To the Editor:With the semester’s end rapidly approaching, the time has arrived again for that bi-annual pilgrimage-over the lawns and under the trees, along the sidewalks and across the streets of our fine campus-to the ITS department over in Hyde. I’m sure many of you are familiar with this pilgrimage-at the end of which you must prostrate yourself to the ITS staff in order to be granted the privilege of more pages for your semester’s printing quota. This journey undoubtedly interrupts important research soon to fill dynamic papers chock-full of academic discourse. Or maybe you just can’t print off that final essay chock-full of b-s. Either way, page allowances are a contradictory absurdity considering the stated mission of these quotas.According to the page that prints off when your printing quota is met -endlessly if you keep trying, I might add- ITS has “applied these quotas in order to increase awareness to the fact that printing resources represent a significant cost in the ITS budget which is funded primarily through student fees. In order to contain these costs and thereby your fees, we have started to track print jobs.”Isn’t it nice how they turn it around and make it about us and our money all the time? But if they were truly interested in conserving money-and trees-they would take another strategy. I propose that ITS install at all computer labs, printers that are capable of printing on both sides of paper.’Ah-ha,’ the money-conscious ITS skeptic will say. ‘But won’t installing new printers just cost even more money?’To this I reply: only initially. The installation of new double-sided printers will enable ITS to lower their print quota to, say, 250 pages as opposed to the current 350 pages. With this novel strategy, students will be strongly encouraged by the smaller allowance of pages to double-side print and get as many as 500 pages of printing from their 250 pieces of paper. Cutting back 100 pages per semester for over 3,000 students will save thousands of dollars on “printing resources” which would rapidly offset the price of new printers and eventually and perpetually “contain” and even diminish the “significant cost” of these paper resources. And it would be more environmentally conscious too. Additionally, the print quota could become an actual hard quota. If students fritter away the potential for 500 pages of printed matter-a luxurious 150 page increase per semester, I remind you-then ITS should charge a reasonable fee for 50 or 100 extra pages-to offset those costs.To me, this seems like a win/win proposal: extra pages for students, lower costs for ITS, and less trees killed for Mother Earth.Now if you’ll excuse me, I must walk over to ITS and request more pages for my print quota.
– Kevin Chauncey Avery