We've all heard plenty of stories about higher education institutions who were formerly huge Mac supporters starting to lean towards the Windows side of the world in recent years. Apple maintains that its educational market share is either holding steady or increasing, but whether or not that's technically true, there's something very damaging from a morale standpoint when a Mac campus suddenly goes Windows. So it's not good news that one of the most stalwart defenders of the Macintosh platform in the educational sphere was made an offer they couldn't refuse; Dartmouth, the school who once again strongly recommended Macs for their incoming student body, has also just accepted a donation of $450,000 worth of Windows NT workstations, servers, and software from Microsoft. (That $450K supposedly covers forty workstations and a server, plus hardware support and software, which comes out to like ten grand per workstation-- man, who says Wintels are cheaper?!)

A Mac Observer article includes a letter sent to Dartmouth alumni announcing the gift, and it actually makes for some pretty entertaining reading if you keep a sense of perspective. Most of the letter is obsequious pro-NT propaganda, but at one point, Professor Bruce Randall Donald (who went to Microsoft and proposed the whole thing in the first place) actually tries to justify the donation by saying that "a mixed environment is ideal for universities." If that sounds strangely anti-familiar, it should-- it's the exact opposite of what we so often hear when IT folks are trying to justify ripping the Macs out of a multi-platform environment: "Supporting two platforms is too difficult and expensive." So if your school is trying to dump their Macs in favor of Wintel boxes, tell 'em the computer science department of Dartmouth says not to.

It's easy to get bent out of shape when Microsoft and Intel give their stuff away to universities in a baldfaced attempt to squeeze out the Macs and UNIX systems, but hey, Apple used to do pretty much the same thing-- that's why the Macs are there in the first place. In fact, we wish Apple were still aggressively donating hardware and software to schools, because we suspect that's the only way to hold onto educational market share these days. As for Dartmouth, fear not-- the influx of forty NT systems into the computer science department isn't going to turn the whole school anti-Mac. We think Professor Donald inadvertently said it best: "This donation will provide [Dartmouth] with modern infrastructure to attack the computational problems of the 21st century." There you have it, folks: if you're looking for 21st-century computational problems, look no further than Microsoft. Too bad that donation included hardware support and not software support...