We have to talk about the printing situation.
You know what’s crazy? The second I write the words “the printing situation,” you already know what I’m talking about.
If you happen to live in a world of bliss in which you’ve never had to print anything here, I’ll give you a quick rundown. Out of the five printing locations on campus, only one or two at a given time tend to be working.
This creates a serious issue for those who need to print. Students are constantly queued up in lines because professors would like to see printed copies of their readings. The documents can range greatly in page numbers, and if you want to be an effective participant in a class that has a no-tech policy, you’re going to want to have that reading in front of you. Multiply this by the number of students experiencing the same thing, and you don’t know how long you will be in queue.
I think to have an effective conversation about the gravity in which we should be upset about this as students, we must highlight the issues of accessibility that can be easily fixed. Printing materials needed for class, for free, creates an equal playing field for everyone.
Some students can’t afford a laptop. Without a printed article, they’re forced to zoom in on an article for hours on your phone and give themselves headaches.
The same scenario goes for students who work off-campus or are generally on the go. Not everywhere has Wi-Fi for devices.
There are also issues with accessibility. What if there is a student who gets frequent migraines when looking at tech? A student can’t fall behind, even when the printers do. They’ll just have to grit through the pain, I guess.
The circumstances here leave us with a couple of options. The first is very unfavorable: push professors to change their class policies. This directly interferes with how a professor intends to teach the material, and how they intend for students to learn it. I, for one, am a huge fan of not having tech in classrooms. I would rather my peers and I have the resources to reference readings and sources on paper, so we can all be active participants.
This could bring us to a second reform: professors who require sourcing that would be available online would have to take the initiative to print out packets of readings themselves. There are some professors that do this already, but this comes at a cost to students. Potentially, this puts an unnecessary financial burden on students, if their professors make them pay for the readings (even if the cost is relatively low). And once again, more burden is put on the professors who will have to compromise, due to lack of diligence on a simple technological issue.
A third reform, which I’m sure the school would not be in favor of giving every student a printer along with the cost of the education. Needless to say, this would act as a justification to raise tuition yet again, and there would be even more technological issues left and right. If they can’t fix five printers, they probably can’t fix something around 1500.
So that brings me to the final reform, and in my opinion, the most simple thing they could do: just fix the printers.
I think the most disheartening thing about this is that it is reflective of a greater sentiment that I’ve often heard among current students: “Ursinus cares more about admissions than the students who are already here.” This is where I urge Ursinus students to realize that you yourself are an investor, and what you have invested in was false advertising. You (and maybe your families) invested in this school with the promise that you would have the accessibility at all times to do your work. You did not invest in having to find workarounds to even begin the learning process. This takes away vital student time, and replaces the potential to gain knowledge with trivial tasks and wait times just to acquire it.
It is time to recognize that this blatant disregard is not okay, and should not be laughed off. Acceptance of this lack of standards in our daily lives has led to our unknowing compliance in being disregarded. If we’re expected to do our work, Ursinus must help provide the means.