Newspapers indispensable to education

By Catherine Bratic     3/19/09 7:00pm

As part of its latest round of budget cuts, the administration of Rice University has decided to cut one of the most important resources that a university campus can have: a subscription to a daily newspaper.At the same meeting where President David Leebron announced a 5 percent increase in tuition, a tripling over the past 20 years - even accounting for inflation - he informed students that their daily subscriptions to The New York Times and the Houston Chronicle would be terminated.

That means no morning papers in the college commons. No morning crosswords over breakfast, no Style section, no Sports section, no Business section and no front page news.

Newspapers are at least as vital to learning at Rice as our best professors. Even the illustrious political science professor Richard Stoll cannot teach as much about international relations as a week's worth of reading from The New York Times's international news section. Famed Houston sociologist Stephen Klineberg cannot teach any student as much about our city as a read through the City and State section of the Houston Chronicle and its letters to the editor from concerned Houstonians. And it is frightening to imagine how long an ECON 211 class would take if it covered all of the information in every day's Business section.

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Considering the benefits, the price tag of $30,000 a year to provide a paper every morning for every student - less than a professor's salary and much less than a new classroom or a new building - is a bargain. Clearly these are times when cuts must be made, but this is not an area that is so easily expendable.

The economy is hard, and it is affecting newspapers too. More and more papers are being forced to shut down as households find they can no longer afford a subscription.

I will not pretend that the printed word is not in decline, no more than I would pretend that the American dollar is stronger than ever. But in our age of Twitter and Facebook not every trend should be followed. As the portion of the incoming freshman class that fails the writing entrance exam has rapidly risen to 30 percent, and as students spend more time watching television than reading books, newspapers are what we need most here at Rice.

Not only does reading a newspaper connect students with their community and the world beyond the hedges, it gets students to read at least something daily, and improves their writing and vocabularies through regular exposure to samples of excellent journalism.

Since the 17th century, newspapers have been the main form of disseminating information. Despite all of the changes of the past four centuries, newspapers remain. And for good reason: There is nothing in the world comparable to the experience of holding the day's news between your fingers.

In 2000, interim Associate Vice President for Student Affairs John Hutchinson, who preceded Robin Forman in the position that became the Dean of Undergraduates, instituted daily subscriptions to the Times and the Chronicle, available in each college's commons.

Having these newspapers in the commons, instead of simply available online (as most papers are these days) enormously increases the chance that students will read them. Furthermore, even if students do not take the initiative to read these papers, they at least cannot help but see the day's headlines on their newsprint placemats.

In an effort to diminish the impact of what it must know is a terrible decision, the university has generously offered the colleges the "opportunity" to purchase these papers with their own funds. I strongly encourage every college to do so, recognizing, better than the Office of the Dean of Undergraduates can, that newspapers are essential to the undergraduate educational experience.

However, administrators knew that this would be an uphill battle when they handed the decision down to the colleges.

The residential colleges are, and have always been, essentially social institutions, more concerned with the purchasing of kegs for Beer Bike than they are with course offerings or faculty excellence. Though they have done an admirable job of administering college courses in recent years, the fact remains that their design does not easily accommodate educational priorities.

At Hanszen College, where my loyalty lies, the announcement of the termination of newspaper subscriptions was immediately followed by a money request to spend $2,000 on a new 66" television for the game room, an amount that would easily cover 15 year-long subscriptions to both The New York Times and the Houston Chronicle.

There is a reason that you do not let 19-year-old boys choose between big screen TVs and newspapers, and it is the same reason that you do not let fourth graders choose between history class and recess. It is the educational institution's duty to ensure that its students are educated, and at times, that means making important academic decisions for them. Students should not be forced to choose between their social life and academic lives. After all, that is the reason that we are all paying Rice $30,000 a year: because we trust that the university can do a better job of educating us than we ourselves could do.

However, given the university's delinquency in this matter, this is a time for the students to prove to the administration that they we know what is best. I implore each college to stand up and pay up for daily newspapers and all of the benefits that they provide. Because in times like these, newspapers are the one thing we cannot afford to lose.

Catherine Bratic is a Hanszen College junior and Thresher News editor.

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