Or, if you do the math, three printed pages per week, per class.

Student Government Association seems to think that is all students deserve to print at the open computer labs on campus, a place students pay a fee to use.

Assuming the average student enrolls in 15 hours each semester (30 hours and 10 classes total for the year) for the roughly 30-week school year, that rounds out to only three printed pages per class, per week in order to avoid exceeding the 500-page limit.

Those three pages for a week of class must cover printed notes, papers, assignments, and whatever else a professor asks students to print.

Were students really beating down the doors begging Student Government Association to limit our printing privileges to 500 pages a year?

You’d think so, given the little signs SGA put out now sitting next to every lab computer terminal on campus that say we did.

For supposedly going green, we wonder how much paper and ink they used printing out those signs?

Couldn’t they have just wrote it on the desktop backgrounds?

In any case, SGA does not seem to have to do much to enforce this quota.

Computer technicians have to worry about implementing and maintaining the system, while lab employees must decide whether to grant or deny extra printing requests.

SGA members just get to sit back, vote to impose a printing quota on the rest of us, and make it appear they are doing something for the environment and the school’s budget.

SGA computers are not located in an open lab, so they can still print as much as they want, whenever they want.

Unfortunately, the students (SGA’s constituents) are the people who will be harmed by this capricious decision.

Some students will avoid the computer labs once they reach the imposed limit, instead printing on their own home ink jets (costing the student money), while other students will just ask to have their printing limit exceeded.

If SGA really wants to get serious about saving paper and money, why allow students to extend the limit so easily? Either set a limit or don’t. Doing neither wastes everyone’s time.

We seriously doubt lab employees really are going to sift through a students print jobs to make sure they are academic-related. Honestly, that should not be their job anyway.

Okay, so one student printed over 25,000 pages last year. That is a ridiculous waste of money, ink, and paper. However, the whole campus should not be punished over the actions of one student.

Instead of a printing limit, we have a better solution to the problem. As before, student printer usage should be monitored by software. However, students should not be limited in printing privileges.

At the end of the year, any student who prints an excessive amount of copies is subject to a print review by members of an SGA board. If, after examining a student’s print jobs, SGA finds that an overabundance of non-academic prints were made, then that student would be required to pay five-cents per-page for anything over 500 pages.

Voila. Under this plan, students would limit their print jobs to academic purposes to avoid the fine, the campus saves paper, ink, and money, students following the rules can print their academic work as needed, and the burden of policing the mandate transfers back to members of SGA, where it belongs.

Going green doesn’t have to mean going cheap.

-Zach Becker

For the Editorial Board