Last semester, after a number of less-than-flattering articles about Suffolk University were printed in the Boston Globe, the Student Government Association voted to cancel their subscription to the newspaper in protest.
For a number of years, the Boston Globe and the New York Times have been available for free to students in various campus lobbies, informing those of us who can’t afford or aren’t interested in having subscriptions ourselves.
Now, however, the SGA, apparently insulted by the Globe’s reporting of the facts surrounding President Sargent’s controversial salary, subsequent contract extension and Chairman Macaronis’ resignation, has cut the student body off from a convenient and necessary source of knowledge of current events ranging from local to national to world news.
How can a school continue to function if its students are unaware of the world that surrounds them, in order to place what they’ve learned into reality and judge their feelings on any given situation? For those who would take the lobby newspapers every day (a large group of people – the racks are always empty by lunchtime), as well as for those who sporadically find the time to read the sports section in print, not having the papers there on a daily basis significantly impacts the ability to gather knowledge from varied forms of media.
The Communications and Journalism department is the largest in the College of Arts and Sciences, with over 600 students, all of whom stake their student loans and careers on the study of the media. Every single one of those students benefits from the daily availability of one of the nation’s largest newspapers. Professors in the CJN department have even been known to make reading the Globe daily mandatory – or at least highly suggested.
The SGA’s actions here have shown cowardice and ignorance. Not being able to address the actual problem or pushing as hard as they should to demand answers from the administration regarding President Sargent’s compensation and instead directing their anger towards the publication that shines a negative lime light on the University is cowardly. And they have shown ignorance by failing to understand that by reading the Globe’s coverage of Suffolk, students on campus may be able to garner a grain of truth about the situation that isn’t in the form of defensive emails from the Provost’s office.
Newspapers are sources of information, knowledge and social, political and cultural commentary vital to the world of academia that we inhabit everyday. And as we also inhabit Boston, the SGA must renew Suffolk’s subscription to the award-winning and oftentimes exemplary Boston Globe.
