In Tuesday's school-wide Tufts Community Union Senate election, students will be voting on Referendum 1, which would allocate $20,000 to TuftsLife to lease and operate an SMS short code, TUFTS (88387), for 12 months.
The service would allow students to text this number and get an instant pre-programmed response to a variety of questions such as the hours and menus of the dining halls or office hours of a professor as well as subscribe to user-selected alerts about topics like meeting reminders.
While these services could be helpful, we believe that any potential convenience is simply not worth $20,000 for the 12-month period.
The main point of contention is where this money comes from. The $20,000 will be taken from the Student Activity Budget Surplus once the funds become available. Students pay the Student Activity Fee — $296 this year — with the understanding that it allows them to join, create and improve a number of different student organizations. That surplus money could be used to help new groups get funding or to help improve existing groups. Instead, a huge sum is being spent on a service of questionable usefulness.
While TuftsLife states on its website that there are no other concrete plans for how to use these surplus funds, we should not impatiently rush into supporting a flawed project just because a better alternative does not yet exist.
The service itself is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Students with smartphones have web browsers that can provide answers to any question the proposed SMS short code could, and students without smartphones still have plenty of non-phone options for finding out this information.
Furthermore, as smartphones get more affordable and ubiquitous, an SMS short code becomes even less useful, making this project one with a very limited time to shine.
Students are used to planning where and when their meetings are, going on a computer to check the dining hall menus and texting a number to get the Joey schedule. We don't need a number to text for every single query that we may have in a given day.
The referendum vote is going to open up at midnight tonight. The question is not whether the proposed service is a good idea.
The question is whether or not having that service is worth $20,000. The Daily's believes the funds would be better spent elsewhere.
