The Rochester Center for Community Leadership is laying out a challenge for the student body: get informed. By signing a deal with USA Today, The New York Times and the Democrat and Chronicle, RCCL is making it easy. For one month, students will be able to pick up free copies of all of those newspapers from eight different high-traffic locations and read them Monday through Friday.
UR is not the first to pick up a Collegiate Readership Program. All over the country, colleges and universities are supplying their students with free newspapers, in an effort to promote an environment of learning, reading and staying informed.
Our generation isn’t known for our habits of picking up newspapers or priding ourselves on being informed citizens. In fact, it is quite the opposite – we rarely are aware of current events, and we get our news from the Internet.
This is unfortunate, of course, because being well-read and aware of what is going on in the world is an important part of being knowledgeable and well-rounded people. Given the fact that these national papers are available free of cost, there is no reason not to take advantage.
Students need to take on this challenge, pick up the papers and read them. If the papers are left to sit on the rack, the program will be canceled.
But, if students take the initiative to start reading and start getting informed, it will be an incentive for UR to continue the program for as long as students demand it. RCCL should be commended for getting the ball rolling, but now students need to show they are serious, too.
