Campus always seems to front a flash different when students appear back on campus after a break. Usually this involves some thing of upgrade to campus infrastructure, a vary to the inventory at Waves Café or a late landscaping project that has been completed to lend a hand re-enforce our aesthetic bragging rights. But the combining around campus following this year’s bounciness break was even more signal than usual - in the form of shiny changed plasma screens that were installed in various high-traffic locations around campus. The reborn LG televisions (which are sold for a rugged $5,400 a protrude on LG’s Web site) were mounted on the walls in a dump pains by the administration and SGA.
The intended object of the venture is to provide a new outlet for students to get message and for student groups to abet their upcoming events. Many advised of that SGA had this plan in the works for a while - and since they were in fine installed last week, questions have been raised as to whether they are inevitable and, if so, how SGA could have at all paid for all of this on their own. The answer: they didn’t. $3,000 from go the distance year’s approximately $70,000 budget was allocated for the project, but delays studied the funds to be transferred over to this year’s budget.
However, a absolute $3,000 would not even take one of these plasma screens, let only five of them. Some students are solicitous their schooling resources that is allocated to SGA went to pay for this project, which is technically true. But a adulthood of the change came from the administration, which still uses our instruction dollars for these types of projects. But as many students have seen, the unusual televisions have so far done petite to in the way of radically changing how students get their information.
We already have regularly e-mail updates ("Pepperdine Today") that stipulate us with the rundown of upcoming events, a evaluator spring calendar that goes into each of our mailboxes, WaveNet’s alerts and calendars, and numerous flyers that inundate us at all corners of campus. The $3,000 that SGA put into the reservoir for the brand-new TVs was only symbolic - an engagement that showed the hypothetical schoolgirl interest behind the project (the Student Senate approved the jut out pattern year). Despite such a strong information that the symbolic action sent, the provision still decided to sit on the idea for a year before following through. While many would altercate the counting up of these plasma screens is a necessary technological upgrade (most other schools also use TVs as an safety-valve for information), the be without of gratification should be cause for concern - especially considering the expenditure which could have run the school anywhere from $20,000 to $35,000.
While this might be pennies when compared to our $850 million endowment, it should cultivate questions amidst students as to whether the clumsy valuation we pay to attend savoir vivre here is being well spent. Currently, all that is really being televised on these screens are the inclination weather (as if that’s crucially mighty in Malibu), the time, various upcoming events and 24-hour coverage of the 2006 resident protect men’s tennis crew hoisting the trophy. While vanity and admission of our athletic teams is important, there are more burning issues these televisions could be used for. As an example, why not concentrate on au courant events, by putting CNN on the TV in the Waves Café (which was rather ill-placed by the way)? In sum, we should be using this odd original technology as a means to get intelligence from outside, as opposed to inside, the notoriously stifling Pepperdine bubble.
As SGA president Andy Canales emphasized, the significance does needfulness to be improved and the trendy setup is purely a test pass over in what was referred to as a "pilot project" by SGA. They also notable a Web plat would soon be up and running for feedback on the project. The plans he outlined were promising: a newsfeed from the Associated Press, broadcasts of NewsWaves 26 and SGA manoeuvre speeches, centre of other things. The televisions can still be worn to get the chat out on the subject of campus events and alerts, but we strike one there should be a jot more variety with how they are being used.
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