Will Klatt weighs in on The Post's editorial on the tuition hike.
To The Editor,
On Monday I opened the editorial page of The Post to see letters from the Graduate Student Senate president, a professor from the English department, and a student from the Sierra Club all condemning the behavior of the Board of Trustees and top administration.
The Post’s editorial rightly scolds the trustees for walking out of the meeting due to the fact that there were students present who were upset with their lack of support for college accessibility. However, it’s the rest of the editorial that gets to the heart of how backwards our local student paper has become this year. The Post could have taken a position that higher education should be accessible, and that a 23.88% increase in the cost of tuition for a four-year degree for incoming students by 2018 is unreasonable and out of touch with Ohio families.
The Post states “nobody enjoys paying more money for the same product.” Last time I checked, our public education wasn’t a private commodity, but a service provided by the state, to the citizens of Ohio. However, instead of challenging the core foundations of the tuition hike, The Post recommends that the solution is simply to swallow the tuition hikes, and the administration’s hostility to its graduate and undergraduate student governments. The Post claims this can be accomplished by the administration improving communication with easy-to-read reports detailing how the extra money the university is charging students on campus is going to be used. The Post never questions if students should play a meaningful part of that process, or if the tuition hikes should happen at all.
This year, The Post appears to have solidified its position as Athens’ official status quo news outlet. This development is pretty unfortunate because for anyone who’s been around Athens for a while, The Post has had a pretty outstanding history of asking tough questions, and being advocates for student interests on campus. Don’t get me wrong, not everyone who works for The Post has taken on its leadership’s lack of journalistic gusto, but there’s a problem at The Post and the result has meant that the students at Ohio University have lost an important institution that used to advocate for their rights and interests on campus.
Will Klatt is a second-year MPA student in the Voinovich School for Leadership and Public Affairs at Ohio University.
