ASG cuts subscription

Luke Garrett / News Editor / The USD Vista

USD students lost their digital subscription to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Oct. 8 and are not going to get it back. This cuts the already stripped College Readership Program at the University of San Diego in half. The other half of the program, a digital subscription to The New York Times (NYT), also lies in uncertainty as Associated Student Government (ASG) must renew its contract by Nov. 8 to maintain the campus-wide subscription. ASG has provided no updates on how it plans to renew.

The program exists on college campuses across the U.S. and began at Pennsylvania State University in 1997 “with the specific goal of promoting civic literacy and global awareness on campus through daily exposure to the news,” according to the University of Utah. 

 Over the past two years, ASG has systematically defunded the program and limited student access to high-quality journalism.

In 2018, ASG defunded the delivery of three physical newspapers across campus, and the following year the program was further cut, leaving one free digital subscription to the NYT.

During Thursday’s ASG senate meeting, President Marion Chavarria Rivera did not mention the WSJ’s termination, but instead suggested that the student body rely on Copley Library’s single copy of newspapers and research-oriented digital access for news. 

“Currently, right now, Copley Library has both (subscriptions) available to all students,” Rivera said.

Rivera went on to describe that few differences exist between the library’s journalistic resources and that provided by the College Readership Program.

“The only comparison one could make (between the two resources) is you can’t see comments and sometimes people come in and make edits to their articles,” Rivera said.

This described similarity between the two resources is misleading. 

In order for students to access the NYT or the WSJ through Copley, they must go to the library’s website, sign into the research database, scroll through other periodicals and academic journals, click on the NYT or WSJ, then search for a specific article by name or date. This resource, as explained on Copley’s website, is explicitly designed for research and not daily use. The Copley resources do not provide students with app access or a full view of the day’s news. 

The digital access provided by the College Readership Program gives students full subscriptions; meaning they have access to unlimited articles through the newspapers’ apps and websites. 

Despite the WSJ subscription termination, no effort has been made to alert students of their shrinking access to journalistic sources. The ASG website contradicts the status of the program, as it still lists the WSJ as free for students under the “ASG initiatives” tab.

ASG officials worked to regain the free WSJ subscriptions for students, but not through its own funds. Rivera and Finance Chair George Saunderson attempted to have the WSJ funded by the business school because they believed the business students made up the majority of the WSJ readership.

Rivera proposed the idea to Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs David Light of the Business School, but the school declined to fund the WSJ for all students.

“It is unfortunate that subscriptions to both the  NY Times and WSJ cannot be provided to students by Associated Student Government,” Light said in an email. “The School of Business will not participate in the College Readership Program at this time.”

ASG has an annual budget of over $1.5 million and, according to previous years’ financial records, the WSJ digital access costs $12,000 — less than one tenth of a percent of the annual budget. According to the 2017-2018 ASG budget, a similar amount of funds was spent on the Bradford Lee Bosley Fitness Center’s DirecTV subscription. 

Following the senate meeting, ASG officials spoke to the struggles they have had with the College Readership Program. Much of them originate from last year’s student government, according to Chair of Diversity and Inclusion Jesse Magaña.

“We are kind of picking up the pieces that were left off by an exec team that left last year,” Magaña said. 

With uncertainty surrounding the program, and the Rivera claiming that the library already provides sufficient news for the campus, the fate of the College Readership Program is dim.