An advertisement for a popular student eatery published in the newspaper at Central Connecticut State University caused the school’s president to threaten business relations with the restaurant last month.
President Richard Judd did not approve of the advertisement, which read, “How does having Sex on the Beach or an Orgasm sound?” Realizing he couldn’t censor CSSU’s paper, The Recorder, Judd opted to circumvent the newspaper’s advertising manager, Catherine Turner, and went straight to the owners of Elmer’s restaurant.
The university has a “blue chip” program that allows students to use money on their campus cards to purchase items, such as food, at off-campus venders. Judd told Elmer’s owners that their “blue chip” participation contract may not be renewed if similar ads continued to appear in the paper.
Elmer’s has now opted to run its menu, in lieu of an advertisement designed by Turner.
The Recorder, however, has decided not to take any action against the president’s meddling since “there was no financial loss,” Sweeney said.
“Our editor’s stance was, ‘It doesn’t bother me until it hurts me,'” Sweeney said. “The paper would have stepped in if it had lost revenue.”
The circumstances were not quite the same at a New York campus. Utica College President Todd Hutton told the student newspaper, The Tangerine, not to run an ad for a competing college.
SUNY Institute of Technology, another college in Utica, paid for an advertisement in The Tangerine. The ad infuriated Hutton, who sent an e-mail to the faculty adviser Kim Landon in September telling her not to publish similar ads in the future.
The situation has been temporarily resolved, Landon said, but it is not clear The Tangerine will continue to run SUNY Institute of Technology ads.