I'll admit, it's been a long time since I read every word of Morning Mail every day. I think the mountain of listserv e-mails I received after my first fall activities fair may have crowded out that pastime. Yet for me, and I believe most of the Brown community, Morning Mail remains an unrivaled connection to the happenings on campus.
It's true. Each issue of Morning Mail presented me with more activities - whether academic lectures or mid-day backrubs on the Green - than I could ever attend. But seeing how many different things happen on campus every day reminded me of the Brown Community's dynamism and diversity.
All of this, however, is threatened by the University's new Morning Mail policy, which restricts use of the system to events expecting more than 300 people. The restriction was intended to combat the rapid growth of Morning Mail, according to Marisa Quinn, vice president for public affairs and University relations.
While it is undeniable that some of last semester's Morning Mails were quite long, this solution does more to harm our vibrant community than help clarify what's happening. We need Morning Mail to remain accessible for Brown student life to remain accessible. The new restriction should be overturned as soon as possible.
As a founder of the Critical Theory Project, I can testify to the primary importance of Morning Mail to anyone running a student group. Even with a fairly large listserv and a budget that permits us to make posters and table slips for our events, Morning Mail remains the most effective and reliable way to get Brown students' attention.
Few student groups consistently sponsor events that would meet the 300 and up requirement to make it into the newly slimmed-down dispatch. To compensate for this drastic loss of free publicity, student groups will be forced to resort to more expensive, labor intensive and wasteful advertising methods. Both posters and table slips, the media most likely to make up for groups' lost access to Morning Mail, are expensive to produce, especially considering that the administration's Brown First procurement policy functionally requires all University organizations to patronize the Metcalf Copy Center instead of possibly cheaper community vendors.
While the Critical Theory Project has enough support from Brown departments to afford to blanket the campus with posters for every event, many student groups will not be able to keep up. At a time when we are told that Brown's severely limited resources demand all possible cost-savings, it seems foolish to require student groups to spend more money to just attract people to their events.
And even if a group can afford to print posters, sustaining a proper advertising campaign on campus is a nearly Sisyphean task. Between Facilities Management's regular removal of posters hung on unapproved doors and walls and the race to keep other posters from covering my own, I usually need rehang posters every day or two. Table-slipping is even more time consuming.
Worse than the cost is the waste generated by these 20th century advertising methods. Eliminating access to Morning Mail will only increase the University's use of paper and energy just as there is an growing emphasis on conservation.
The events that do qualify for inclusion in this shorter Morning Mail are hardly the ones that need advertising help. The majority of the events held in Salomon 101 and Sayles - just about the only non-athletic venues that can hold more than 300 people - are well funded and already have access to unique advertising opportunities including big poster boards on the Main Green and snail mail invitation cards. But Mike Huckabee's speech last semester certainly didn't need the Morning Mail to be a success.
Obviously, these big University-sponsored lectures are some of the best events on campus and I've always been grateful for the high-caliber speakers that come to the University. But what makes Brown a great community is the huge range of things that happen every day.
Student groups' events are direct reflections of the interests of the student body and are responsible for much of Brown's mid-week vitality. The administration should aim to foster an environment in which a small group of people with a common interest and an idea can start a successful student group. After all, the University heavily advertises this ethic on the campus tour.
Indeed, this policy's greatest victims are probably the student groups that haven't even started yet. Before a club qualifies for official UCS recognition and advertising money it must show that it has developed sustained interest from the community at large. Without access to Morning Mail's free publicity, it's hard to imagine how a new group might be able to gain enough traction to get moving.
However, the biggest loss might be a beloved part of Brunonian culture itself. Morning Mail is more than a mere list of daily activities; it is a crucial connection to the University community. Every night at 1:00 a.m. the next day's Morning Mail arrives in inboxes and triggers a wave of beeps, chimes and vibrations from Gmail notifiers and Blackberries. This shared experience is a comforting one. I like knowing what's going on tomorrow. And even if I can't make it to the Main Green to pet sled dogs, I'm glad to know it's still happening.
Nick Werle '10 is a physics and modern critical philosophy concentrator from New York. Read more at
www.runningthezoo.com/blog.
