For the seventh consecutive year, Wyoming Catholic College (WCC) will require its students to surrender their cell phones for the entire semester, Campus Reform reported.
The policy is simple, at the beginning of the semester, students hand their cell phones to administrators, who then lock the devices in a box until its conclusion. They can only access their mobile phones in instances of travel or emergency.
The policy was enacted in 2007, when the school opened, to encourage traditional forms of communication between students and faculty.
"The reason we have the rules is to uphold a certain type of community that is conducive in growing in mind, body, and spirit," WCC dean of students Jonathan Tonkowich told Campus Reform. "We don't think that cell-phones are this evil thing."
School officials do not have to surrender their cell phones and can always be reached by students' parents if need be. Prospective students are warned of all school policies during the admission process so none come as a surprise. In his four years at the school, Tonkowich said he has seen two violations of the cell phone policy, which results in community service.
"We're all about connecting," he said in a 2010 news release. "But our students are connecting with the greatest ideas and thinkers the world has ever known. And they can't use their cell phones or Blackberry to do that."
Students even like the policy and one junior, Erin Milligan, 20, said it was a freeing feeling to leave her phone behind.
"It's a release, really, not having a cell phone," she told Yahoo. "When you are no longer captivated by technology, you find your true and real self."
Milligan is part of a class of 112, so face-to-face communication is quite easy for her and her classmates. She said there is almost no anxiety in relinquishing her cell phone because student leaders keep it in the dorm room in a locked box.
"We are so tech savvy these days," Milligan said. "But something that is really prevalent is our inability to genuinely communicate at a human-to-human, face-to-face level."
WCC's president Rev. Robert W. Cook told Inside Higher Ed in 2007, upon the school's opening, that the policy is meant to change the way students define research.
We're intent on trying to get these youngsters to engage in critical thinking," Cook said. "We say to them, 'Look, God gave you the greatest computer ever created: your brain.'"