Department increases student fees

Language students pay more for copies

By Sharon Christensen, On-Line Forty-Niner

Tuesday, September 1, 1998

Due to a departmental oversight, lower division Spanish and French students will no longer be charged a $5 student fee for all copies used in this semester's classes.

The fee was determined to be illegal by the office of the dean of liberal arts. Students will now buy a packet of all the semester's handouts at the copy center for an estimated $15 per packet, instead of paying the fee directly to the instructor.

Dr. Maria Carreira, the coordinator of lower-division language courses in the Romance, German and Russian languages and literatures department, proposed this fee in order to shift the financial burden of making copies from the instructors to the students.

The department failed to file the proper forms with the dean's office so that this fee could be approved by a committee and be named a minor mandatory fee, Carreira said.

"The university had some obscure rule," she said. "Now we have to return the money and apologize."

Until this semester, the burden had fallen on the instructors of these classes, usually teaching associates.

"I had a teacher's aide last semester who spent $200 for copies," Carreira said. "This had gotten out of hand."

"Money did come out of my pocket," said Kathleen Salsbury, a French 101A teaching associate. "I've found in my class that my students are more than willing to help me.

Carreira said language courses are vastly improved with handouts, and barely legible dittos are not an option in a foreign language.

"Language classes take up a lot of paper," Carreira said. These lower division classes are the largest in the department.

According to Carreira, the department soon intends to begin the form process for the fee's approval for next semester. Such a process will take about five months for approval due to the infrequency of the committee's meetings.

"I think it would be a thoughtful thing to pass considering the number of students, particularly in the classes with an overload of students," Salsbury said.

The money for these copies, which would have included the fees for quizzes and exams could not have come from the department's budget, according to Carreira.

Judy Swan, administrative services manager with the dean of liberal arts, said the budget for this semester has only just reached the president's desk and therefore, the departmental budgets for fall have yet to be determined.

This time frame is not unusual at all, said Swan, who remembers years where the budgets were not allocated until November.

Swan said she plans to meet with the new department chairs to make sure they are spending their money appropriately. Dr. Claire Martin is the new chair of the department and will be involved in these proposed meetings.