A captive audience

Judging by Residential Programs and Services' proposal to put big-screen TVs showing ads in the commons areas of IU's dorms, this isn't a university. It's a profit center.\nRPS will allow Sadge Media, an advertising agency from Cincinnati, to place the televisions in residence halls early next semester. In exchange, RPS could receive up to $30,000.\n The Presidents' Council of the Residence Hall Association, the residence halls' student government, agreed to the proposal last Wednesday. Why is RPS selling access to students to corporations? \n Sadge claims their primary purpose is to help produce student advertising and only sell out to the big spenders on the side. \n Pardon us if we stand in more than slight disbelief. If anyone grew up with Channel One in their high schools, they know that certain "rationales" behind marketing in schools rarely are worth their weight in coins.\nIt's fashionable to complain about "commercialization." Usually, those complaints are overdone. \nBut not this time.\nThere's no denying the simple business motives at work. Indeed, RPS is glorying in it. RPS Executive Director Pat Connor promised to "give the best bang for the advertisers' dollar." \nThat suggests the question: What are these advertisers paying for?\nSimple. They're paying for RPS' captive audience.\nPeople who live in the dorms will be pretty much forced to watch these ads. The televisions will be placed in high-traffic areas like the food courts in Foster and Wright. \nAnd so, starting in January or February, students in the dorms (including nearly all freshmen) will eat their mediocre dorm food to the accompaniment of commercials pitching movies and the military.\nIt's disappointing RPS would suggest this policy. It's more disappointing that RHA would agree to it with only a single dissenting vote (from the president of Collins).\nConnor thinks this is nothing new. "There's a lot of corporate advertising already on this campus," he told the IDS last week. \nThere are lots of arguments against Connor's position, but the best one is this: RPS' decision displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the University's purpose.\nIU's real mission statement is inscribed in our seal: "Lux et veritas" -- Latin for "light and truth," a commitment to discovering and teaching knowledge.\nBut in setting up these televisions, the University is obeying a different master. Advertisers seek revenues, not understanding. \nCome to think of it though, what are we? A news source, funded by ads. The reality of the situation seems to be that we live in a world where money talks, and knowledge is not enough. \nLight and truth, yes, but someone has to pay the electric bill. \nHowever, you can put down the IDS. Not so with these new ad-TVs in the food courts … That is, for those in the dorms, unless you don't eat. \nWhen is enough information, enough information? This deal opens the floodgates to a wave of access advertising where there was no demand. We've bought enough air time from those with the green. Let's try not to offer them any more.\nHowever, if we must, maybe RPS can buy the students something nice with its thirty thousand pieces of silver.