Gone are the days of twirling the spiral wire of a handheld receiver and (literally) hanging up the phone.
This semester, Lafayette College will transition the majority of its campus landline telephones to a computer and mobile device app, the result of its current phone provider rolling back support.
In place of in-office telephones, faculty and staff will be able to access Lafayette’s phone service by downloading the Zoom Phone app. Additionally, the college’s 60-plus fax machines will be replaced by an electronic fax service, which uses the internet to send documents as opposed to paper. General campus rollout of the Zoom system will begin in March.
The change will affect most offices on campus. Under the original system, many faculty and staff members have had their own physical landline to which calls to their phone extension connected. Now, calls will go through directly to the Zoom application.
“Most of us who have been here for a while have been used to having a phone on our desk and stuff like that,” said Director of Institutional Research Simon Tonev, a landline user. “So switching that to a computer or switching to a cell phone, it’s going to take some getting used to.”
Chief Information Officer David Lifka, whose division is implementing the change, said that the new system will give faculty and staff more flexibility with the “freedom to take their work anywhere and still have access to office calls.”
Lifka noted that the system has mechanisms to prioritize “work-life balance,” with options to adjust notifications from the app based on working hours.
The college learned the change would be necessary last spring, after being informed that support from its active phone provider would soon cease. Lifka wrote in an email that, with the time pressure, Zoom was a familiar face and a straightforward choice.
Landline users had mixed reactions to the change.
Government and Law professor Joshua Miller called the transition “a sad day for the descendants of Alexander Graham Bell,” referencing the inventor of the telephone.
“I think some people are worried that it’s a cost-cutting move that’s going to backfire,” Miller said.
Suzanne Keany, a department specialist in the study abroad office, said that the new system “sounds like a better way to go” based on her experience with phone unreliability recently.
Nathan Oun ‘29 contributed reporting.