Paperless COM not critic-less

As the first semester of a paperless College of Communication comes to a close, students and administration said they have yet to fully embrace the policy.

In January, COM professors were barred from printing and distributing documents to their classes.

‘We have been pushing faculty towards electronics, and it has been an uphill battle,’ COM Dean Tom Fiedler said.

The policy could save COM nearly $80,000 per academic year, Fiedler said. The exact calculation of how much has been saved so far is unavailable because all paperless measures have not completely been enforced, Fiedler said.

‘I understand that for some students it is more comfortable to read from a printed page than from a screen. I’m in the same boat,’ Fiedler said. ‘We need to give students the option to read articles online instead of automatically handing out printed material.’

He said he is worried the policy has transferred the burden of printing on to students, which is not the intent of the policy.

Fiedler said professors need to allow students to turn in assignments electronically, adding that newsrooms have operated electronically for the past 15 years.

‘The decision saves trees, allows material to be distributed quickly and saves professors time,’ mass communications department chairman T. Barton Carter said.

‘It helps students because it allows information to be accessed wherever they are,’ Carter said.

Film and television department chairman Charles Merzbacher said many professors had difficulty adapting to the paperless policy.

‘A couple of the professors in my department had to scramble to get documents scanned, but the crunch, such as it was, only occurred during the first couple of weeks of the semester,’ Merzbacher said.

Merzbacher said the policy may have sent students running to computer labs to print.

‘Through the grapevine, I have heard a little grumbling about students printing handouts at the computing center. I hope this hasn’t been a significant burden, either in terms of time or money,’ Merzbacher said.

He said the policy, although sometimes inconvenient, has a legitimate purpose.

‘In the long term, going paperless will save faculty and staff time and money. Once a document has been posted as a PDF online, it can ‘live’ there more or less in perpetuity.”

Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation freshman Sarah Collier said it would be a major inconvenience if her school adopted a paperless policy.

‘I have so many friends in COM [who] have had to print so much material that they have used up their print quotas and now I have to print for them,’ Collier said.

COM graduate student Ashley Roache agreed with Frederick’s frustration and said the paperless policy is particularly inconvenient for her because most of her work deals with scripts.

‘I don’t mind reading long articles online. It doesn’t strain my eyes or anything, but we need to print out scripts,’ Roache said. ‘I don’t think a communication school should ever go without paper.’