Friday, March 9, 2001

A Small College's Mixed Results With Technology By SCOTT CARLSON Buckhannon, W.Va. Chapel bells echo off the hills while William R. Haden, the president of West Virginia Wesleyan College, strolls through the campus of red-brick Georgian buildings, calling out to passing students by name. He recounts the institution's hundred-year history -- first as a precollege seminary, and now as a liberal-arts institution. He points out that the chapel's white steeple has a modern twin on the other side of campus: a steel tower, with antennas on its spire, that will soon provide wireless computer service. For a small college with a modest endowment, West Virginia Wesleyan has made some bold, and costly, steps to bring technology to campus life. In 1996, it was an early member of I.B.M.'s Thinkpad University program, under which every student leases a laptop computer. The college had a small wireless system long before larger universities dabbled in the technology. Last year, West Virginia Wesleyan announced that it would be the first college in the country to require prospective students to apply online. Valuable Training Supporters of the college's technology program say that six years ago, Wesleyan had a jumble of various brands of hardware, with no network and little connection to the outside world. Now students are getting valuable computer training and are connected to a host of resources beyond the Appalachian Mountains, as well as to one another. In addition, the library and the student center have a wireless system that was, until recently, state of the art; updated wireless systems are planned for the rest of the campus buildings. NTELOS, a local wireless company, has built the tower on the far side of campus; through it, the college plans to expand its campus wireless Internet access to cover students, professors, and staff who live all over town. West Virginia Wesleyan's transformation has brought national attention, as its ambassadors have spoken about technology at many higher-education conferences and small colleges. "They've kept technology in the right perspective -- that it's a tool, but that the real focus is on how you use that in the learning process," says Diana G. Oblinger, a senior fellow with Educause who visited the college last year. But some professors say that aspects of the technology transition -- especially the laptop program -- have been too expensive. They say the financial burden has put pressure on traditional academic programs as the college has looked for ways to make up annual deficits brought on by the laptop program. And the technology has not been as successful as the administration might have hoped, either as a pedagogical tool or a marketing tactic. The online-admissions requirement, for example, has been an enrollment hurdle for some students. Repeated Deficits Over the past four years, the college has spent more than $8.5-million on its technology plan. It has spent almost $5-million on the Thinkpad University program alone, and has shelled out additional money for staffers to repair and service the computers. Before the laptops arrived, the college spent $1.5-million to wire the entire campus for Ethernet service. West Virginia Wesleyan, with an endowment of only $32-million and an annual budget of $25-million, can't compete with the level of technology investment at a huge research university or a wealthy small college. To pay for its program, the college got the city of Buckhannon to issue bonds on its behalf, it solicited donations from supportive trustees, and it passed some of the costs on to students, who pay an extra $1,050 each year for a laptop lease and technology support. Even so, West Virginia Wesleyan subsidizes the laptop lease, and the college has run an average deficit of $400,000 every year since the program started in 1996. G. Michael Goins, West Virginia Wesleyan's vice president for finance, says that the college will switch to three-year leases on the laptops, which he says should put it back in the black. West Virginia Wesleyan is in the middle of a $32-million fund-raising drive, of which at least $2-million will go to technology. The technology has changed life on the campus in both obvious and subtle ways. Students used to organize carpools to drive two hours to the closest research library, at West Virginia University in Morgantown. Now, through money-saving consortia with other small colleges, West Virginia Wesleyan's library supplements its modest and somewhat dated collection of books with subscriptions to electronic reference materials (such as online versions of The Grove Dictionary of Art and the Oxford English Dictionary), 400 electronic journals, and thousands of e-books. Every year, about $114,000, or 45 percent of the library's acquisitions budget, goes to electronic resources and library-cataloging software. And on weeknights, students stay here in Buckhannon, huddling around glowing laptops at library tables, connected to the network through the wireless system. "We couldn't do a credible job of offering our academic programs if we didn't have a technology-rich environment," says Kathleen A. Parker, the college librarian. "I mean, if you're graduating someone with an accounting degree and they've never had their hands on a spreadsheet, what kind of job are you doing?" Karen Petitto, an assistant professor who teaches computer-oriented courses to both students and faculty members, says that, from the beginning, the committee wanted the technology to affect instruction at the institution. "The real basis for this wasn't about putting Webcams in the dorms or making [Yahoo! Internet Life magazine's] Most Wired College list, because a lot of those things have no impact on students," she says. Still, technology use at the college varies widely. Wesleyan's professors, who often mention the importance of teaching, carry a heavy load of classes; even simple e-mail correspondence with students about class work can help, they say. Others use PowerPoint and digital projectors to make flashy presentations. Many of the 1,500 students pick up and drop off class announcements, assignments, and notes through electronic class folders, which are set up each semester after registration. The math department requires students to bring laptops to class to create graphs of equations and run mathematical software. Science courses use the laptops to collect and crunch data. Classroom Use One afternoon in a marketing class, Thomas W. Cline, an associate professor of business and economics, uses statistical software to gauge the students' reaction to a pair of advertisements. Mr. Cline also says that the easy access to technology has helped him collaborate on journal articles with colleagues across the country. However, there isn't a laptop open in Mr. Cline's class, other than his own. In some classes, not a single Ethernet port is in use, and not a digital projector is in sight. C. Anthony Redden, a senior and marketing major, says his laptop has been "essential" to life at the college, although he acknowledges that he uses it more for recreation -- reading the newspapers, catching up with sports teams -- than for research. He notes, however, that he came to college "computer illiterate," because there weren't many computers at his West Virginia high school. Now he writes essays in Microsoft Word, analyzes data with Excel, and stores his golf stats with Access. John R. Warner, a professor of sociology and anthropology, has been at West Virginia Wesleyan since 1970 and has worked with computers even longer than that. He's taken full advantage of the laptop program, using pictures from the Web to enhance online versions of his lectures and notes. But many of his colleagues, he says with a wry chuckle, simply own "$3,000 e-mail machines." Other professors don't seem quite so amused with the computing costs and its returns. Joseph Wiest, a professor of physics who has been at Wesleyan for almost 30 years, says that the network has been a great addition to the campus infrastructure. "The idea of universal computer access for everybody, especially in Appalachia, does make sense," he says. But he says the laptop program and the accompanying deficits have been an unnecessary drain. "It particularly hurt this past year because there weren't good earnings on the endowment to cover [the added costs]. The college is having to make choices," he says, adding that the nursing program and his own physics department have been threatened with cuts or total elimination. He says that the college has decided to trim clerical and custodial positions instead. He suspects that some retiring faculty members will be replaced by adjuncts or will not be replaced at all. Mr. Goins, the vice president for finance, says that assessing the value of academic departments is a regular process at the college and is not related to the laptop program. He acknowledges, however, that money has been tight at Wesleyan and that the college has been cutting back on some staff positions and has been trying to cut down on the use of part-time faculty members. Whether the financial strains are related to technology or not, Mr. Wiest points out that requiring every student to have a computer could have been done for much less if the college had settled on desktop computers, which are much cheaper. He says that other colleges interested in starting a laptop program have inquired about Wesleyan's; many of them have determined that it's too expensive. In the social realm, e-mail and instant messaging have become standard modes of communication here. Trina Dobberstein, the dean of students, says she gets the feeling that students gather in the dormitories and that they don't go to the dining halls to socialize as much. "They don't hang out in those places because they have so much in their room -- video games and computers," she says. "What I have heard consistently is that students are much more likely to instant message someone down the hall to say, 'Let's go to the dining room,' than they would be to walk down there or to call." The plan for bringing new technology to Wesleyan started in 1995 as a modest proposal from a faculty technology committee asking for more computers for professors. The committee set a goal to have one computer for every 10 students on campus. Mr. Haden, a technology "convert" who had just arrived from Reed College, where he was the vice president of public affairs, to be president here, asked the committee to hire a consultant and hammer out a more ambitious approach. He promised to find funds for the new plan, and he was sure he could sell it to the trustees, some of whom had already been pushing for more technology on campus. At the time, computer use on Wesleyan's campus was a mishmash of Macintosh computers and PC's, each running a different set of programs, almost none of them connected to the Internet. Members of the committee visited other colleges to see what they had done right -- and where they had gone wrong. For many of the people who were on the committee, Allegheny College's experience still stands out as a reminder that Wesleyan couldn't take risks on unproven technologies. A delegation from the committee visited Allegheny and found that the college had made a huge investment in computers from NeXT, the company Steve Jobs founded after he left Apple Computer. NeXT Computers had pioneering features -- they were among the first to use Web software -- but they never enjoyed widespread sales and ended up being difficult to support. "We couldn't afford to make a lot of mistakes," says Ms. Parker, the college librarian who chaired the committee. Some of their decisions were easy because of fortunate timing, college officials say. Although most of the computers on campus were Macintoshes when the committee was creating the plan, Apple was on the rocks at that time, so a PC-based standard seemed like a safer route. Winning Over Faculty Members At least some of the committee members thought that it would be difficult to sell the plan to faculty members who had been teaching at the college for years. But while the plan was being drafted, Richard Clemens, a professor of computer science, took a sabbatical to teach other professors how they could use technology to enhance the classroom experience. In the process, Mr. Clemens began to persuade his colleagues -- even the Luddites -- to support new technology on the campus. "There's nothing that a president could do to generate that kind of advocacy in the faculty," Mr. Haden says. "He converted a lot of people. So when we presented the technology plan to the faculty, the approval was unanimous." Mr. Wiest, however, says that the faculty thought the college would find additional outside financial support. "We never imagined that it would come out of annual revenues," he says. College officials recognize that the technology program was, in part, a marketing investment, and they still hope it will generate attention from prospective students. But it's unclear how many students consider the college's technology base before coming here. Nicholas R. Brauchler, a freshman majoring in accounting, sits hunched over a borrowed laptop in the library late one night -- his own laptop is in for repairs. He says that he did not know about the laptop program when he applied. He plans to go into seminary after he finishes here, and he was more interested in the college's Methodist grounding. Marcel A. Steichen, a freshman who is sitting on the other side of the room with no laptop, says he came here for the small classes and the individualized attention, which would help him get through college with a learning disability. Robert N. Skinner II, Wesleyan's director of admissions, says the college is not competing for applicants with a different set of institutions since it added the laptops and other technology. He says Wesleyan's laptop program plays some role in attracting students from the college's primary market, which includes West Virginia and western Pennsylvania. However, students who come from more distant markets, such as New England, don't seem to know or to care about the technology features; they come for the college's Division II sports programs, for its religious foundation, or for the individualized attention, he says. As for Wesleyan's requirement that students apply online, he says that many prefer paper applications and have found the online format to be a hassle. "We didn't count on the fact that kids might not have access to the most up-to-date machines," he says. "I think we're going to review that requirement and decide what's best for us. It has taken a lot of energy to move kids along the application process." Applications are down 15 percent from where they were at this point a year ago. A Balancing Act Over all, Wesleyan officials say they have tried to keep an eye on balance between the qualities of the old Wesleyan and the new. It's a balancing act that every college deals with these days, says Richard Ekman, the president of the Council of Independent Colleges. "One of the distinctive features of small colleges is the warm, face-to-face, small-class experience," he says. "You could convert an awful lot of activity to electronic form, but the judgment needs to be, What do you keep in traditional form and what do you convert? The risk is that you throw out the baby with the bath water." Although the college has made a big investment in technology, Ms. Petitto and other boosters seem at ease about how often, or how little, some students and professors use it. Ms. Petitto offers courses on software and courseware for professors every week. It's a bit like leading horses to water, she says: Some professors have picked up the technology enthusiastically. Others never will. And when it comes to using technology in the classroom, Ms. Petitto says, the three hours of class per week are "sacred" time between a student and a professor. "If we put all of them behind machines, then we have changed the perception of a liberal-arts education," she adds. "We need to do as much and engage students as much as we can in that three hours that we are together with them. We can point them to electronic resources while we're not sitting together." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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