University Of North Dakota Spending An Obscene Amount Of Money On Nickname Transition

Well, this is just plain ridiculous, but sadly fitting with the North Dakota University System’s overall stewardship of taxpayer dollars:

As of Dec. 30, the university had spent a total of $126,261.95 on everything the Nickname and Logo Process Recommendation Task Force required, including food, IT equipment rental, various office supplies and printing, consultants, room rentals for community forums, travel and IT systems.

All of that money, and so far it seems this committee’s big recommendation is to…form another committee.

And it seems most of the money has gone to not one but two “consultants” which have ushered this committee to the conclusion that they need to appoint another committee:

The majority of expenses went toward paying two consultants who assisted the task force over the course of about four months: Marie Miyashiro, president of the consulting firm Elucity Network, and Kelly O’Keefe, professor of advertising at the Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter.

Because clearly handling a university nickname is a task too complicated for we rubes here in North Dakota, not to mention the legions of highly-paid bureaucrats and administrators who are entrenched in our bloated university system.

Oh, and by the way, this exercise in profligate spending won’t ever produce anything concrete. As Forum Communications reporter Anna Burleson wrote on December 15, “there is no mandate requiring the UND president to actually take the task force’s recommendation into consideration…”

That’s right. This “task force” is a committee to appoint a committee to make a non-binding recommendation to UND President Robert Kelly about the logo/nickname.

It almost seems like this committee isn’t a genuine effort to engage the public so much as it is (very expensive) make-work intended to give the appearance that UND administrators care what the public thinks about the nickname.

If UND President Robert Kelly cared what the public thought, he wouldn’t have been working behind the scenes to push the “Fighting Sioux” logo and nickname out. In fact, if Kelly and others cared what the public thought, the answer to what comes after “The Fighting Sioux” would be a simple one.

Nothing. Let the university have no official logo or nickname – the task force members have done one thing right in stressing that this is a valid option – and let them be the Fighting Sioux unofficially forever.