ASG brings back New York Times subscription for all USD students
ASG officially voted to approve the $8,570 budget proposal in order to bring back pared-down College Readership Program
Tyler Pugmire / News Editor
USD’s Associated Student Government (ASG) voted to pass the budget for the Spring 2021 semester on Jan. 28, which included funding a free New York Times digital subscription for all students for the rest of the semester.
The contract with the New York Times has been finalized, and should be available to students in “the next couple of weeks, or sooner” according to the New York Times higher education manager Todd Halvorsen. All students will be able to sign up with their school email on accessnyt.com and will then be granted permission to read all online content from the Times.
This deal comes after both ASG President Joey Abeyta and Vice President Justin Daus ran on the platform of bringing back the College Readership Program (CRP) in Spring 2020, which granted students access to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The San Diego Union-Tribune in print and online.
The CRP has had a complicated relationship with USD in recent years, becoming a divisive topic of debate for the ASG budget since most current students have been on campus. Since the beginning of the 2018 school year, there was much discussion about whether or not the then nearly $30,000 program was worth it, including two petitions that revealed that one in three students on campus supported the program. The program was officially defunded in Nov. 2019.
Now in its return to campus, the pared-down College Readership Program will cost ASG $8,970. This subscription is only available for students, as faculty and staff have not been permitted access to the New York Times through the CRP. ASG’s budget comes from the $125 student activity fee that every student pays, and they have roughly $1.2 million dollars to spend each year.
USD students were without a national news subscription throughout the entirety of the pandemic, and until now there had been no real traction in ASG to fund this program, other than some small pushes by groups of senators.
Daus was responsible for bringing the idea of restoring a New York Times subscription to the finance chair for a spring budget vote. Daus said the delay in discussing the revival of the CRP was because of more pressing issues that came about during the summer.
For both Daus and Abeyta, their focus was to engage in productive civil discourse in order to reignite the College Readership Program conversations.
“The debates that surrounded the College Readership Program (a year ago) were very divisive, there was bias on different sides of the argument and it was very unproductive,” Daus said. “As far as concrete things happened, College Readership Program debates enveloped that entire semester (Fall 2019).”
This time around, a simple vote on the yearly budget brought the College Readership Program back to life. Although just a fraction of the wide range of news sources the CRP used to provide, the discourse surrounding this year’s debate seemed to be much more efficient. The long-term future of the CRP is still unknown, but soon enough all students will see the benefits of the program.
