The tri-campus has a poster problem.
At other universities — the very “peer institutions” our administration strives to emulate — the advertising situation is essentially laissez-faire. If you want to hang a poster or a flier or anything of the sort, you print it, you hang it, and that’s that.
The result? Vibrant bulletin boards on which departmental lectures and freelance dog walkers are promoted side-by-side, lamp posts on which posters for faith groups and punk music house shows coexist. Walking around these campuses, the vitality of after-school life is visually apparent.
Notre Dame’s bulletin boards, however, are tame; our lamp posts are empty. Visiting highschoolers probably notice the relative sterility.
The iconic scene from “Rudy” in which the titular character grabs a flier off the wall at Holy Cross College for a “room to rent” — ultimately kickstarting his football career — is unimaginable today. On today’s tri-campus, you’re simply not allowed to post a flier to promote a yard sale or sell a used car or (like in “Rudy”) to rent a room.
What’s to blame? The unique grip the Student Activities Office (SAO) holds over advertising on campus. The linchpin of the Student Life policy, which SAO enforces, is that use of university bulletin boards is restricted to departments and “recognized student groups.” The policies at Saint Mary’s are nearly identical and are managed through its Office of Student Involvement, while Holy Cross requires approval by their Office of Student Activities.
Small stakeholders (e.g. freelance workers or artists and bands) are removed from the picture entirely. Furthermore, the sheer bureaucratic effort required to apply for SAO recognition in the first place — completing annual registration, finding a faculty or staff advisor, potentially submitting a financial evaluation — is a high bar which precludes many groups from advertisement on campus.
Even if an organization is capable of bearing this onus, recognition — and consequently the right to post its material — is ultimately contingent on whether or not SAO deems it “consistent with the University’s mission, whether it be spiritual, moral, intellectual, cultural, social, athletic or recreational.” Regardless of whether this standard should govern the recognition of clubs, it is questionable whether such lofty ideals should govern something as quotidian as our right to post.
Saint Mary’s has seen controversy over which organizations are granted recognition — and thereby have the right to express themselves — and which are not. The rejection of the Smicks for Choice club in April 2023 is one such instance. Whether or not the College should recognize this club officially, these students are precluded from even seeking approval to posting a flier anywhere on campus.
On the other side of the political spectrum, a poster for the College Republicans of Saint Mary’s was initially rejected on a bureaucratic technicality. Though the students’ poster was denied because it was not submitted by the (recognized) club itself, Saint Mary’s policy allowed submissions from “individuals” as well as clubs and departments.
The poster was ultimately approved, but not without a fair deal of confusion about the policies and their enforcement. In an email to the students in question, Saint Mary’s dean of students and campus life informed them that: “Only sanctioned student organizations can post flyers on campus. Further, our process promotes the interest of Saint Mary’s College in guarding against violations of copyright laws, inappropriate content and or instances of the destruction of the positive campus atmosphere, campus property or campus appearance.” What is the “destruction of the positive campus atmosphere” but a vague phrase that can be applied to anything according to the bureaucrats’ whims.
How much paperwork must an organization fill out to hang a flier? Must it prove itself “consistent” with the “mission” to declare when and where it meets? And if an institution — such as The Observer — is intentionally independent from the University, what then? Why is that sufficient reason to erase that institution from this campus’s bulletin boards?
Keep in mind that while these policies make posters an impossibility for individuals and unrecognized groups, they do not make it a cakewalk for recognized ones either. Promotional material to be posted must first be submitted online to the SAO360 system, a process which often takes several days. Then, an in-person visit must be paid to the SAO office to complete a form, have a copy of the material scanned and filed and have the material itself stamped.
Funnily enough, University departments — who employ administrative staff for this sort of busywork — are exempt from this requirement. It is only the extracurricular organizations, often run by busy students, whom the process burdens.
Perhaps the poster policy can be said to prevent the encroachment of corporate advertising. Is a policy which treats an undergraduate calculus tutor and a massive real estate firm like Irish Gold Management as equal threats really the best way of doing this, though? Perhaps the poster policy can be said to prevent unsightly clutter. Is sterility not unsightly in its own way, too?
A poignant counterexample to this system is found in the residence halls, where these directives are less rigorously enforced. Some rectors are stricter than others, of course, but there is generally more freedom to post flyers in residence halls than in other campus spaces. Consequently, their walls are typically more vivid. The hall newspapers taped up in the toilet stalls, the hall election ads hung in the elevators, the hall event posters lining the hallways, the memes posted above the urinals — these are not just clutter, they are a visual reflection of the campus culture our administration talks so much about cultivating.
