Pace Paw Print

Issue date: 4/18/07 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: pace.edu A computer room in Wilcox which students have used to subvert the 30 page limit

Midterms are always a stressful time of the semester for college students. It seems as if projects, presentations, research papers, and exams spring up out of nowhere. During midterms it is not uncommon to find Mortola Library and the Willcox Computer Lab unusually crowded, and rightfully so. The printers in Willcox and Mortola spit out hundreds of pages of crucial study material for students. Certain students may even need to print over a hundred pages to aid them during studying for midterms or final exams.

Having said this, it is just a simple fact that students will inevitably create large print jobs. This raises the question, who made the decision that 30 pages was a sufficient number for each student's daily printing needs? Just the other day in the Willcox Lab, I noticed several distressed students who needed to print out presentation slides to study from but had already exceeded their daily printing max. Putting a limit on the number of pages a student can print per day is almost like telling them they can only study for a certain amount of time.

Pace University is supposed to be a center for academic excellence. By setting up a printing limit for students, the administration is creating an academic boundary. One can even go as far as saying that such a restriction is hypocritical of a university's core values.

I spoke with a couple of the student workers at the Willcox Lab in regard to the printing limit. One of the student workers who was in partial agreement with the print limit said, "Working there, it's too difficult to sort everything out, especially during common hour when the lab is really busy. Maybe they can limit each student to 30 pages during common hours only." The other student worker simply stated, "It's outrageous that for all the money we pay to go to this school we can only get 30 pages a day."

The amount of money that each student pays towards tuition is certainly more than enough money to finance a surplus amount of paper and ink for both the Willcox and Mortola printers, making the reasons for a printing limit very difficult to comprehend. Hopefully this is not the administration's solution to the University's financial problems, because buying paper and ink for the computer printers is most definitely not where the core of Pace's financial problems lie.

This printing limit is a problem that needs to be addressed. Students cannot get by on a measly 30 pages a day when their classes demand numerous presentations, research papers, and pages of study material. To my knowledge, no student at Pace enters Willcox or Mortola with the sole intent of printing as many pages as possible for absolutely no reason. Our administration needs to acknowledge the fact that college students are mature enough to handle the responsibility of using the school's printers and that placing a printing limit is uncalled for.

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