2 petitions for CRP

Hundreds of students sign to regain WSJ and NYT from ASG

Luke Garrett / News Editor/ The USD Vista
Anderson Haigler / Associate Editor / The USD Vista

University of San Diego Associated Student Government’s (ASG) decision to fully defund the College Readership Program was met with frustration and controversy last week as students’ digital subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal expired and The New York Times was defunded.

The ASG leadership team announced the termination of the entire College Readership Program on Oct. 17, despite assuring students weeks earlier that at least one digital newspaper  subscription would remain. In the past, the program, which has existed on USD’s campus in some shape or form since at least the mid 1990s, provided students with physical editions of up to four major newspapers, though in recent years it has been slimmed to include only the two aforementioned digital subscriptions.

Uproar regarding the decision came to a head four days earlier, when class came to an abrupt stop in Olin Hall as Real Estate students sat in confusion and disappointment after learning that their digital subscriptions were cut by ASG, according to senior Anthony Catanzaro. 

Real Estate professor Vincent Kasperick set aside five minutes of class time to discuss ASG’s decision, which prompted Catanzaro along with other students to start a petition to regain the two national newspaper subscriptions. 

“I love that service, I love to read the news, I love to stay current,” Catanzaro said. “It is just going to be that much harder to do so if this service gets taken away. That really is the motivation for me.”

The ASG leadership team walked back their initial commitment to fund the College Readership Program because of their belief that Copley Library has a similar service for students and that the program goes unused by some students, a statement that was elaborated upon in Saunderson’s campus-wide email.  

Catanzaro acknowledges the library’s resources, but pointed out that for his purposes and many of those students he talked to, daily subscription is key.

“There are other ways to view the news through the library, but I like being able to get it through my phone, iPads, and computers — pretty quickly like that,” Catanzaro said. “This is why we are fighting for it.”

Through sharing the petition with classmates, Catanzaro learned that some students rely on the subscriptions for classes and for their ability to stay current. 

To this senior, the petition is not self-serving.

 “I am not even fighting to keep this for the last few semesters I have here,” Catanzaro said. “I am mainly fighting to keep this for the grades below me. I feel like it’s such a valuable tool.”

He is not alone. Another petition, similar to Catanzaro’s, has also sprung up within the business school. The second petition was started by a pair of business school students — Easton Griffin and Christian Oertli.

As of Oct. 29, the two petitions have raised over 250 signatures. 

On Monday, ASG Finance Chair George Saunderson sent an email to all USD students explaining the decision, including usage statistics regarding the program and the subscriptions purchased. The numbers showed that at least  20.7 percent of USD students, or 1,242 total persons, activated their subscriptions to at least one of the two newspapers. The email also included a justification of the decision. 

Saunderson’s statement addressed the petitions, and elaborated on the rationale behind the move. His, and the rest of ASG’s collective justifications centered around their prior assertion that Copley Library’s database research access to the newspapers is sufficient to replace the full newspaper access provided by the College Readership Program. As previously reported by The USD Vista, though, this assertion is false, as the library’s access is intended for academic research, not daily, breaking news consumption. While the library’s access does provide students with the ability to read all of the same articles (as Saunderson mentioned), the library access is only a list of articles without pictures or any form of coherent organization, as well as taking nearly double the time to access through the research database.

His Monday-night email on behalf of ASG also contained a new rationalization for the lack of funding. In the 742-word statement, the Finance Chair detailed how ASG leadership consulted “a dean from the School of Business” in their decision, later asking him to fund the program through the USD School of Business’s budget rather than through the biannual $121 Student Activity Fee, a request that was denied. After the business school dean declined to fund the program, Saunderson described how “the dean suggested that ASG should not renew the subscriptions if we could not afford the program, suggesting that students pay for the subscriptions themselves.”

However, the “business school dean” that ASG met with, Associate Dean and Professor of Marketing David Light, denied that he made that suggestion, and rejected ASG’s accounts of the meeting. In a email to The USD Vista, Light said that he “did not make that statement,” adding that Saunderson’s email “contains the inaccurate assertion that I recommended the ASG defund the College Readership Program,” and that his account of the meeting was “unfortunate.”

These two petitions, the campus-wide controversy, and Saunderson’s lengthy defense of the ASG decision come after a year-long and incremental defunding of the program. Last year’s senate unanimously voted to leave the decision up to students through a referendum, although this never happened due to infighting within last year’s student government. 

ASG Finance Committee met on Tuesday to vote on the defunding of the College Readership Program. The committee voted to defund the program, but held off on reallocating the $13,000 formerly allocated to  The New York Times until Nov. 12. Officials said student input will decide where the funds will be reallocated.

Though the program has now been fully defunded at USD, the program still exists at several California colleges similar to USD. According to The New York Times’ customer service department, the University of Southern California, Chapman University, Pepperdine University, and Loyola Marymount University all maintain current subscriptions to the NYT for their undergraduate student body.