Student Rene Semple is very involved on campus. As the Student Union Board Vice President and a Senator for the Student Government Association, she is always promoting events and looking for events that others are attending.
One problem she has run into is that not only does she feel uninformed about campus activities, but she has noticed a lack in attendees at her own organizational events.
She has taken note of posters left on tables in the Cougar Café and on the hallway tables in the main building being thrown away sooner than the date they were stamped for removal. Semple has even been frustrated to see her flyers have been ripped off of the metal strips that are specifically for student use.
So, with metal strips and public tables being seemingly off limits for flyers, the only other option for physical information is the bulletin boards. However, according to handouts from Student Life, there are only seven bulletin boards approved for students to advertise for all of campus.
Administrators worry about the lack of student attendance at the events they spend time planning, but do not address the fact that students are not seeing information in a timely manner. Because of this, SGA President Andrea Méndez Rodríguez has taken on the project of creating more structure around the use of flyers.
The issue of paper flyers being taken down has caught the attention of many students throughout the past few semesters. Méndez said that the main reason SGA decided to make moves to fix the situation was due to several anonymous student requests in their suggestion box.
According to John Sarber, the director of physical facilities at IUK, campus used to house many more bulletin boards for student use. However, during construction on several of the buildings in 2014, a lot of bulletin boards were removed so walls could be taken down.
Instead of putting all bulletin boards back up and crowding the walls, Sarber said the designers they worked with “strategically put [bulletin boards] where students would stop for a few seconds and look at things.”
Yet, every time clubs do spend a part of their budget on designing and printing off colored flyers, they end up in the trash after only a day of being on display.
Sarber says all flyer policing was done with the intention of cleaning up the campus, and better fitting the mold that was created by Bloomington. Even though students, like those suggesting SGA help fix the issue, prefer the feel of a colorful campus.
In an online survey conducted in Spring 2023, of the 147 students who took the survey, 109 said they felt flyers were the most prominent or one of the most prominent ways to learn about events on campus.
With clear evidence of students in support of flyers, SGA has been hard at work since the beginning of the semester creating a plan to eliminate the idea that bulletin boards and flyer displays always look crowded.
As just a preview of what the organization has planned, Méndez said that SGA is laying out specific rules for flyer distribution that allows the clubs that were already following regulations to still have physical advertisements, but the rules will restrict the clubs who contribute to the clutter.
This structure aids students like Semple who feel their organizations are struggling with decreased attendance to their events due in part to the lack of informational flyers.
In another effort to improve this, SGA is also working with Sarber and his team towards the goal of adding at least one more bulletin board in a high traffic area of every campus building.
