ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times

DATE: Tuesday, April 22, 1997                TAG: 9704220050
SECTION: CURRENT                  PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: MARK CLOTHIER THE ROANOKE TIMES

TECH DISSED BY LIST OF 'MOST-WIRED' WWW.LEFT.OUT

Hokies conspicuously absent from ranking of computerized campuses.

MIT. Pomona. Harvard.

These are colleges deemed by the magazine, Yahoo! Internet Life, to be more wired than Virginia Tech. A survey ranking the 100 most-wired schools was released this month. Tech didn't make the cut.

Harvard? Who can argue with that?

MIT? Sure. They've got that guy who walks around with a web site camera strapped to his head.

But Pomona?

Granted, the California college has an on-line project called the Visual Signifiers of Cool, which sounds like heady stuff. And, yeah, 95 percent of the students own computers. But more wired than Tech? More wired than the home school of Blacksburg, the most wired town in America?

Apparently.

Tech's ranking was a surprise to Tech as well. About 60 percent of its students own computers and each on-campus student has dorm room hookups. And then there's this: "We had our campus wired before a lot of schools even knew what a wired campus was," said Larry Hincker, Tech's associate vice president of university relations.

Hincker said it was extremely odd that Tech hadn't placed, "even more odd when you see the ones that are on there. I find the whole thing suspect. One of their categories is on-line card catalogs for their library. And Tech is one the first schools to do that."

Hincker said Tech computer officials never received any survey or query of any kind. So he questions the rankings' methodology.

The survey looked at 300 colleges and universities and addressed 35 factors, grouped under four categories: academics, hardware and wiring, student service, and social use of the Internet.

Washington and Lee in Lexington was the highest-ranking Virginia school. It came in 37th. George Mason University and - oh, the Hokie Horror - the University of Virginia placed 68th and 69th.

James Madison University in Harrisonburg placed 76th. Apparently not because of its media relations' department, which - unlike the other schools - had faxes dropping onto newsroom floors soon after the survey's release.

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