The Georgetown University Student Association Senate’s Finance and Appropriations committee, in a draft student activities budget for fiscal year 2015 released March 6, ended funding for the Collegiate Readership Program, which distributes free copies of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today across campus. The Senate will vote on the final budget this Sunday.
The Readership program, started by GUSA in 2008, costs $14,000 and is funded as part of GUSA’s Student Activities Fee Allocation, which collects the student activities fee paid by undergraduate students as part of tuition. According to FinApp Chair Séamus Guerin (COL ‘16), however, the newspapers are often taken by professors and grad students instead.
“[The] $14,000 will find great application to other initiatives on campus, whether it’s our own Media Board, whether it’s our Student Activities Commission and all the SAC groups underneath it, or whether it’s Georgetown Day, which we’re funding for the first time,” he said.
GUSA Vice President-elect Omika Jikaria (SFS ‘15), however, expressed disapproval of the process that went into FinApp’s decision to cut the program in its draft budget.
“[GUSA President-elect] Trevor [Tezel] and I believe that this should not be how a widely-used program like Collegiate Readership should be cut. The program needs to be looked at further before it is cut,” Jikaria wrote in an email to the Voice.
GUSA President Nate Tisa (SFS ‘14) concurred. “As college students, it’s really easy to get trapped in our bubble … [and] you want to keep the student body informed and have that easy access,” he said. “Most of us aren’t going to get the paper delivered to our dorms, we don’t sell the papers at Corp locations … so if you want access to a full paper, this is the way that we do it here.”
FinApp Committee member Abbey McNaughton (COL ‘16) agreed reform should “first involve gauging general student interest,” but said the committee was challenged by a lack of data about the undergraduate student response to the program.
“I am hesitant to continue spending this amount of money on a program with such uncertainty regarding student benefit,” she wrote in an email to the Voice. She added that even if FinApp were to consider alternatives, “We don’t know if that is what students would prefer.”
Currently, Lauinger Library offers a digital alternative to students and faculty through electronic access to The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today via George, the library’s journal database. Not all articles, however, are added to the database on the day of print.
According to University Librarian Artemis Kirk, the library is “continuing to investigate possibilities” to purchase subscriptions to The New York Times for all students, faculty and staff, but faces “prohibitive” costs due to a lack of a pricing model for universities.
Benjamin Shaw (COL ‘08), founder of the Collegiate Readership Program in his role as former GUSA president, said the program should be discontinued if there were better uses for funding that would more directly impact the undergraduate population.
“I would imagine that there’s less funding for things in general. You have to prioritize. I think that student organizations should come before paper newspapers,” Shaw said.
Kirk also noted that “this discussion has made [library staff] aware that it would be useful to have a guide on our website dedicated to newspapers with instructions on how users may access them, and we will work on creating one.”
A two thirds vote on the fiscal year 2015 budget from the GUSA Senate will be required to pass the cut of the Collegiate Readership Program.
