When former University President Lawrence Bacow announced last March that the Naked Quad Run (NQR) would not continue, a committee of Programming Board members and Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senators set to work selecting an event to celebrate the end of fall semester classes. The event decided upon, WinterFest, was to feature a tubing course, a snow sculpture competition, a smores station and a heated tent featuring a DJ.
Obviously, no event could hope to take the place of NQR, in all its frozen and irreverent glory, but WinterFest promised to be a fun and relaxing way to end the fall semester. Unfortunately, the schedule the Programming Board has published for next weekend's event bears little resemblance to WinterFest as it was originally envisioned.
The main problem is that there really isn't anything wintry about it. The tubing course, sculpture competition, and smores station have all been axed. Instead, the cornerstone event, the Winter Carnival, will feature a mechanical bull, a rock-climbing wall, laser tag, rides and Boston food trucks. Don't get us wrong — it sounds like fun, but it's a disappointment compared to the event that was originally planned.
It was said last semester that WinterFest was modeled after the annual winter carnivals at Dartmouth and Middlebury Colleges. But the highlights of those carnivals include skiing and human dog sledding contests, gingerbread castle building, and a chili contest. By comparison, our own WinterFest seems pretty sparse. And without any winter-themed activities, our carnival is really just a watered down version of Tuftonia's Day, except that it takes place in the cold, in the middle of the day on perhaps the busiest academic weekend of the semester.
Programming co-chair Leo Greenberg, a senior, said the event had to be scaled down because of unseasonably warm weather and insufficient funds. These are inadequate excuses.
The Programming Board and TCU Senate could not seriously have been so shortsighted that they didn't have a back-up plan in case snow was not yet on the ground by the second week in December. We live in Medford, not Montreal. We frequently don't see snow cover on the ground until the end of the month.
Also, the original plan for WinterFest called for a snow machine to help construct a tubing course on the President's Lawn. If the TCU Senate just allocated an additional $40,000 to this year's Spring Fling, it should be able to afford a snow machine for WinterFest.
And if it can't, that's very disappointing, because the TCU Senate promised last semester to make funding WinterFest a priority. At the beginning of this semester, it was sitting on a surplus of at least $170,000.
The Programming Board is advertising WinterFest as a series of events throughout the weekend of Dec. 9-11, including a B.E.A.T.s performance, a hypnotist show, Big Prize Bingo, and the Annual Pancake Breakfast Study Break with University President Anthony Monaco. Many of these events, such as the B.E.A.T.s show and the nighttime pancake breakfast, would have been occurring anyway.
While all these events are worth attending, they don't seem to be in the spirit of WinterFest. They have nothing to do with winter, for one thing, and few of them are special occasions.
Many of these events usually occur during orientation week, and for good reason: Nobody has any work to do. The last weekend of the semester is one of the busiest academically, so it's unlikely much of the student body will be able to make it to many of the festivities. Unlike Spring Fling, these are not marquee events for which people rearrange their schedules.
We know that Medford and Somerville aren't exactly winter wonderlands. Many traditional winter activities, like skiing or polar bear swimming, simply aren't possible, no matter how innovative the Programming Board is. But there's a lot more they could have done to make the inaugural WinterFest an exciting event. Sledding, tubing and snow sculptures are all possible if people are willing to put in the time and resources to make them happen.
We aren't looking for an event that can replace NQR. We're looking for a new tradition to memorably celebrate the end of the semester, and WinterFest — in its current form, at least — isn't it.
