Schaff: Use Collegiate Readership Program money for other public needs

It’s always entertaining to watch people spend their peers’ obligatorily relinquished wealth. It’s always entertaining to watch people spend their peers’ obligatorily relinquished wealth. From congressional budget battles to student government initiatives on Pitt’s campus, big-dollar political theater invites us to pull up chairs and stuff our faces with handfuls of popcorn.

Cue the rise and fall of collegiate readership. Cycling back on what looked in 2011 like an encouraging new program bubbling with ambition, our Student Government Board met last week to take The New York Times and USA Today off the stands indefinitely. This once-fledgling Collegiate Readership Program, which only after intense work by student leaders put daily editions of the two newspapers in several Pitt buildings between spring and fall 2011, is now kaput.

Surely, it’s not over for the program, as the newspapers could potentially reappear if lockable “drop boxes” prove to reliably distinguish College of General Studies students from those the SGB actually represents (such as Arts & Sciences students), according to The Pitt News. But if you care to read into the “unanimous” nature of the Board’s vote not to fork over the $30,500 needed to continue the program, the support ship for college readership might have sailed. Bon voyage.

For me, it’s a sad goodbye. That’s not to say the program struck me as the single greatest idea for campus improvement since the latex condom; in fact, I’ve yet to be convinced of the worth of dipping into the Student Activities Fee just for hard copies of publications that could otherwise be accessed via already-available academic database LexisNexis.

In addition, the idea that deepening the bath of current events information submerging today’s young people would somehow improve them must be dispelled — as college students, we should really be focusing on how to criticize our news, not how to get even more news. And even if the program injects more paper-bound news into the Pitt environment, there’s no guarantee the papers get to the appropriate students or effect the desired impact, as the SGB members complain.

So instead of lamenting the passing of a program for the typical reasons — elegant design, flawless execution or thunderous applause from bettered recipients — my sadness over the possibility of collegiate readership leaving Pitt is of an entirely different vein: It’s comforting to witness a government directing other people’s cash toward projects honestly believed to be constructive and broadly impactful. With or without positive or even clear results, the piloting of the Collegiate Readership Program should be remembered as an exercise in courageous benevolence. And for that, I’m proud of my student representatives (well, I suppose that means the voting constituent of last year’s representatives).

Indeed, the national newspapers might not return to the lobby of the William Pitt Union and their other former locations, but the Board’s benevolent spirit need not be whisked away by cold gusts of January wind. If my advanced mathematical calculations are correct, the Board’s coffers are now occupied by undirected funds to the tune of $30,500 per year (i.e., the cost of renewing the Collegiate Readership Program). Since these dollars were once earmarked to pay for a project designed to benefit the average student, it only makes sense to spend them with the same goal in mind, except, of course, doing things other than buying newspapers. Below are two proposals that I believe would serve the student community as whole and thus exemplify the practical program ideas that deserve dibs on extra SGB money:

Financial literacy education. I know, I’ve touched on this before, but without any powerful people having acted on it since (I called on Dean of Students Kathy Humphrey last time), someone’s got to bring it up again. With college students taking out a record number of loans to finance higher education, they ought to have personal finance skills — that is, balancing checkbooks, paying utility bills and living within means. As far as I can tell, students enter college largely without much experience doing any of that, potentially at their own financial peril. That’s where I believe universities, now interested in mitigating student stress, can step in. And Pitt’s SGB could lead the charge — whether it uses the available newspaper money to put on something as glossy as a financial literacy symposium or simply to advertise an on-campus helpdesk, it would be doing good by its peers.

A formal Pitt “ride-sharing” network. Stepping back, it’s quite remarkable that a university of Pitt’s caliber doesn’t currently offer one of these (a commenter on The Pitt News’ website was similarly amazed last month). Sure, Pitt’s website has links to outside companies that coordinate carpools for students commuting in the Pittsburgh area. But most undergrads don’t commute. Instead, what’s clearly needed is a system that organizes long-range holiday carpools between students. Typically, car-less students are forced to pack into crowded, odorous vehicles and pay exorbitant travel fees during the Thanksgiving, winter and spring recesses while car-owning students (and parents who pick up their kids on campus) drive home with vacant seats collecting dust on the road. An SGB-initiated holiday-ride-share program could fix this inefficiency and, in the process, make life a little more relaxing for a whole lot of people. Just a thought.

Have better ways to spend $30,500 of your money? Contact a Student Government Board member by visiting the Board’s website, www.pitt.edu/~sgb. Questions about this column should be directed to Matt Schaff at matthew.schaff@gmail.com.