McKinley: Telefact’s budgeted $88,000 should be spent on something modern

The University doesn’t spend money on typewriters, floppy disks or farriers, after all.What’s older: this writer, the Pirates’ losing streak or TeleFact? I’ll save you the phone call on this one: It’s TeleFact. And it is time for TeleFact to go.

The decision to cut a beloved quirk of our campus is not an easy one. I love getting a free TeleFact T-shirt at the activities fair as much as everyone else. And it sure is nice that someone out there can tell me how many blades of grass there are on the Cathedral lawn. But the fact is, in today’s world of ubiquitous smart phones and economic recession, TeleFact is no longer a reasonable expenditure.

A lot has changed since TeleFact’s founding in 1990 ­— primarily, the world has been introduced to a big thing called the Internet.

This thing has made TeleFact obsolete. According to the official University description, TeleFact answers questions about “campus activities, sports, weather and local happenings,” ranging from “University information to the universal.” They’ll answer anything that doesn’t involve personal academic or medical information. All of that is wonderful. And it is also all available on the Internet.

Speaking of the Internet, the TeleFact website — the least technologically advanced site I’ve seen since the early 2000s by the way — does provide some nice statistics about why people call in. The main reason? Transportation. About 16 percent of calls are inquiries about buses, yet my laptop or smart phone can tell me through the Port Authority website all about bus routes and when and where to catch a ride.

In a pre-Internet, pre-smart phone world like 1990, TeleFact’s service was very sensible. But with my 4G iPhone, it is downright paradoxical. Why pay for a service to look up basic information when I am paying for the University to make me a critical, self-sufficient human being? When information was accessible only through cumbersome encyclopedias or reference books, TeleFact made life simpler and more efficient. But Pitt students today don’t need someone to type a question into Google’s search bar for them.

Maybe, despite it’s obvious obsolescence, your romanticized view of TeleFact as a fun campus quirk remains. Well then, consider this:

Each semester, non-College of General Studies students pay an $80 Student Activities Fee. The resulting Student Activities Fund is a pool of about $2.3 million. When any of our 350 student clubs ask for funding for things such as competitive sports tournaments or academic conferences, it comes out of this fund.

The fund also pays for TeleFact, which is one of five formula groups that receive a set amount of money from the fund. For TeleFact, it receives about 3.4 percent for a total of more than $88,000 each year.

Considering the undergraduate student body — the only group that contributes to the fund, even though the service is available to the rest of the world for free —­ is a population of just under 18,000 students, each student pays almost $5 to continue the operation.

For those of you who’ve called in wondering if the moon is bigger than the Earth or questioning the legality of owning a barracuda, maybe that more than $88,000 is worth it. But for the majority of Pitt students, we would benefit more from a different investment.

For example, how often do we find ourselves searching for an available electrical outlet in Hillman as our laptop batteries dramatically dive deeper into the red? Imagine if we could use that money for more outlets in the library. Or what if instead of closing at 6:00 p.m., we invested the money into keeping the Cathedral Cafe open an extra hour on weekdays so that it covered dinner? Heck, with more than $88,000, we could even contribute something to campus beautification: Posvar Hall could sure use some creative murals in the hopes that a colorful interior would distract us from its brutalistic architecture. Maybe we could use some money to cover the electricity costs of the victory lights for additional victories. If football gets them for beating Gardner-Webb, shouldn’t the tennis team light them up every once in a while too?

TeleFact is just one example of a gratuitous expense that the University could invest elsewhere. Certainly the email kiosks have fallen victim to the smart phone age, too. And there are other things to question.

How many of us actually went to see Cobra Starship at Bigelow Bash last year? Or how many of us really stand and watch those flashy flat-screen TVs throughout campus as they repeat infomercials from eager Student Government Board members? As for Panther Prints, when was the last time you picked up the college yearbook?

The point is, even though Chancellor Mark Nordenberg and the administration should be commended for taking some necessary steps to keep tuition at a reasonable rate, there are still many ways to make Pitt a more cost-efficient university.

As the paying members of this institution, we should demand that our money be spent on more than an obsolete, expensive service. You don’t need to call TeleFact to know that.

Email Rosie at romckinley@gmail.com.

Editors note: Rosie McKinley serves on the Student Government Board Allocations Committee.