To the Editor,

As I cycled through campus Tuesday morning on my way to my first classes of the semester, I was surprised to be met outside the bookstore by a large Victoria’s Secret “Pink” bus. I have since learned that its presence on campus is supported by the Campus Store.

I cannot imagine a more disheartening and less appropriate welcome to the University of Utah for first-year and returning students. Instead of promoting the university as an intellectual community that runs on the currency of ideas, this crass display of commercialism sends all the wrong messages, right in the heart of our campus.

This partnership devalues the intellectual commons, reducing it to a shopping mall and communicating to students that their dollars and appearances matter more than their minds. Victoria’s Secret is a particularly suspect vendor, a company whose history of promoting unrealistic body types, objectifying women, and embracing the most conventional conceptions of what it means to be beautiful is well documented.

Students of the University of Utah, you deserve and should demand better than this sorry welcome.