Newspaper service scratched

Author: Zoey Burrows

The Student Government Association (SGA), under President Eli Berman '07.5, temporarily discontinued the Collegiate Readership Program this week. The program, which provides free newspapers in dining halls for students to read, was cancelled after dining hall workers complained that students leave newspapers behind for employees to clear away.

Since the program's inception over a year ago, SGA members agree that it has been one of their most successful programs. As Berman notes sarcastically, "It bursts the bubble that is Middlebury College." As part of the College Readership Program which is run through USA Today, the program provides students with daily New York Times, Boston Globe and USA Today papers. The SGA would like to receive the Wall Street Journal if it were an option, and used to get the Financial Times and Burlington Free Press, which were cancelled due to low student interest.

SGA Director of Institutional Affairs Tafadzwa Dube '08 explained that the SGA "agreed on a system whereby the number of papers to be delivered today is determined, primarily, by yesterdays demand. Roughly, we get 70 newspapers a day split between the three dining halls. The split is one-half New York Times, one-fourth Boston Globe and one-fourth USA Today.

After weighing its options, the SGA decided to place the newspapers in campus dining halls, rather than in social centers or student residence halls. However this has caused some tension between students and dining hall staff who end up cleaning up after students who leave tables, chairs and floor space strewn with newspapers.

In an interview with The Campus, Berman said that this week's suspension of the service is intended not to punish students but rather "to raise their awareness about the problem and make [the newspaper service] a privilege." Berman gives fellow students the benefit of the doubt, saying that "in their positive effort to share the papers with others," students are leaving them on the tables instead of putting them back on the racks.

Atwater employee Adrienne Bougor said, "I don't mind them bringing the papers into the dining halls, I just wish the students would be a little more considerate." Bougor, who has been working in Middlebury dining services for 23 years, first in Proctor and now at Atwater, notes that "before, newspapers were put into student mailboxes."

According to Dining Services Team Leader Anna Bishop, students often "stick them underneath the table so they can eat." There seems to be consensus among dining hall staff that the "newspaper problem" tends to be worst after lunch when students sit down to read but then rush off to their next class and do not pick up after themselves.

Bougor explains that she herself loves to read The Middlebury Campus, but that the dining room becomes especially newspaper-ridden on Thursdays, when the College's weekly Campus edition hits the stands. She says, "I love them all and I know it's hard for students to study, but I don't even pick up after my grandson!" Bougor says that sometimes she thinks to herself, "I'm not Mom, you know?"

Due to time restraints on the job, dining hall staff are often forced to throw away perfectly good papers because they don't have time to put them back together again, depriving latecomers the option of reading the paper.

Dube thinks of this week's temporary cancellation as "a necessitated tune-up" to the program. He compares this idea to other 'tune-ups' on campus, such as ITS shutting down Banner Web access to students in order "to perform an upgrade to the current system. It is all in the best interests of the student body so that at the end of the day, they are receiving the best possible service."