This letter is written with regard to the series of items appearing in the Daily recently addressing the Mello Yello vs. Mountain Dew debate.

It is a waste of time to debate the relative merits of Mountain Dew and Mello Yello, particularly in a public forum.

I wrote a resolution entitled “Commercial Presence,” debated by the GSB Senate earlier this fall. A resolution is a piece of legislation that states the consensus of student will. My resolution asked that exclusive contracts no longer be granted by this university and that no advertising take place on campus.

I can understand why people are frustrated and mistrustful of the Government of Student Body. In addition to having long and cumbersome proceedings that would bore many people to tears, we are elected officials — politicians. I was raised to mistrust politicians and despair of impacting them. Despite the fact that they purport to represent us, they seem to be unaccountable to us. They must be elected to office, which means that a very large number of people must know their names and associate positive things with that name.

To achieve this, they buy air time. They advertise. The outstanding drawback to this practice is that it costs a lot of money. In order to purchase enough advertising to be elected, they solicit campaign contributions. Individual citizens donate money, but so do businesses. Some businesses donate a lot of money, like Phillip Morris and Chrysler.

Businesses rarely part with money without some perception that doing so will help them to make more money. They expect to have influence with politicians they donate to, while the politicians wish to continue to receive campaign contributions. The lawmakers become beholden to corporations.

Our interests became secondary to the interests of major contributors. Nicotine, a highly addictive and dangerous substance is permitted to be sold, and gasoline prices in this country are artificially depressed. We buy products advertised on TV, and some of the profits from those sales go to campaign contributions, which pay for commercials for political candidates. Companies buy influence that should be ours, the people’s.

There are other ways influence is peddled.

Closer to home, some students have chosen to waste their time over the last year trying to change the name of a building on campus. Despite long term focus and determination, as well as vocal support from some faculty and students, there is no indication that we will see a change in the name of Catt Hall.

Rhetoric in the media is dominated by members and supporters of the movement to change the building’s name. I have heard maybe three people defend the character of Carrie Chapman Catt.

But none of that really matters much. Those who contributed money to the renovation did so to memorialize Catt. Arguments notwithstanding, Money won.

For even longer, students have been asking for the name of Cyclone Stadium to be changed to Jack Trice Stadium. Jack Trice has no stigma attached, to my knowledge. He was Iowa State’s first black football player, and he was killed in his first game by an opposing team whose school definitely did not have a multicultural diversity program.

But despite over a decade of popular support from the students and annual legislation by GSB, the stadium is still Cyclone Stadium. The field (the grassy area in the middle, analogous to the lawn) has been named Jack Trice Field as a token gesture, but we are told that alumni, who donated to the building program, may be upset by a name change. Money wins again.

In this country’s government, and in this university, you get what you pay for, and your tuition is not paying for much. Those Stafford Loans may seem like a lot of cash to you, but it’s pocket change to the ISUFoundation, which processes donations to this university, just as an individual’s personal contribution to the Clinton campaign is to the political action committee.

My objection to commercial presence on campus is manifold. I think we should have choices about products and services; free enterprise requires competition. I think advertising is manipulative and gaudy; it makes any landscape it graces look whorish.

And that is an accurate impression. This university sells influence. Corporate America buys influence. I almost don’t blame companies for doing so. I certainly stand less chance them than Ido Iowa State, which is slim enough, considering that I have less capital than Coca-Cola or Brenton Bank. The facts indicate that big money has an influence on public policy.

The current scenario of building names and sticks and stones is trivial when I consider the worst case scenario. Our motivation as students is to secure a quality education; in short, to learn. ISU’s motivation is to provide a quality education; in other words, to teach. The goal of any business is to make money and grow. As business becomes a bigger part of higher education, the integrity of this university becomes seriously threatened.

If this university makes substantial money from advertising, it becomes as beholden to the advertiser as it currently is to donors, as politicians are to lobbies. I do not want to see money making decisions on public policy; I want the public to decide its own policy.

And as little time as I have left to concern myself with such things, I cannot afford not to.

David Ammann

Junior

Architecture