Who Needs Google? Students Still Use Phone Hotline

June 1, 2010

 Before there was Google or any other search engine, there was a phone-based information hotline at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

It was set up 40 years ago to control rumors at a time when the campus was embroiled in racial violence and anti-war protests. The student union was firebombed in 1970, the same year violence erupted at Kent State University. few months after the union burned, two teens were shot and killed at the University of Kansas — and there was a citywide curfew.

Like other campuses across the country, the University of Kansas set up a hotline to try to quell rumors, says historian Doug Harvey.