In addition to training, students have access to specially trained student advisers in their dorms and to a computer help line. This year's freshman class is the second group to start its college career at Wake Forest under a broad-based initiative called the undergraduate plan, originally known as the Plan for the Class of 2000. While the plan contains about three dozen features including the hiring of 40 new faculty members and the introduction of special first-year seminars for incoming students the element that has received the most publicity is the requirement that each student be assigned an IBM ThinkPad when he or she enters the university. This year freshmen and sophomores also received a Lexmark color printer. The computers, which are dispersed to faculty as well as students on a two-year rotation, come loaded with Windows 95, Microsoft Office 97, Netscape Navigator, Lotus Notes and a special Wake Forest Template.
Students take ownership of their second computer upon graduating.
The touchstone of Wake Forest s approach to learning is personalized, individualized, customized dialog among collaborating students, between a student and a faculty member, faculty to faculty, said the university's provost, David G. Brown . If we are to empower each individual student to communicate frequently with professors, to access customized reading lists, to collaborate with colleague learners on campus and at distant locations, we must provide the tools to do so. The computer is such a tool. Keeping the lines of communication open between professors and students is central to the undergraduate plan and one of several concerns voiced by early critics of the Plan for the Class of 2000. Danielle Deaver, a senior from Folsom, Pa., who is editor in chief of the campus newspaper, Old Gold and Black , says that the undergraduate plan has divided the school into computer haves and have-nots without really benefiting those students who have them.