The Involvement Fair - Fall ‘09
UConn Involvement Fair Listing
Wednesday was the Involvement Fair! We were able to be partake in the Fair to meet new people and gain new members, but not without some hassles. The picture above is an excerpt taken from the 4-page listing of Student Activities that scheduled to be at the UConn Involvement Fair. Take a moment and look it over. Notice anyone missing from that list? That’s right, The UConn College Republicans were not listed on the list of Activities under political Groups.
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My first reaction: “This must be a joke by someone working in the office…maybe they ‘mistakenly’ put us under ‘Religious Groups’ or ‘Special-Interest Groups’ “. It was wishful thinking. We were not put on the list. We were not assigned a table, and there was no record that we had registered to be part of the Involvement Fair.
If only this were the first time that this had happened. Last year, the exact same thing happened! After registering, and confirming, we somehow had no record of being registered. I was told by another member that the same thing happened two years ago as well. If this was a joke, it was not funny.
The most memorable quote of the day came when UConn’s Associate Director of Student Development & Learning, Joe Briody, came to us to discuss the situation and ensure us that nothing happened within the Student Activities Office that is causing us to be left out of the Involvement Fair. Briody’s argument was that UConnCRs must be technologically deficient and not understand how to submit an online form properly.
The quote was, “What I don’t understand is why, with all the groups who are on campus, you are the only ones who have problems every year.”
To which our President, Tim Plungis, responded, “That’s exactly my point.”
If the same problem has happened three years in a row, with a different UConnCR executive board each time, then I think any reasonable person would say, the problem isn’t with the person filling out the form, but rather in the people that handle the information. After all, it is reasonable to think a form wasn’t submitted properly if it happens once. However, this explanation becomes less likely every time it is used.
What further fueled our suspicion that perhaps, this was more than a mistake was the Involvement Fair website. Take a look for yourself:
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The first picture on the page is of the UConn College Democrats holding a sign reading, “Vote Democratic”!
Furthermore, many of our attempts to communicate with UConn’s Involvement Office in the past have been ignored. For example, when we first sought to create an online presence, we tried using the UConn Involvement Office to get a website.
The UConn Democrats have the website, http://democrats.uconn.edu. When we requested a website, we were given http:// homepages.uconn.edu/~republic/. I placed several inquiries with the office to find out how to receive a domain in the format that the Democrats have. I was ignored every time. That is when we decided to buy the privately owned domain that we have today (UConnCollegeRepublicans.com).
I could continue on with grievances against the the Office of Student Activities, but I digress. Perhaps these are all honest mistakes and with fault on one or both sides. But the point is to show that there is justification for my skepticism.
Fortunately for us, we were eventually able to use a table, not due to the Involvement Office making accommodations, but because another group on campus, CFACT UConn, generously shared their table with us, which put us side-by-side with the College Democrat booth (which was good because it put us close to our rivals but bad because a 6ft Obama-cardboard cutout was always in sight)
