By Dan Rust
This is a simple article meant to convey simple ideas. It is an article about the relatively recent print initiative adopted by the University of Portland, and while the overriding issues involved are obvious and significant, the themes that move in the undercurrent of deeper issues should be obvious to us highly educated UP students. So ... to begin simply, the print initiative is, in a word, retarded.
While the typical connotations that surround the word retarded offend some and only give others pause, as a philosophy and life sciences double major, make no mistake that I understand every meaning of this word that could ever be applicable. Suffice to say at this point that the initiative in question does more to hold the students of the University back than it does to save the environment, and helping the environment and saving the University money are two of the purported purposes of the said print initiative.
You see, it is simply a reality that for universities and other companies it is sometimes necessary to shade motives behind noble fir trees of moral non-questionability. For companies whose outright purpose is quite obviously to make money selling the product they produce, when the product is students and the company in question is a university of higher learning, and a religiously affiliated one at that, it becomes significantly less acceptable to adopt this practice, and this seems to be exactly what the University of Portland has done in the case of its recent print initiative. Allow me to elucidate.
First, an interesting irony that is frankly hilarious. Rather than include the details of the print initiative in a school-wide e-mail in order to clarify the motives of its no doubt flawlessly conceived plan to save money ... woops I mean save the environment, it decided to print out, that's right, PRINT OUT ON HUNDREDS OF SHEETS OF TREE CARCASSES, the details for the students' reading enjoyment. Now, if this makes sense to anyone, or if the irony was somehow lost in translation, please let me know. If you were UP you might write me a lengthy letter, but then if that were the case you would have an unlimited printing paper supply rather than just five bucks a semester. So it's drust@up.edu if you have a Confucian-like solution to this frankly confusing reality. Moving on to the details that make this one of the most frustrating in a list of policies popularly adopted to hamstring students, it will become clear how backward the initiative is.
Every student currently at the University of Portland has by now experienced the irrationality of having to choose between paying 10 cents for printing two-sided or paying the exact same amount for using twice as much paper. Now, to ask a rhetorical question, are we to understand that the toner cost for a printed side is five cents? Obviously not, and I didn't even have to do any research to realize it. A really tough actual question is, do they take us for idiots as students at the University of Portland, or just as students with no choice in the matter? Or is it like the razor and blades approach to a college education, where they make little profit on the actual tuition and really rack up the cash on every single other accessory cost that they possibly can? Enough with questions though, let's look at some hypothetical answers to this conundrum.
If I were a college financial consultant, and found that my university was losing money from excessive student printing, I would probably come up with a way to not only stem the flow of paper through my printers and eliminate costs, but to actually make a profit at the same time. In this hypothetical situation in which I am a capitalist consultant, either in-house or contracted, I would of course be trained to be a money-grubbing profiteer, even if the institution I represented ascribed to a spiritual and moral code of Teaching, Faith and Service. So much for words and platitudes aimed at a better condition for mankind, right?
Setting aside the fact that our University is itself hamstrung into its actions to an extent by the system at large, whatever happened to compromise and the school's good history of rational choices in the face of an often irrational world? The fact of the matter is that even though many of our higher faculty are members of the religious order that founded and runs our academic institution, the Holy Cross, they still mostly drive luxury automobiles, and yes, they park their Lexus, Mercedes, or Volvos in spots students could only dream of parking in for 10 minutes without getting ticketed by our beloved department of Public Safety. This article, unlike many others however, should not be seen as another in the ongoing series of articles pitting student interests against those of the University at large.
Again, it is simple in microcosm and grows increasingly complex when viewed in the broader context. That is, I am SIMPLY pointing out how ridiculously frustrating it is to go from unlimited free (if you consider anything at the University to be free at our tuition cost) printing to paying each semester for an amount of paper (toner?) that is so hopelessly inadequate that it almost certainly requires us to feed more of our hard earned cash into the conveniently located money vacuums near our printers. It has given me many a painful headache wondering just how anyone could try to advance an initiative that must be considered too COMPLEX for college students to perceive its injustices or question its motivations. But when the words of a student or an article in a newspaper are weighed against those of the University of Portland, and the issue is fraught with financial and ethical considerations, the outcome only holds toner ... oops I mean water, in the court of public opinion.
