I am extremely excited by your ambition, while at the same time I am somewhat doubtful about the chances of its success. IMHO, the foremost hurdle you face is simply that the kind of technophobe / non-tech you want to approach (who are people like my mum, dad and so on, who are teachers in the Humanities) are allergic to the cli. To start with if you open a DOS console or term in front of them and say "you are going to be typing things in here", you will have already lost 90% of them. It's a hard fact (especially for those of us who love the cli as much as I) but rather inescapable. So what are you going to do about that?

IMO the best measure you could take to promote use of perl by these non-tech colleagues would be to code up something of a demo program in a Perl/Tk (or other perl GUI interface like the WXPerl, iirc) wrapper. Show them the input and output and code a few controls that let them twiddle something about how it runs. Spend as much time as possible (aargh) on the GUI-face so that their first impression is of a professional-quality tool (as they perceive it).

OTOH I may be wrong in assuming that your department doesn't have any old DOS users about (my dad first learned in DOS, now Windoze GUI baffles him). In which case (in any case, actually) your very first move probably still ought to be: show them a script at work, run it for them and let them see what it can do. Only after demonstrating something very powerful and flexible should you try to explain anything about how Perl is configured or coded up. Whether done in a text console or wrapped in a GUI, they first need to be shown what it's good for. Major selling job needs to be done on people like Humanities professors, as they have a type of technophobia that isn't just about "never learned" but is even more about "don't want to learn, my cranium is full enough (and the internal workings are likely petrified enough) as it is."

If I can be of any help, let me know.

-- 
Now, 2004: The 3 least meaningful terms in online jargon are:
  troll   flame   rant
These used to mean something; but then they were highjacked by the kind of
inferior intellects who, when faced with a more erudite opponent employing
superior arguments (or simply hanging in there with a disagreeable
contention), abuse them as merely another form of name-calling.  ;-)