To the Editor:
The statistics quoted in "SA, College Discuss Printing Fees" (July 9, 2003) may shock some readers, but not me. I freely admit that I was one of the 30 percent of students in winter 2003 who printed more than 1,000 pages. There is an excellent reason for that, however: winter term was when my senior honors thesis was due. My advisor and I believed that 90 percent of the time completing a major paper should be spent on revising in order to make it as good as possible. Although I can only speak for thesis writers, the need to print hundreds of pages per week is very real: advisors need paper copies to read, and revising done on paper is always superior to that done on the computer screen. Without the countless (though always double-sided) pages I printed in order to revise my thesis while in the process of writing, I firmly believe that it would not have been awarded the prize it received, nor would I have been encouraged by my advisors to try and publish it. Students printing for legitimate academic needs should not be penalized simply because other students might be printing non-academic items. But I also would like to offer a solution: if all the Green Print printers were duplex, wouldn't that cut down the volume of paper used?
