You know, sometimes — sometimes — I have a point. Like in my May 12 column, “Fear the Turtle: More like ‘Fear the Gindes,'” I saw this whole slogan changing business coming, and I made physical threats toward university officials on behalf of my mother if this crap went through.
Well, here we are a scant five months later, and the news breaks: The university spent $250,000 — a full-ride, four-year, out-of-state scholarship plus another $100 grand — to re-brand. And what did we get for all that? “Unstoppable starts here.”
Un … stoppable … starts … here.
$250,000.
I need to collect myself for a second.
What the hell? Seriously, what the hell? What the hell?!?!?!
This is a joke, right? We’re cutting costs across the board, student fees are increasing 156,000 percent (inexact estimate), and last time I checked, we were still in the midst of a financial crunch that introduced fun words such as “furlough” into the vernacular. But we dropped a quarter of a million dollars to come up with an awful slogan that no one’s going to care about? This actually happened?
Where do I start? On one hand, there are the “university officials” who came up with the whole idea to re-brand and supplant a well liked slogan that few people really had a problem with. They spent money we surely don’t have and outsourced the job to Pennsylvania for absolutely no reason, as we have thousands of students here who would have come up with a new slogan for free.
I can only assume the oft-used “university officials” phrase means they’re a contingent of evil robots built by university President Dan Mote to make awful decisions for all of us.
Well, university officials/robots: You’re idiots. Idiots.
On the other hand, we’ve got the people who came up with the slogan. What the hell were you thinking? God forbid we had a slogan that was unique and novel, so thanks for the additional bland, vague and meaningless “Unstoppable starts here.” What does that even mean? Unstoppable doesn’t start here. I stop all the time. I stop at stop signs or stoplights. What’s so unstoppable about this school?
There are plenty of good reasons to stop. Haven’t you heard the saying, “Stop and smell the roses”? The other day, I stopped and flipped over a penny that was tails-up on the ground (creating luck for the next person). Stopping is great. Can you imagine the chaos in a world without stopping? I don’t want to live in that kind of world. This paragraph was a long and roundabout way to develop the following point: This new slogan sucks.
Here’s the rub, like I said in May: All this serves to do is give the university bad publicity. People who would otherwise give money here will now step back and ask, “Is this where my contribution is going? To this horseshit?” And it’s a valid question.
There’s a slogan for you: Unintelligible starts here.
Rob Gindes is a senior journalism major. He can be reached at gindes at umdbk dot com.
