Thank you.
Over the past few weeks, we at The Varsity took up precious space in the pages of this newspaper (and our newest spinoff on those Internets, our more-symbolic-than-popular Facebook group) with large, slick-looking ads encouraging students to vote ‘Yes’ in a referendum to raise our student levy.
This request wasn’t new. Since at least 1983, campaigns to raise The Varsity’s levy above a measly pittance were organized every four or five years, like clockwork. For various reasons, they failed every time.
For a while, after mounting rejections of our appeals for a lifeline, we resigned ourselves to the fact that the cards were stacked against us. We developed new strategies to fund ourselves, such as courting more advertising. This worked for a while, until we found ourselves with no space for more ads (roughly half of the paper has been ads in recent years).
We tried cutting our budget, canceling all but the most necessary expenditures. (This included literally snipping an inch off the physical length of our pages last year).
But eventually, amid mounting costs, we knew we had make another appeal.
And last week, for the first time in roughly 25 years, when we asked, you said, resoundingly, ‘Yes.’
You voted to add $1.24 to each full-time undergraduate student’s non-academic tuition fees for the year, raising it to $2.50 per fall and winter period. What’s more, you voted to link this figure to the rising cost of living. At a time when high tuition fees inspire so much emotion and indignation in so many, your decision to raise them (if only by just a little) was generous, and it was brave. It showed that U of T students do care about the quality of their campus paper, which, at 127 years old, happens to be the oldest, largest, most widely read, most well known, and best student newspaper in Canada.
So, you might ask: all this is very heartwarming, but where the hell will my money go, exactly? Well, glad you asked.
A certain amount of money will go toward ensuring that we survive. It’ll finance things like new computers and equipment, paying our student staff, paying our phone bills, and saving for a rainy day.
More will go toward improving the paper. It’ll help us overhaul our awkward website, purchase outdoor display boxes, increase the paper’s size, and cover more stories, in greater depth.
Perhaps most excitingly for the community we’re a part of, it’ll pay for the return, beginning in September, of free campus listings for student groups. If you’re a registered campus group and you have a lecture, protest, bake sale, or other event to advertise, you’ll be able to put a notice in The Varsity absolutely free.
So, dear Reader, we mean it when we say thanks. And remember-this is no charity. The more you give us, the more we belong to you. The best way to make sure that money is put to good use is to get involved-write, photograph, edit. U of T has no other journalism school but us.
