EDITORIAL – A slippery slope

A student organization at Slippery Rock University is currently campaigning to make its campus… A student organization at Slippery Rock University is currently campaigning to make its campus a little greener by initiating a proposal that would require every student to pay an extra $5 each semester to support environmentally friendly projects and awareness programs.

The fee, which would be mandatory for all students, would generate about $80,000 each year for what the group, Leave It Green, is calling The Green Fund. An advisory board would allocate the funds after reviewing environmental applications from students, faculty and others. The group intends to allocate the funds toward projects to install energy-efficient lighting across campus, add water-conserving motion sensors in restroom sinks and promote a recycling competition among students, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Other college campuses, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Oregon, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Santa Cruz have implemented similar mandatory fees.

While it’s hard to deny the importance of enacting environmentally friendly policies and initiatives on college campuses, it should not be the responsibility of the students to fund these types of programs with a specific student fee.

Environmental awareness is important, but AIDS awareness, cancer research and ending world hunger is important, too. Allowing a university to tack on a mandatory fee for one charity project only opens up opportunities for adding on more that are as equally deserving. There are countless charities that could use extra money (even on our own college campuses), and students shouldn’t be called upon to finance all of them.

Rather than tacking on another fee to student tuitions, universities should draw upon their own funds to finance environmentally friendly initiatives by using funds already included in existing student tuition and fees or by drawing from endowments.

This doesn’t disregard the importance of groups like Leave It Green on Slippery Rock’s campus and Free the Planet on Pitt’s campus, though. These groups serve an integral purpose in the movement toward promoting increased energy efficiency and environmentally friendly measures on college campuses. They help to raise awareness and can encourage their fellow students to help lobby university administrators to enact more green measures.

Part of going to college is learning the importance of giving back and understanding that we live in a global community, ideals that students can help to support by joining campus groups and lobbying for change. But another part is learning the value of choice. Initiatives supporting funding for energy efficiency are important, but they should not be mandatory for students.