At the beginning of this school year,  20 other students and I wrote a letter to Madison Laning, the head of Associated Students of Madison. We explained to her the cost of going to class is too high and demanded meaningful changes. Now, Laning has decided to lead a concerted ASM effort to demand specific and significant changes within academic departments.

High tuition and the increasing cost of textbooks certainly cause concern, but those are not the costs we are campaigning against. In our experience, the costs of various quiz and homework software programs, clickers, online textbook supplements, teaching modules and online attendance trackers are downright unfair.

Fees become unnecessary hardships when they are required for supplies that do not directly benefit student learning, but instead benefit the administration of a course. In our letter, we asserted these costs are not just too high. The fact that students are forced to pay them at all is unacceptable.

We are not naive. We understand the importance of tuition, books and laboratory fees. Tuition amounts to a significant fraction of the university’s revenue and goes toward academic services and the physical upkeep of the university. Students can cover tuition with grants, scholarships and federal loans.

It’s not unreasonable for instructors to require textbooks, but it is unreasonable for students to pay for programs instructors use for administrative tasks like grading and attendance tracking. The injustice is magnified when attendance and quizzes count for a portion of the semester grade. In a sense, requiring students to buy such programs is requiring students to pay again for the academic services they paid for with tuition.

Take, for example, the requirement that students buy a subscription to an online service only so the professor can take attendance and gauge lecture participation for Anthropology 104. Notably, numerous free applications perform the same function as this service, but the instructor did not choose one of those. In this case, submissions through the online service are worth 10 percent of all points in the course. In a sense, students pay for 10 percent of their grades.

There are some students who do not have a dollar to spare and more who live on shoestring budgets. It is naive to claim otherwise. For those students, there are several options: they can decide to buy a brand­ new textbook, used latest edition or an older one or decide to read the library’s reserve copies instead of spending money on books. But there are no options for students who cannot afford subscription fees to online services.

We are aware of students who have to choose between dropping a classes, forfeiting a portion of their semester grades or skipping meals. This is patently unjust and clearly changes are necessary.

So we, the members of ASM, have made it our prerogative to exercise our true ability to influence change. We will exert our power in shared governance and exploit to its fullest extent our spirit of grassroots campaigning. Our case is strong, our influence is wide, our energy is high and we are confident that with enough work, the administrators, deans, the provost or anyone else in control of academic policy will be forced to take this issue as seriously as we do.

Colin Barushok ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in mathematics.