---

It wasn't long ago that if a college administration office had to get ahold of a student, a call would be placed to the student's room phone.

Not anymore.

With virtually every student available by cell phone, college campus phone systems have become obsolete in students' eyes, a frustrating development for college and university administrators.

Many colleges and universities have attempted to address the cell phone issue by either providing students with or requiring them to have a landline in their dorm room, apartment or suite. But increasingly, even that isn't solving the problem.

Now, Wheaton College has joined other local schools in trying to bridge the technological gap. Last semester, the Office of the Registrar sent each student a form allowing them to submit a cell phone number as their primary contact number. Wheaton Registrar Patricia Santilli was one of the driving forces behind the move.

"We're finding it more and more difficult to contact students about important issues," Santilli said. "Many students don't have a phone in their room."

Santilli said that the time-sensitive nature of certain notices sent to seniors informing them that they are, for one reason or another, about to be removed from the graduation list, for example, pushed the Wheaton administration to "finally bite the bullet and start collecting student cell phone numbers."

"Personally, I will only contact students on their cell phones if it is regarding an extremely important matter or if I know that they don't have a campus phone number," Santilli said.

"We make it known that we have three ways of contacting students: by telephone, e-mail and through their campus mailbox," she said. "It's the student's responsibility to keep those communications updated."

Providence College students are not required to have landline telephones. Junior Kelly Gruppioni of North Attleboro said that students always have the option of having a landline, "but I just give out my cell number for contact information."

When contacting professors and administrators, Gruppioni said PC students generally use e-mail, "but if we call a professor and leave them a message, we give them our cell number so they can call us back on that."

The University of Rhode Island is taking a different approach.

In the university's newest apartments, students are provided with IP phones, a new type of phone that allows users to speak over an IP network, such as the Internet or an intranet.

"Housing gives students landlines to use on campus," said Jennifer Smith of Attleboro, a junior at URI. "But it isn't mandatory that you have a phone in your room." Smith is one of many students who recently moved into the university's newest housing facility.

"In the new apartments they give you IP phones that you have to keep in the room just so they don't get stolen," she said. "The plan is that everyone on campus will have IP phones eventually."

Smith's younger sister, Sara, is a freshman at Westfield State College, which provides students not only with landline phone numbers for each dorm room, but with landline telephones as well.

"We get phones in our rooms," Sara Smith said, "and we can bring our own if we want."

She said that while using the landline phones is not mandatory, students do seem to use them more often than at other schools.

"Since the phones are provided, it's definitely easier to use them" she said.

At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, students are supposed to have a landline telephone for their campus phone number, but many students do not, said junior Sarah Occhino of Attleboro.

"The school gives you a landline, but you can tell all your professors your cell number," she said. "Some food delivery people require a landline. That's one of the only times I've ever used mine."

"It'd be nice if our communications fee didn't include the landline telephones," Occhino said. "Most people that use them are people who don't have cell phones, and that's an ever-shrinking number."

Cell phone-reliant UMass-Amherst students were in an uproar at the beginning of last semester when the school opened its four new residence buildings.

"They rushed to finish them, and when we moved in this fall we had a huge issue because most cell phones had no service in the buildings," Occhino said. "Most people had to crawl into stairwells or up to their windows to get service in their dorm rooms," she said.

Paige MacGregor is a film studies and English major at Wheaton interning at the Sun Chronicle during the winter break. She can be contacted at macgregor.paige@gmail.com.