Wendy Holbrook, Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs at UCA, spoke at the SGA meeting on March 17 to represent and spread the word about Bear Biographies, a new name for the Human Library and to provide the senate with details about making the food pantry entrance more accessible.
“Bear Biographies is just a framework for conversations where people talk about prejudices and stereotypes,” Holbrook said. “So you get to check out a book; a book is a human being. We’re set up in different areas of the library, and we have this whole list of books that you can talk to, and they have varying experiences on all of their different life experiences. And you check that person out for 20 minutes, and they share the story with you.”
The Bear Biographies event will be held from noon to 4 p.m. April 8.
Holbrook then went on to describe what it would take to make the food pantry more accessible. Right now, there is a concrete step in front of the entrance to the food pantry, making the pantry harder to reach for those in wheelchairs or using strollers. Holbrook said that after discussing the matter with a construction worker from Nabholz, the estimated cost to cut the curb and put in a concrete ramp that comes up to meet the lip of the door would be an estimated $10,335.
David Keith, adviser of The Echo and chair of the student publication board at UCA, Kas Armstrong, editor-in-chief of The Vortex, Torrie Herrington, editor-in-chief of The Echo and Harley Walls, editor-in-chief of The Scroll, spoke about increasing the student publication fee.
The publication fee is a $6 fee per semester that all students pay that funds the student publications on campus.
“The student publications are very important to this campus,” Keith said. “I hope you realize that they are a way for the students to have a voice. These are truly independent student publications. The issue for these publications is not only that the expenses are increasing, but that the revenue from the publication fee is going down.”
Keith said that the publications are reaching a dire situation if there is not an increase in funding.
“The Echo is really an integral part of the journalism program, because they’re learning how to use InDesign, they’re learning how to take photos, they’re learning how to interview people, they’re learning how to cover events, and without a student paper that kind of experience gets taken away from them,” Herrington said. “It’s important that students in the journalism program are able to continue having that experience, especially students who have a print or online emphasis because most of them are involved in The Echo. There’s not a lot of money left for us to continue printing.”
Armstrong said, “In past years, it’s cost around $12,000 to print, and we print about 200 pages. It’s really important to us to have the funds because we have to cut so many submissions already in order to make sure we can print; we tend to get about 100 more submissions in the spring when we do the print issue, so we end up having to cut about 100 people in order to publish the magazine, just because of how many people submit and how little space we have for paying for those pages. Also, without the publications being increased, we may have to further cut the magazine, make it shorter, or pay our people less, and they’re already not getting paid as much as they should.”
“With the increase in the fee, we would be able to print more books, and we’d be able to have more pages to cover more events on campus, so I just feel like we need an increase in the fee so then we can get more books printed,” said Walls.
Keith said that a $1 fee increase would be substantial, but that a $2 increase would “solve the problems for certainly a considerable degree.”