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She (almost) did the mascot mash
By Andrew Flohr-Spence
spencand@mscd.edu

What is it about a lovable, furry mascot that could make a grown woman want to run up and punch it? At first I laughed when my wife, Nadja, explained the feeling that came over her on the first day of school. But when I saw the scared look in her eye, I tried changing the subject.

“If you really think you need to assault some giant stuffed toy just ’cause he’s trying to pass out coupons, you need serious help,” I said. “Hey, we should cook something spicy for dinner.”

The first days of a semester are always a bit distressing, but something about this year pushed a healthy, mentally stable person to consider stomping some horn-honking, hard-working sap in a fuzzy suit. I like to think Nadja’s deck is not missing any more cards than my own, which can only be missing a few at the most. Something, or someone, had to have pushed her into the lobby of Hotel Crazytown. I had to find out what happened. “I was just leaving my first class and a gigantic bird-thing stepped in my way and honked his horn in my face.”

“It’s a roadrunner,” I said.

“I don’t care what bird it is. What is it doing here? Are we in kindergarten?” she asked.

Had she lost her school spirit, her love for the well-marketed item? Had she no understanding of the current state of higher education?

All of us as students learn to deal with a number of inconveniences: the throngs of glassy-eyed, wandering coeds, the endless lines for everything you need done in the five minutes before class begins, the random misfortunes that tend to occur in the first days of class (and again, of course, during finals). The list goes on and on. But these annoyances are all student-made or student-derived. They are unavoidable.

What can be avoided is every unused square inch of the school being devoted to selling one product or another and the giant amusement-park characters chasing everyone around.
Perhaps it’s just the way schools work nowadays. The commanders of profit are not satisfied with merely surgical marketing: they know that to gain total victory they must carpet-market the whole area. Get a couple commando-style coupon mercenaries on the ground and blanket the whole zone with posters and flyers. For businesses there is no substitute for saturation marketing in the war to sell to students.

Like most students, I eventually became accustomed to the circus of the modern American college campus, and I’ve fortified myself against such treachery. My wife, however, comes from a country where the universities haven’t yet succumbed to the more aggressive forms of marketing madness. Just as America once refrained from allowing any old backwater franchise to prey on college students (education, after all, is the important business at hand), Germany still takes its higher education seriously.

My wife, on that first day of the semester (and her first day attending an American college), happened to have her mind on other things than getting a new credit card, receiving a free tub-o-cola at Blimpie with purchase of a mega-lunch bucket, or entering a sweepstakes to win a new waste of time. Her first impressions of a professor had been poor and she was deep in thought as she walked outside, wondering if there wasn’t some other class she might take.

This is when the Roadrunner came dancing through the crowd in her direction – honking its silly horn and trying to drum up school spirit – and she became a bit vexed. The poor bastard never knew how close he came.

Campus administrators need to take action against this dangerous and wholly unscholarly situation. They should regulate an end to these snuggly and aggressive money vampires before some sad mascot gets hurt.