Newspaper boxes open for non-undergraduate students

Locked drop boxes don’t prevent students who aren’t paying for the USA Today and New York…Locked drop boxes don’t prevent students who aren’t paying for the USA Today and New York Times newspapers on campus from getting copies, and they never have.

Following complaints from concerned students in the Collegiate Readership Program’s pilot year, Pitt’s Student Government Board worked last semester to prevent people who don’t pay the $80 undergraduate Student Activities Fee from taking the newspapers the program provides for students. But the drop boxes do not limit access to the papers to Pitt undergraduates — they open for any Pitt student with an ID. Even so, SGB members maintain that the boxes serve a purpose and that the program is a valuable asset to undergraduates.

The Collegiate Readership Program, which distributes 300 copies of The New York Times and USA Today to students on campus every weekday, cost $30,500 in 2012 and is funded by the Student Activities Fund, the sum of the Student Activities Fees paid by all undergraduate, non-College of General Studies students. Last year, after several months of the program’s implementation, discontent over ineffective dispersal procedures prompted SGB to re-evaluate the program’s worth. In January, the Board settled on the installation of swipe-access boxes to fix the problem of non-payers receiving papers, allowing the readership program to continue.

But Pitt’s director of Computing Services and Systems Development says the locked drop boxes never would have stopped CGS and graduate students from taking papers.

CSSD director Jinx Walton said in an email that last January CSSD met with SGB President James Landreneau and Kenyon Bonner, Pitt’s associate director of student life, to discuss the drop boxes with USA Today and the vendor who provided the swipe-access recepticals.

The boxes were provided at no cost to the Student Government Board by representatives of The New York Times and USA Today.

Walton said that the vendor for the drop boxes does not provide the capability of connecting them to a network nor does he have the ability to store a list of approved users, meaning the boxes cannot differentiate between undergraduate, graduate and CGS student ID cards.

The boxes do, however, limit the access of faculty and staff members by differentiating between the 2P numbers on student ID cards and those on faculty and staff cards.

Walton said that to truly differentiate between student types, the vendor of the locked drop boxes would have to implement an intelligent card scanner with network capability or the 2P numbers on ID cards would have to be changed to differentiate between student type — meaning the University would have to reissue cards to all students.

“The capabilities of the locked drop boxes and the ID card were known by SGB and others involved at the time the decision was made to proceed,” Walton said. “Last January, the vendor indicated that they had no plans to modify their system and the option of re-issuing ID cards was deemed as unfeasible.”

SGB Board member Julie Hallinan said that while the Board knew the boxes would not fully differentiate between the students accessing their contents, they still perform their intended function by preventing just anyone from taking the papers.

“We wanted to make sure that students paying into the program through the Student Activities Fund were the ones benefitting,” she said. “In the past we have all seen faculty and staff taking papers that were intended for students, and during Pathfinder tours through Towers, parents were just grabbing copies.”

Landreneau said that the locked drop boxes’ inability to block certain groups of students from accessing the papers was a disappointment.

“It was definitely discouraging to me because we wanted to make sure that the students paying for the papers were the only ones accessing them,” Landreneau said. “But I presented the info [that graduate students and CGS students would have access to the boxes] to the Board before voting on the contract, and they still approved.”

Landreneau said that the locked drop boxes still serve an important purpose on campus.

“The pickup rate of the papers in 2011 was close to 100 percent. However, even though the numbers this semester have dropped, the roughly $30,000 that we fund for the program is the peak of how much we would spend if they were picked up every day. We don’t pay for papers that aren’t picked up, so the numbers are down because we are cutting down on paper fraud,” he said.

Landreneau said the Board is working to make the Readership Program more inclusive so that graduate, CGS and nontraditional students not only have access to the papers, but also help fund the program.

“The problem, though, is what is the incentive for these other groups to pay into the program if they are already getting the papers for free?” Landreneau said.

Graduate student Rachael Greenwalt said that she has never been denied access to the papers and picks copies up regularly. She said she would be disappointed if she lost access.

“It would suck. Honestly, I think that grad students use these papers more than the undergrads do,” she said.

Hallinan said she believes that graduate and undergraduate students access the papers equally and that she is working with Landreneau to find alternative funding for the program to alleviate some of the financial burden the program places on the Student Activities Fund.

“James and I have been working with the Graduate Program Student Government and the College of General Studies to see if they would buy into the program as well,” Hallinan said. “Right now we are just trying to work on a fair price and taking into consideration the fact that the other groups have smaller funds. This may also prompt us to move around the boxes a bit and put them in places where grad students would have greater access to them, such as the Cathedral or maybe Scaife Hall.

Hallinan noted that the Collegiate Readership Program offers a variety of other benefits to students at the University, in addition to copies of the newspapers. These include the opportunity to host different panel discussions and for New York Times reporter John Broder to speak on campus in November.

“I definitely see value in the program because having the papers themselves are so valuable, but also everything else we can do with it is so great,” she said.

Landreneau said that while student response ultimately decides the fate of the readership program, he hopes that incoming Boards will be supportive.

“Certainly it is not a cheap program, but I hope that it gets renewed because it’s still at its birth, and we are still working to promote it.”

Before the current Board members finish their terms in January, they plan to decide whether or not to renew the Collegiate Readership Program for another year.

Landreneau said the cost of the program will be more substantial if it is renewed for the future, as the $30,500 funding covered the costs from March through December, which were affected by the program’s brief hiatus last winter.

Landreneau said that one reason the program was temporarily halted last winter was because the Board had to make quick decisions. He said he hopes to create a better transition period for future Boards.

“This year’s Board was thrown into making the decision [to renew the program] immediately,” he said. “The contract right now is an annual renewal where each Board that comes into place has to vote on renewing the program, but the goal of my Board is to see if we can extend it through April for the 2013 Board, to give them enough time to make a decision for themselves.”