The Peak

Grads must vote to keep their voice

By Brian Labore

As perhaps up to 20 per cent of you know, the Graduate Student Society (GSS) elections are going on this week. In addition to electing our new officers, we will be voting on three referendum questions. It is the third referendum question that is most important, that being the proposal to end graduate student funding of The Peak.

If this removal of funding is approved, it would save each of us $4.90 per semester ($2.45 for those of us who are part time). I know that most grad students are excessively poor (largely as a result of our terrible life choices, leading to our becoming graduate students), but $4.90 per semester? Really?

These savings of $15 per year will not likely be significant to any of us individually (unless your food budget is less than $2 per month, in which case I applaud you), but because graduate students make up 15 to 20 per cent of the university community, it would remove up to 20 per cent of The Peak’s funding. I understand that some people have problems with The Peak, but attempting to make it better seems a better option to me, than turning away from it entirely.

I, for one, have had my own problems with The Peak in the past. I used to be outraged at the wastefulness of the insane number of copies printed each issue. I assume the paper was printed in such high volume so that advertisers could be given an inflated idea of the readership, but that is entirely my speculation. Whatever the reason for the over-production, the point is that it no longer occurs. In the past year, The Peak has reduced the copies printed by 40 per cent, focused more on the online edition, and has still printed enough physical papers to put one in the hands of any student who wants one. This reversal of a wasteful practice is a clear example of how easy it is to remedy those problems that people may have.

It seems, though, that there are some graduate students (a vocal minority, in my opinion) who think that continuing to fund The Peak is not worth the equivalent cost of one beer per semester. This is evident even in the way the referendum question is phrased:

“Do you agree that the Society discontinue collecting the special membership fee for the Peak Publication Society, effective Fall 2010, resulting in a reduction of $4.90 per full-time student and $2.45 per part-time student per term in the Graduate Student Society Activity fee?”

The phrasing of the question shows a clear bias towards discontinuing the funding. They are implicitly asking us to vote ‘yes’. The members of the GSS board have decided that they want to stop funding The Peak, and are crossing their fingers that we will side with them.

The GSS has criticized The Peak for not representing graduate issues. This, at first, seems a reasonable critique, but it does not hold up. The editors have offered the GSS a full section dedicated to graduate issues, as well as the formation of a new editorship to be staffed by a graduate student who would oversee this aforementioned new section. To this offer the GSS responded that no one would be interested in such a position.

Really? There isn’t one graduate student at this entire university who would be interested in editing a graduate issues section of The Peak? Wow. We may be busy (and lazy), but not all of us can be that busy (and/or lazy). It seems to me that such a claim would be akin to saying “There is not one graduate student who would be interested or have the time to work for the GSS.” Clearly those people are out there.

Voting ‘yes’, and ending our support for The Peak would end our ability to use it as a platform from which graduate voices can be heard. Are we starting our own newspaper to be the voice of the private little club to which some grads seem to believe we belong? As it stands now, The Peak is an open forum for all students at SFU, and I believe it should stay this way. Rather than cut ourselves off from it, we should contribute, and let the entire university community know what is important to us as individuals and as graduate students.

The Peak does a lot for our university, including helping to establish a sense of community between campuses and providing access to a spectrum of student opinion. Most of all, though, The Peak stands as an independent voice for SFU. It is not regulated by the university, and the editors are accountable only to the students for the paper’s content. I don’t think a price can be placed on this function of The Peak. I will, therefore, be voting ‘no’ on referendum question three. I invite you to do the same.

If a semester of SFU coverage from an independent SFU newspaper is worth less to you than the cost of one beer, then by all means vote ‘yes’. If, however, you value what little community our campus actually has, or that it is important to have an independent, student-run newspaper at SFU, in short, if you are reading this letter now, vote ‘no’ on referendum question three.