies students have yet to visit the ID Center in Lerner. It may be too early to call the distribution process a complete success, but it also rare that the University pulls off a large-scale operation with so little room for complaint.

Now that the University has completed this project, it must follow through with off-campus Flex. While the program is only in the planning stages, the administration and student councils have set next spring as a date to begin the Flex program. They should stick to that time-line and lay out an efficient process for establishing the program that allows for the distribution of Flex machines to local businesses. The ID process has shown what the University can do—in the future, students should expect nothing less than such efficient success.