No cell phones allowed: Some colleges ban modern-daygadgets

Ron Recinto September 4, 2013 8:43 AM

Erin Milligan, a junior at Wyoming Catholic College is very comfortable with the college's policy that bans cell …

Erin Milligan has to surrender her cell phone to school officials before going back to college this year.

Milligan isn’t being punished for violating any rules. She’s just following Wyoming Catholic College’stechnology policy, which bans cell phones at the small liberal arts school.

And even more surprising, as someone who grew up in a generation that has never known a worldwithout the Internet, Milligan says she likes it.

“It’s a release, really, not having a cell phone,” said Milligan, a 20-year-old junior from New Hampshire.“When you are no longer captivated by technology, you find your true and real self.”

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Also banned at Milligan’s school are televisions and access to most websites in dorm rooms.Administrators allow only limited Internet connectivity throughout the campus, so students can doonline research.

Before the start of each school year, Milligan and her 111 classmates at the college relinquish thedevices most of their peers elsewhere use to stay constantly connected to friends, family andclassmates. Student leaders lock the phones in a box in each dorm room.

Students can check them out for emergencies or if they leave campus for travel.

“We are so tech savvy these days,” Milligan said. “But something that is really prevalent is our inabilityto genuinely communicate at a human-to-human, face-to-face level.”

At Wyoming Catholic College, located in the picturesque mountain town of Lander, 150 miles northwestof Casper, the ban on technology is part of the school's mission to foster more traditional debatebetween students and their peers and also between students and faculty, Dean of Students JonathanTonkowich said.

“We’ve all have the experience where you are talking to someone and their phone goes off, or their textgoes off, and they stop talking to you and begin talking someone who is not there,” Tonkowich said.“I’m worried about that direction in our society, where people you aren’t with are more important thanthe people you are with.”

Milligan said the students actually appreciate the freedom of being disconnected and becomeaccustomed to the unusual policy after a few weeks at the school.

“We realize that spending too much time on a computer prohibits us from doing something that weshould be doing or something that is fun,” the college sophomore said. “I don’t want to be someonewho is just texting friends and not talking to them, and have a Facebook profile to define who I am.”

Tonkowich said in his four years at the school, there have been only two violations of the policy. Onewas a blatant violation where a student tried to sneak a cell phone onto campus and use it. The otherincident was a misunderstanding where a student had signed out her phone because of a medicalemergency and thought she could hold onto it longer than was allowed. Wyoming Catholic College hasbanned cell phones since its first class in 2007.

The penalty for violating the technology policy is performing community service.

The school is not entirely a Luddite utopia, however. Students in their dorms do have limited Internetaccess via personal laptops and Wi-Fi that allows them to access only a handful of sites. The collegeemail service and Skype — to call home — are allowed. But if students tried to log on to Facebook orany other social media site, the site would be blocked. Video streaming sites are also not allowed. A fewpublic computers scattered around campus allow access to a broader range of websites.

Parents, not students, tend to grapple more with the tech ban. Parents go through a two-day orientationwhen students first enter the school to allay any fears about not being constantly connected with theirsons or daughters during emergencies, and to also meet other students and families. Many of thecollege students have had cell phones since they were children, and their parents are accustomed tobeing able to reach them at any moment.

The school is so small that administrators know where everyone is on campus at any given time,Tonkowich reassures the parents. And school officials — who are allowed to use cell phones — arealways reachable by the students’ parents or guardians.

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The school’s policy represents a dramatic break with the trend of students using more and more

technology in their daily lives and while studying. A comprehensive study by the Kaiser Family

Foundation on the media habits of young people showed that more than 60 percent of people aged 8-18

do their schoolwork while also using some other form of media, such as TV or instant message. And

two-thirds of college freshmen in a 2012 survey said they sometimes or frequently use social media

sites while in class.

Some researchers, led by Stanford Communications Professor Clifford Nass, say the constant

multitasking encouraged by smartphones and other devices is making people less productive and

worse at learning complex new concepts .

Even so, some education experts have encouraged universities to adapt to the expectations of this

generation, by making classes more interactive and limiting the amount of time students are expected

to focus on any one speaker or task.

Wyoming Catholic College rejects this premise.

“We don’t see this as thumbing our nose at tech and modern culture,” Tonkowich said. “We’re allowing

a freedom and a vacation from all that so that students can work on something different: true friendship,

true virtue, true study.

The private coed university isn’t the only one to eschew the trappings and wires of modern day life. At

Deep Springs College in Big Pine, Calif., the small student body recently voted to ban wireless Internet

service in the living area at their elite two-year school, where tuition is free for the 13 students admitted

each year.

“The student body felt that looking at screens might distract from communal living and might distract

from interacting with others,” said Zach Robinson, a second-year student at the college.

While there’s a formal ban on technology at Wyoming, the geographic remoteness and the spartan

philosophy of Deep Springs College keeps students there disconnected from most of the world.

“There’s no service out here,” said 21-year-old Robinson. “So you can have [a cell phone] if you want,

but it won’t do you any good.”

Robinson, who transferred to the school after two years at Dartmouth, said he was hooked on the

school’s focus on labor, academics and self-governance.

At Deep Springs, the 27 students staff the college’s alfalfa farm and cattle ranch. The school is mostly

self-sustaining through its farms and cattle, and the students manage their school through committees.

The rustic valley life encourages a spirit of cooperation and communication without the many

technological distractions at a larger university, Robinson said.

But Robinson said he misses the “little things,” like getting news on his phone and not being able to

download new songs.

After his two years living in the remote and communal college lifestyle, he plans to return to Dartmouth

and pursue a career in management consulting.

“It might be a little hard for me, but I’ll be prepared to be more engaged with the Dartmouth community

and [to have] better face-to-face interactions now than I was when I first came here,” he said.

For her part, Milligan says her friends are often baffled at her choice to live without constant connection

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and communication.

“Technology is a mask and can be a deception in this world," said Milligan, who is studying to become a

teacher but is also considering a life with the church. “I don’t think I will be behind other people, because

I will be developing something that will be dying – the ability to communicate.”

“Developing that over the years is more important to my growth than figuring out whatever Twitter or

Facebook is,” she added.

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