Art Cordova
Staff Writer
Slingshot is the program by which students are automatically enrolled and set to purchase the necessary textbooks for classes. While to some this may sound idyllic, they continue to fall short in several aspects.
Going out into the fray, I polled 15 students on campus for their opinions. A whopping 12 participants (80 percent) responded with varying degrees of dislike. I asked them to unpack why they felt so dissatisfied with the program, and their responses were fascinating.
The most common response I got was that it was overpriced. To verify this, I looked at the difference between Slingshot’s price for the textbook “Learn to Read Latin,” and Amazon’s current price was 16 percent cheaper!
Another complaint I received was that Slingshot occasionally rents books by default. Students often want to purchase their books to add to their collections, but with overpricing and renting as a default, this is not often an option.
Freshman computer science major Peter Arlinghaus said, “If I knew about Slingshot, I would have looked elsewhere. I appreciate that it exists at the university, but I would argue for better explanations.”
This is a common grievance among freshmen, illuminating a flaw in the university’s implementation of the program. Many freshmen are not adequately informed about Slingshot and are overcharged hundreds of dollars since they tend to make whole orders of new, overpriced textbooks.
The lack of communication from the university drowns out even Slingshot’s benefits. Junior clinical psychology major Gordon Kalamasz mentioned, “Slingshot is the only way to get my student loans to pay for (my books).” However, he did not learn this from the university’s communication, but from a professor wanting to help him save money.
I interviewed associate professor of philosophy Dr. Alex Plato to hear his concerns. One of the major problems he highlighted was the potential damage to our community.
“I have studied technology and society extensively,” he noted. “… I see the encroachment of a new technological gizmo or device ‘answering all of our cost-effective problems more efficiently and easier’ to be pretty much a vain or empty promise that brings with it lots of other drawbacks that in the end make it not worth it.”
As for how this concerns Franciscan, Dr. Plato said, “It’s not a simple change of adding a tool that makes things better and more efficient, it’s about the question of what kind of a Franciscan University community do we want.”
So what can students do right now to navigate this mess?
Dr. Plato advised, “Go to the library, which we are paying tons of money for, and maybe check out a book on Ohiolink for free.”
He encouraged going downtown, taking our roommates out for coffee at Leonardo’s and then going book shopping at our local downtown bookstore, Booksmarx (which provides a 10 percent student discount to Frannies).
While it may seem easy to complain about the program, maybe the fault doesn’t entirely lie upon Slingshot. If we continue to voice our concerns and share our Slingshot knowledge, we advocate for easier and cheaper textbook access for students and future vulnerable freshmen.