The campus bubble: It’s hard to escape. We as college students like to maintain that we are worldly and knowledgeable about national events, and let’s face it, we have opinions on almost every topic imaginable — whether or not we actually have facts to back up our statements. We often don’t spend the time to really educate ourselves on the day-to-day news of the state, nation, and world — news on issues that often have a very real effect on our lives.

That’s where the Collegiate Readership Program becomes useful.

Notice the stacks of The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and the USA Today lying out in bins all over campus? Well guess what, they’re free to you as a University student! The Collegiate Readership Program, administered by the Student Senate’s Committee on Academic Affairs, oversees the distribution of over 1,450 papers a day to the UIUC campus, with over 109,000 papers picked up by students over the course of a semester.

Our campus’ participation in the Collegiate Readership Program stems back to the Student Senate’s Randall administration in 2008.The Student Senate launched the pilot program on campus in conjunction with the USA Today for one semester in the fall of 2009. Due to the popularity of the program, the Student Senate sponsored a referendum item to make the program permanent. In the spring of 2009, the student body voted in favor of funding our participation in the program permanently at $2 per semester. Today, the Standing Committee on Student Affairs maintains oversight over the program in conjunction with the Office of the Dean of Students.

We believe that it is incredibly important for well rounded U of I students to have access to quality news on a regular basis. The program itself is relatively inexpensive ($4 a year for a paper per day), and the student fund account is not charged for papers that are not picked up. Therefore, it is essentially only as expensive as it is popular.

The Senate is always looking for new ways to help improve campus for the better. The Collegiate Readership Program is only one of several student initiated projects on campus. If you are interested in joining or contributing ideas to the Illinois Student Senate, instructions can be found at iss.illinois.edu. If you would like to improve the administration of the Collegiate Readership Program, or if you have any ideas on how our academic environment on campus could be improved, please feel free to email the Standing Committee on Academic Affairs at [email protected] — we are always looking for interested, motivated students to join!

Jim Maskeri, student senator, LAS Humanities

Chairman, ISS Standing Committee on Academic Affairs