Poor choice, poor reasoning

Associated Student Government makes a weak decision with a weaker justification

Eric Boose / Opinion Editor / The USD Vista

The New York Times says “the truth is worth it.” The University of San Diego’s Associated Student Government (ASG) clearly thinks otherwise. On Oct. 17, the ASG leadership team announced its plan to pull all remaining funding from the College Readership Program, canceling USD students’ free online subscriptions to both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The decision still requires approval from the ASG Senate, but the leadership team seems to be banking on receiving that approval. Earlier this year, ASG pledged to defund only one of the two subscriptions — the one to The Wall Street Journal — leaving students with some, albeit minimal, access to the news. 

They have broken that promise. Cancelling online subscriptions is the final step in the year-and-a-half-long defunding of the program, which used to not only fund online subscriptions, but provide physical copies of USA Today, The New York Times, and The San Diego Union-Tribune to students free of charge. That defunding process has taken place almost entirely in disregard of the democratic process and regardless of students’ wishes.

In the summer of 2018, without students or ASG senators present, the ASG leadership team decided to stop funding free access to physical newspapers on campus. To support the decision, then-ASG President Natasha Salgado referenced an Instagram poll which received 94 responses, representing only 1.5 percent of the USD undergraduate student population. 1.5 percent of students is nowhere near enough for ASG to have claimed a mandate to remove the papers from campus. Worse still, once students and ASG senators returned to campus, ASG promised students a chance for students to vote on the future of free physical newspapers at USD in a referendum. That vote never came. 

In defending their most recent decision, the ASG leadership team claimed that students, while being deprived of subscriptions, would not be denied free access to the news. ASG President Marion Chavarria Rivera said “we have decided to not fund the College Readership Program this year because of the resources Copley Library offers students,” asserting that Copley Library’s database is similar to the access provided by the online subscriptions. ASG also defended their decision by saying that the $13,000 spent to provide subscriptions to The New York Times would be better spent on other things. ASG Vice President Greyson Taylor suggested putting the money toward increasing the amount of Lyft credit available to students, printing, or even free pens. 

While it is admirable that they had a justification for their decision, the ASG leadership team’s defense is lacking in both areas. First, Chavarria Rivera’s assumption that the resources available in Copley Library are comparable to a subscription to The New York Times is plainly wrong. While Copley Library does provide students access to articles from The New York Times, it would be incorrect to claim that Copley’s access is the same as a subscription. Copley Library librarian Catherine Paolillo, while pledging that the library will work to better promote the research access they provide, also stated that Copley’s access differs from the subscription access which students stand to lose. 

“It doesn’t look like the online subscription,” Paolillo said, about Copley’s news access. Copley’s access is a database of articles, intended for research purposes, not casual reading. While the library also receives a hard copy of eight different newspapers every morning, those papers cannot leave the library, and there is only one copy of each. To consume the news, students would have to take time to go to the library and either navigate the database or read the newspaper of their choice essentially in one sitting. Reading the news should not require someone to go out of their way. 

What makes the Copley Library research access so different from an online subscription is that the two services serve different purposes. Copley’s research access is intended for precisely that. If a student knows what information they are looking for, they can search for it across multiple news publications. However, if a student does not know what they are looking for, they will be lost in a maze of titles sorted alphabetically, not by recency or importance. An online subscription to The New York Times, for example, is not intended for research purposes, but to inform readers of the news of the day. The online site is meant to be easy to navigate for someone who wants to know the top stories of the day and the most recent news. Subscriptions also incorporate multimedia access — from print journalism, to podcast storytelling, to photojournalism. Copley Library’s database has only the text of articles. Do not be fooled. In losing their subscriptions, USD students are losing easy access to the news.

According to ASG, this loss is worth the $13,000 they gain back. They might be right, if those $13,000 did not account for approximately one tenth of one percent of ASG’s $1.2 million budget. To put that into perspective, if ASG had a budget of $100, paying for The New York Times subscriptions would cost little more than a penny. 

ASG, in claiming that the subscriptions are not worth the money, implies that their new plans for that $13,000 are worth it. Of the three alternatives Taylor mentioned, free printing and Lyft rides are the least offensive. However, those options are not clearly better uses of the money, nor do they inherently require the defunding of the readership program. Printing was free through the Creative Zone as recently as 2018, when ASG still provided physical copies of newspapers on campus. Since then, the fee students pay to fund ASG’s expenditures has not decreased, but rather increased, from $117 per semester in 2017 to $121 per semester this year. Clearly, free printing and free newspapers are not incompatible. 

Second, the university already funds multiple Lyft discount programs. One is a one-time discount code offered to students, and is funded by ASG. The other, a far more expansive program, is the “Lyft Torero Ride,” funded by the USD Department of Public Safety and the Center for Health and Wellness Promotion. This program was “created to give current USD students a ride to campus, to their residence, or to a location that they need to get to for urgent purposes.”

Lyft initiatives are important, especially ones like the Lyft Torero Ride, which creates a safety net for students. However, the Lyft Torero Ride has successfully established that safety net, without ASG’s help. 

While Taylor’s suggestions of free printing and more Lyft codes are slightly underdeveloped, there are few suggestions more insulting than the notion that ASG should not spend $13,000 on giving the student body access to the news, but instead on free pens. The ability of USD undergraduate students to obtain writing utensils of their choice has never been in doubt. 

While it is true that ASG’s alternative spending plans, with the exception of free pens, would provide noticeable benefits to students, taking money from the College Readership Program to fund them would be inappropriate. ASG asserts that they can cancel students’ subscriptions because the money would better benefit students if used elsewhere. If ASG is going to defund programs which they claim do not benefit the student body as a whole, they should make sure that the programs they do plan to fund all meet that standard. 

Additionally, the implication that free subscriptions to The New York Times do not benefit students is plainly false. Being informed about current events is crucial, especially in such politically polarized times as today’s. The New York Times is a credible news agency, and the College Readership Program puts it at every student’s fingertips for no cost. Now, should a student want to subscribe to The New York Times, it will cost them$3.75 a week. That amounts to $195 out of a student’s pockets in a year. Even at the current sale rate of $1 per week, ASG’s funding saved students a minimum of $52 a year. That seems to be significantly beneficial. It was even more beneficial for those students who would not subscribe to the paper unless they had to for a class. Some classes in the business school require students to subscribe to The Wall Street Journal — which ASG also provided for free until the end of last year. Now, those students have to pay a minimum of $39 for a subscription over a 15-week semester. At most, those students will pay around $73 in a semester. In monetary value alone, the free subscriptions that ASG seeks to cancel clearly benefit students.

This is also not a benefit that is going unused. According to ASG Finance Chair George Saunderson, 7.8 percent of the USD undergraduate student population — 464 students — have activated their free subscription to The New York Times. Beyond that, a whopping 1,236 Toreros — 20.9 percent of USD undergrads — utilized the free subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal, the first subscription that ASG defunded. 

ASG would like you to believe that these numbers are small. However, even 8 percent student engagement would be impressive for USD students. Think about Torero Program Board events. Do those consistently bring in attendance of more than 500 people? 1,200 people? As much as ASG would like you to think otherwise, the College Readership Program benefits an impressive amount of students.

ASG’s decision to cancel students’ free subscriptions to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal is the wrong one, and they defend their decision poorly. The only way to save the subscription is if the ASG senate votes against the leadership team’s decision. The ASG Senate meets every Thursday at 12:15 p.m. in Solomon Hall in Maher.  Hopefully, when the senators hear the support for the subscriptions that exists on campus, they will fill their duty as representatives of the students and do what is best by voting to preserve the College Readership Program.