Published: Friday, September 11, 2009 in The Whitworthian.

You’ll notice something new when walking into the student computer labs around campus: a number of helpful signs informing you of the new page charge that is now applied to every print job. Each student is credited 25 dollars for printing, which translates into 500 free black and white prints per semester. Anything above and beyond that will be charged to the student’s account.

In truth it’s not too big of a nasty hairy deal, cost-wise. Black and white prints are five cents per side and color is 35 cents per side, or roughly half the cost of getting the same thing printed at Staples or Fedex Office (the old Kinkos).

The primary goal of the change doesn’t appear to be monetary, but rather to encourage good stewardship and conservation of resources. Ken Pecka, director of instructional resources, confirmed this.

“We’re not out to make money with this,” he said. “Really, we just want to be better stewards of these resources.”

According to Ken Pecka, the majority of students don’t print enough to be affected by the new system, so the university still won’t make any money on most of the printing that goes on around campus.

The most affected parties will primarily be those who have been using the computer labs as a free print shop. Going to the library to print off 300 copies of your business newsletter or event flier won’t be a shrug-your-shoulders, “what the heck, it’s free” decision anymore.

In reality, it isn’t Whitworth’s job to provide free printing for tasks like that. Providing free printing for student use is a service – and it’s not something all universities offer. While being able to print class-related materials free of charge is a nice feature at Whitworth, taking advantage of that is abuse, and could technically be theft depending on what exactly is being printed.

Certainly there will be some legitimate printing needs that are affected by the policy change. There are some classes and majors that require their students to print hundreds of pages of manuals, syllabuses, reference material, etc. But it seems like most of that could be solved by faculty rethinking their systems a bit. Providing students with printouts of critical class materials doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

There are a few concessions made for legitimate large-scale printing needs. Student workers won’t be charged for printing they do while on the job, and clubs will be able to print their materials through ASWU.

If nothing else, the policy will make students think a little harder before printing, which will probably cut down on waste. Hopefully it will also cause faculty to pause before requiring students to print out large amounts of materials now that each page represents a direct cost to them. If the goal of the policy change is to encourage stewardship and cut down on waste, I suspect it will be a resounding success.

“Hopefully we’ll continue to serve the student body,” Pecka said, “but make people think about stewardship a little more.”