Breakfasts and lunches over the week at Harris have become a gamble. My friends can tell you that I’m not very good at planning or attending group trips to the dining hall. And partly because of my schedule and my sporadic desires to do work or socialize at random points in the day, I very often hit the dining hall when it is very empty or packed with people I do not personally know.
After scanning for familiar faces, I would look around for something equally familiar: The New York Times. I would grab one lying around or take one that I had already thrown in my backpack earlier that day, throw it down on the seat and scurry off to get some finger food. I would then spend forty minutes to an hour poring over the newspaper, flipping from international news stories to business news to film reviews to editorials. Often those days would be more enjoyable than a hurried lunch with a friend.
That is a very personal experience, but I am sure having newspapers on campus has a very profound effect on the student body. They were readily available for free for all in dorms, dining halls, academic buildings and just outside the library. I know after reading The New York Times, I would always find an article or point of view to discuss with my peers in or out of a classroom. Whether reading the whole paper, skimming through it for sports scores, or simply shooting a sideway glance at the front-page photo, students were confronted with varying ideas and knowledge that they could consider throughout the day and spread to their peers. Having newspapers on campus with a steady readership by students made us a much more informed and intelligent community.
Having a physical copy of a paper is a must. The immediacy of having a piece of paper in front of you to read, often in a highly communal area, has a strong appeal that has not disappeared in this information age. Print news sources like The Daily CONNtact and SGA on The Can may get more readership than semi-weekly emails sent out by the college. The websites for these newspapers are very inadequate in comparison with the daily paper, with often far-less important late submission articles and flashy advertisements pushing the day’s most important stories off the homepage.
I even find the sensation of having actual newsprint in hands, interrupting a wild night of running around Boston with a friend by walking into a BU dorm and grabbing a Times off the stack to read before we headed out for a party.
Finally, while it was nice to have the The Boston Globe and USA Today around campus as well, I am mostly arguing to find a way to bring back free copies of The New York Times to campus. I can understand why a school with a large New England audience would want to have copies of the /The Boston Globe/ to read about generally more local news (I myself am a converted Mass. resident). Personally, I felt USA Today should have been replaced a long time ago. I often jokingly refer to its large photos, awkward side articles, and color-coated sections as amounting to be the news equivalent of Highlights for Kids.
The New York Times strives to be the best source of national and international news in the country and excels at both, offering insightful and unique stories every day. The Times is the top newspaper in the country and an institution that is trying to be one of the top schools in the country should have it readily available for its students.
