By Kayla Brown, Arts & Entertainment Editor & Devonne Tourre, Co-Editor-in-Chief
The Information Technology (IT) department will stop providing extra printing money to students on campus pending a review of finances and operations.
According to Chief Information Officer Jennifer Servedio, students receive $30 worth of printing money each semester, which is equivalent to 500 pages.
When looking at the entirety of the SU student body, it amounts to 1.2 million pages and $72,390 per semester.
Last semester, extra printing requests reached 406,350 pages, which amounts to $24,381 for a semester total of $96,771. This semester, the additional requests have already doubled last semester’s requests.
The money allotment for printing comes from the IT budget, which includes a tech fee that students pay every year in their tuition. However, the budget is not large enough to cover an excess of $40,000 each semester, according to Servedio.
To remedy the situation, Servedio and her staff are analyzing all the requests for this year— as well as past years—to fully understand the needs. Their goal is to find out why the printing is needed, is it in lieu of a textbook, and could a different approach be taken.
With the increase in technology, there are many computerized programs that can do many of the things that classes use printed copies for, such as editing and annotating. These programs would also help SU’s sustainability efforts.
“I’m certainly not faculty, I can’t tell faculty how to teach their class. They know the most productive way to run their class,” Servedio said.
While Servedio is not a professor, Dr Glen Retief is. Dr. Glen Retief is the Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing, as well as the Director of the Writer’s Institute and program director of GO South Africa.
When asked how the lack of funds would impact creative writing students, Retief said, “Our experience as professors has been that the quality of critique of student creative work tends to be higher when students are looking at printed copies of each other’s stories as we sit around the table doing workshop.”
When suggested the use of screens (laptops, tablets, phones, etc) for creative writing classes that require workshops of creative pieces, Retief finds them to be more distracting due to instant Internet access, notifications, and other things that may distract the student.
“It is also harder to find particular excerpts to analyze in a student piece being viewed on a screen. For example, I can say, ‘Let’s look at the long paragraph on p. 7’ and with printouts everyone goes right there. With screens you have scrolling, search functions for key terms, just in general more struggle to control the documents under discussion,” said Retief.
However, as it would be unfair to ask students to use their own amount of money for printing, Retief sees screen-centered workshops as a “lesser evil than inflicting financial hardship on students.”
The IT department is aware of the student and faculty needs, yet it’s unable to make the budget any larger or give an immediate solution.
Although it seems like this is a losing battle, “we’re not here to say no,” Servedio said.
Servedio and her staff are continuing to look for options to increase the budget as well as decrease the cost of printing.
Neither the English and Creative Writing nor IT departments are giving up on this issue.
“Clearly, I have my doubts, based on the piecemeal, negative experiences with screens we had before this. But can you really say for sure something’s awful until you’ve properly tried it?” Retief said.
