Voting will be open to students this week from Tuesday, March 4 to Thursday, March 6 on the Spring 2025 Joint Elections Ballot. This ballot includes Undergraduate Student Government positions, as well as a student fee referendum, including a $2 fee increase for The Daily Campus. This does not mean that students would have to pay more money, it just means the increase that is already approved for the Student Activity Fee would be redistributed.
The Daily Campus is classified as a Tier-III organization, meaning that we are funded primarily by student fees. These fees are currently $10 per semester or $20 per academic year from each undergraduate student — already included within the Student Activity Fee on your undergraduate fee bill.
As a Tier-III organization, we also must present our annual budget, and any fee increase requests to the Student Activity and Service Fee Advisory Committee (SASFAC). As a part of this request and petition, we must provide all undergraduate students with the opportunity to vote either for or against this fee increase. The referendum this year will ask students if they support a $2 fee increase per semester, changing funding for The Daily Campus to $12 per semester per student.
Funding from student fees is crucial to the operations of The Daily Campus and helps us pursue our mission— “to provide the UConn community with fair, accurate, relevant and editorially independent content,” as well as to represent student interests. We publish a print and digital paper five days per week filled with the news, sports and events as well as student voices that you care about most. We are one of the only sources of UConn specific news. Without the additional funds, we will not be able to produce the amount or quality of content that the students and staff at this university demand.
The Editorial Board understands that funding a college education is difficult and that every dollar matters, but it is important to note that voting “yes” on this proposal would not create an additional cost for you beyond what has been previously decided. UConn has already approved an increase to the Student Activity Fee; we are only asking that some of that increase be distributed to The Daily Campus. Additionally, this vote is not the final step in the implementation of the increase. The budget review process has multiple parts.
As politics on campus and around the world become increasingly tense, it is more important than ever to have a strong and independent free press. The Daily Campus is editorially independent from the university and serves to represent the entire student body. We strive to represent the voices and the interests of you, the students. We work to keep you informed of events on campus so that you can be an involved and educated member of the community. As students, we are all dependent on the state and university to act in our best interest, but sometimes they don’t. That is what The Daily Campus is here for—to advocate for students’ best interest and provide a platform for every student’s voice to be heard.
This campus election season, please choose to vote “yes” for The Daily Campus fee increase. With the rise of printing costs and wages, this vote will allow us to continue printing a newspaper five days a week and fulfill our mission of advocating for students and informing our community.
Vote NO. NO blank check to a paper with no journalistic standards. NO blank check to a paper that has no code of ethics. NO blank check to a paper whose editors do not declare their conflicts of interest. NO blank check to a paper that wastes over $100,000 on printing costs. Hold the DC accountable. Vote NO.
Thanks for the reminder, I’ll be voting no
No vote here, too. This paper is weirdly obsessed with bashing Israel. I’m not that interested in that topic but it shows a major bias and lack of any real journalism.