TD Garden. Gillette Stadium. Citi Field. The Izod Center.
They are all victims of a phenomenon that draws groans from sports fans the country over: corporate branding. Now the Tufts Community Union Senate sees a pragmatic opportunity to do some branding of its own.
Members of the Senate's Student Outreach Committee say they are not content with the amount of attention students pay to the body's work, complaining that Senate decisions often go unnoticed and elections go uncontested due to lack of student interest in the positions.
So they are proposing to attach the Senate's name to events like Fall Ball and the Nighttime Quad Reception, also known as Naked Quad Run. This raises a very simple question: Is it really acceptable to re-appropriate our campus traditions for the purpose of advertising our student government?
What's more, the Senate proposes to create an emblem that it can add to student organizations' materials, in order to drive home the fact that the body gives those organizations financial support. So is it worthwhile for the Senate to enforce such a homogenization of clubs' identities in the name of its own self-promotion?
The Outreach Committee says that students are largely unaware of how the Senate spends its $1 million student activities budget, which is funded by undergraduates' tuition money. But it seems intuitive that students would assume that their student activities fees go toward funding student activities — just as they assume their payments for room and board go toward maintaining Tufts' dormitories and the money they spend on meal plans goes to Tufts Dining Services. If they care to find out exactly how money much each club receives, they can easily find that information on the Senate's Web site.
Some argue that aggressive branding efforts will help to educate freshmen about the Senate's impact on campus. First of all, freshmen are less apathetic toward our student government than older students are, as evidenced by the disproportionately high number of first-years who run for Senate seats. And while the Daily agrees on the importance of informing freshmen about the Senate's role on campus during orientation, we do not feel that sticking a Senate label on events or other organizations will give first-years meaningful insight into why they should join Senate.
Senators say they would like to avoid situations like the one that arose last year, when students who had not originally made their thoughts known came out heavily against the body's decision to allocate $230,000 for construction of the Tufts Mountain Club's Trips Cabin. But labeling Tufts Mountain Club ads with a Senate logo would not have prevented the Trips Cabin debacle.
The major reason for students' surprise at the outcome of the funding decision lies in the fact that they were not accustomed to seeing the Senate handle such issues — and, more importantly, the Senate was not accustomed to handling them, or to advertising appropriately for them. Furthermore, similar situations are highly unlikely to arise in the foreseeable future. The Senate had hundreds of thousands of extra dollars to give away only because it had recently been reimbursed for losses in an extraordinary embezzlement scandal.
Before the recovered money was allocated, few were demanding that the Senate highlight its own involvement in all the things it funds. And without similar opportunities to mishandle hundreds of thousands of dollars in the future, the Senate does not need to foist its "brand" on the titles of storied campus traditions or the materials of unique student organizations. Senate Fall Ball? Senate Spring Fling? To us, that sounds a whole lot like Microsoft Fenway Park.
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