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As members of THE HOYA’s Editorial Board, we are all great believers in the importance of newspapers. As such, we’d like to applaud the progress, symbolic and actual, made by the successful partnership of GUSA and InterHall in working with the university to bring The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today to our campus, free for all GOCard holders. Together with additional funding from The Corp, these institutions have spent a great amount of time negotiating this idea’s tricky route from student association presidential platform to real implementation. The results are enough to make the grimace of even the sternest of student critics soften. The papers have been picked up with such enthusiasm by the student body that we can’t help but feel an expansion of the program would be more than welcome. Additionally, the feared increase in on-site waste has, so it seems, failed to materialize.
This episode reveals a great deal about the positive side of student life at Georgetown: a desire for easy access to worldview-broadening resources among the population. This has been channeled by a few individuals into a complex and not-inexpensive cooperation between institutions, and — the icing on the cake — a grateful campus that seems to have taken an instant liking to the system. Inevitably though, it isn’t perfect. The number of newspapers is, at present, unequal to the population of students that wish to read them; you’ve got to be quick to the dispensers if you want your fix. This is a great mirror of Hoya desire to see the world beyond Healy lawn and something the current GUSA administration needs to keep an eye on. If interest remains high, we hope an expansion of the program is something that will remain in its plans for the coming years. However, the existence of the program itself is something to be lauded and high praise is due to all those involved.
The one truly glaring error in the whole affair is the (surely unlikely) possibility that a few students here and there might peruse a New York Times editorial on a Tuesday or Friday and miss the challenging, insightful and undoubtedly modest proclamations of their fellows here at THE HOYA. And if David Brooks starts complaining about the food at Leo’s, we might be in for a little competition.
It's great to see such a positive editorial from The Hoya. With all the good stuff that students do here, it's really nice to see the Hoya choosing to focus in that direction rather than just on criticism.
I think this was tried briefly my freshman year at GU (2001-02). They had stacks of free papers in the dorms. The main result seemed to be a campus strewn with abandoned newspapers. In any event, in only lasted for one semester.
This program was previously seen during the 2001 - 2002 academic year while I was an undergraduate student. Most intellectually well-balanced scholars recognize the New York Times and the Washington Post as loudspeakers for the radical and "intellectual" left, neither worthy of significant deference with regard to their coverage of culture, politics, business, and civic and social affairs. I would pick up a USA Today on occasion ...that is, when I didn't have access to the internet -- a source of any and all news media including all three of these newspapers in neat and complete on-line manifestations. With the internet easily accessible from every corner of the campus, it seems like a waste of resources (both in terms of funds and newsprint) to supply so many copies of publications that would cost those who wanted them a measly quarter or two on O Street and in about a hundred or so other locations within walking distance of the campus.
One knows that the American political scale is truly skewed when people claim that the New York Times and Washington Post represent the "radical left." If these, at most, liberal newspapers represent the so-called "radical left", what then would you call publications put out by socialist and communist parties? Anarchist zines? The Times is not controlled by Communists, but centrist (that's centrist by the grand scale, not a scale of major American parties) liberals, hardly the "radical left."
This is a waste of money. It was tried my sophomore year and newspapers cluttered garbage cans. I am surprised that EcoAction let this take place. Why waste this much money on stuff you can get for free on the internet? This makes me think that my donations to the school will NOT be used wisely.
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