So you don’t have to, I’ve produced a list of changes to Tufts’ Office for Campus Life’s advertising and posting policy from last year to this year. This post is generalizable to how universities handle technology and policy as a whole. It is admittedly highly “inside baseball”, so if it doesn’t interest you, you should skip this post.
As of Monday, August 9, 2010, a Google search for “tufts ocl poster policy” reveals traces of two different, recent policies in PDF form. The “2010″ document has been removed from the OCL website, but the “2011″ document is freely downloadable. For the purpose of this exercise, I’ll ignore publicly accessible the web page last updated “3.15.07″.
Fortunately, when I began this piece, Google’s cache still had a copy of the 2010 document. If it didn’t, a quick trip over to OCL would likely produce one. As of August 10, 2010, the day I’m finishing this piece, the cached document is unavailable from Google. I’ve kept a copy of it here and here in image screenshots.
The 2010 document is mostly well-formatted, with proper hierarchy and understandable use of emphasis like bold and italic type. The 2011 document (PDF, HTML) is a completely different story. Aesthetically, it’s an Arial disaster without any concern for readability. According to its metadata, it was produced by Microsoft Office 2007 and authored by “jgolia01“.
Nonetheless, I’m more concerned with the content of the documents and not their presentation. I took some time to produce plaintext versions of the policies (2010-policy.txt, 2011-policy.txt) and run a diff on them (policies.diff). I tried to standardize the conventions in the two text files as to yield the most useful diff possible, but I didn’t do a perfect job. This is good enough to see the major differences.
A quick summary of the differences:
- A hyphen was needlessly inserted into the word information.
- A restriction on the number and size of flyers posted in a single area was changed (now six on the “Campus Center Breezeway between Bookstore and Mayer campus Center and the walls along the Tisch Libray steps” and one elsewhere).
- Office for Campus Life was condensed to OCL on some occasions.
- In what can only be read as a response to the Sam Wallis campaign’s use of “spray chalk”, OCL inserts a only bold, italisized, ALL-CAPS’D sentence addressing its use. Literally, this is the sentence with the most emphasis in the entire document. Although I’m pleased this clarification has been issued, I find the execution to be reactionary and completely unprofessional. As a disclaimer, I am remarkably biased in this area.
- A point on “Off-campus Advertising” is modified. Although it makes sense in context, this section is immediately ambiguous as to whether OCL is trying to regulate advertisements that aren’t on its campus, or advertisements originating from non-campus affiliated parties.
- Sections dedicated to the Mayer Campus Center and Residence Halls are added.
- The new policy mentions a collaboration with ORLL, the Office of Residential Life and Learning, on enforcing its dorm policies.
My takeaway from this exercise is that the fragmentation of locations and formatting of past and present policies regarding advertising and posting on the Tufts campus is shameful. The most recent document from OCL sacrifices any regard for formatting while expanding on the previous year’s document, clarifying and expanding on some points. However, some changes to the document seem arbitrary and hasty; I wouldn’t be surprised if they were made by a single individual without any review or vetting process. Finally, the information in these documents should be placed on the web page that already exists to hold this content. A web page with an authoritative URL like this one should always have the latest policy.
If this policy were to come from my office, I’d be embarrassed.
Ricky,
thanks for this watchdog work. It’s great to know that people are keeping track of what’s going on-especially while not even at school.
In general I think you’re being a bit hard on ocl..doesn’t sound like they did anything deserving of adjectives such as “shameful”.
But anyway, my main point Isnt about hyperbole, but about flyering. While I certainly share your concern about policy changes without student input, the flyering change came from senate (I was running point, specifically). Eboard was involved, etc. Ocl was actually a great help throughout, but it was our change. So if your concern is about studen t input, here it’s fortunately unfounded.
If you don’t like the change: our campus is literally inundated with flyers. As a signatory I know that I doesn’t help grouped advertise.. It just makes a mess that nobody can distinguish, and, at least equally important, rapaciously devours trees. Hence this solution. It will be explained directly to signatories at the treAsury meetin thing, so it will be clear to groups. I don’t really feel like spending more Panamanian beach time articulating every poin now, but if this clarification didn’t suffice, I’m happy to go further.
Good work again in keeping on top of everything like this. There have certainly been times when policy changes have been uninclusive, and when a heads up like this would have been a huge help. Look forward to seeing you back at tufts soon.
Bruce,
I can’t disagree with anything you said about flyers, and your perspective is a nice addition to this post. I believe that my points on the professionalism, editing, and locations stand strong, however. Presentation matters, especially when it comes to policy.
Take care and enjoy your beach.