Marquette has a lot of questions to answer about its spending. The Marquette Tribune is a valuable forum for students to voice these opinions. We have written editorials about all sorts of topics and attempted to reach out for reader submissions. Could we do a better job of this? Probably. But the point is, we take our role as the voice of the students very seriously. We work late nights, dig into investigations, research and submit our writing to public scrutiny. If the Tribune is cut in half, fewer opinions and issues important to students will be heard.

Students at the Tribune have not been given any data or budget information. How much will cutting pages for about 13 more issues (until the end of the school year) really impact the university budget? This is probably a minuscule amount compared to Marquette’s other costs. The approximately $150,000 that Marquette provides to subsidize student media is roughly the equivalent of four students’ tuition. If each of the 8,000 paid the full cost of attendance, this would be about 0.05 percent of the university’s revenue from tuition.

We are all paying for this publication as students. It is a disservice and a blatant disregard of student input to cut pages without giving specific reasons or an explanation of the budget.

If I had known how Marquette functions and how much it truly “values” student opinions, I doubt I would have chosen to come here. I had scholarship offers at the University of Missouri’s honors program and the University of Michigan, both to study writing. I chose Marquette because I believed it cared, but now I feel forgotten. I feel more like a number than a person. Does Marquette only see me and my organizations as a dollar sign? Is the bottom line more important than my happiness?