GPSA tabled a proposal at Saturday’s meeting to co-sponsor a program aimed at providing students with free copies of the New York Times.
ASUNM representative Greg Golden, who presented the co-sponsorship opportunity Feb. 26, said ASUNM could contribute $1,000 and requested GPSA pay the remaining $2,750. He said ASUNM has no available money in its pocket, since the organization supports 150 student groups.
“ASUNM’s budget is pretty much dried up at this point,” he said. “We did some creative stuff with our budget, and this was the best we could do.”
ASUNM voted in January to fund the program. The proposed sponsorship will be revisited at the March 26 GPSA meeting. The New York Times sponsorship would provide UNM with 500 copies of the paper daily, unlimited online access and would bring guest speakers to campus.
GPSA member Joe Dworak said the amount GPSA is asked to contribute is not proportionate to the amount of graduate students.
“The ASUNM budget is about three times bigger than ours if you go by pure numbers,” he said. “It’s a great program, but you can’t depend on us paying the vast majority of it, especially when you can’t guarantee it will be on north campus.”
Golden said the program is financially beneficial for the University compared with purchasing the papers each day.
“The New York Times doesn’t make any money off of us,” he said. “Technically they lose money. Looking at it from their perspective, though, it’s like children with cigarettes when they are young — trying to get us hooked into their awesome paper.”
GPSA representative Brianne Bigej said she was unclear how graduate students would benefit from the program.
“My concern is that we wouldn’t get a box,” she said. “I don’t assume that out of 500 papers they have enough to put a box on north campus, which means that a huge chunk of grad students would not get a copy.”
UNM should be responsible for determining the location of pick-up boxes, GPSA representative Patricia Roybal Caballero said.
“We should not just sit back and say we will wait for them to tell us where the locations are,” she said. “We should be proactive and give list of suggested locations.”
Caballero said other student-related institutions should contribute.
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“Student activities, Dean of Students — each of these departments directly impact students and have pools of money,” she said. “This is the time where we need to creatively leverage those sources of funds to remove the burden that we constantly place on ourselves.”