The TCU Announce e-mail system tightened its policy on general announcements, Josh Harmon, director of enterprise application services, said.
During the summer Harmon received a post from an organization called The Legion of Doom.
When he saw it at first, he thought it was “somebody having fun.”
“It was the summer, and we don’t get very many posts in the summer so I thought it would be kind of comical,” he said.
Following the Legion of Doom announcement, Harmon approved other announcements from groups such as the League of Heroism, the Cabal of Neutrality and Dumbledore’s Army.
Senior marketing and supply chain management major Chase Bruton is the head of the Legion of Doom and said 30 to 40 people applied for the Legion because of his announcement.
Now, the Legion has 13 official members, although it is not registered under TCU’s official organization system, OrgSync.
TCU alumnus and creator of the Cabal of Neutrality David Crouch said it was too easy for students to post announcements. The most recent announcement for Dumbledore’s Army stated, “due to recent discoveries that everyone and their grandmothers can post a group announcement, I would like to invite you to join Dumbledore’s Army.”
Harmon said because of organizations such as the TCU quidditch team, he cannot be sure what organizations are real or not.
“When a student organization first starts, we will allow them to post introductory e-mails under general announcements,” Harmon said. “They usually try to post these under the student organizations area, but that’s exclusively for recognized student organizations so I move them to general announcements and then they can get their cadre of people together and apply to be a formal organization.”
According to the TCU Announce e-mail, TCU students can submit announcements through the MyTCU portal. Harmon goes through the e-mails to make sure they are in accordance with the posting regulations.
Crouch said he supports announcements similar to ones like the Legion of Doom and hopes to see more in the future.
“I thought it was a good way to mix it up instead of the same old student organizations having a raffle or someone selling a couch,” Crouch said. “I guarantee you most people I talk to don’t read the e-mails. They just say ‘I deleted it.’ But now there might be an incentive to read them, you know, if they keep allowing this. There might be something crazy that somebody posts and we can get a good laugh.”
After the announcement for Dumbledore’s Army, Harmon posted his own announcement requesting that all Surreal Exemplar Organizations refer to a portal strictly made for them at bizzarro.tcu.edu.
“I felt like people were having fun with imaginary organizations and I would give them an imaginary portal to post those imaginary organizations to,” Harmon said. “I manage that site, and I’m the main person that tries to keep it clean and orderly and avoid distasteful things, so I see that as my responsibility. I like to encourage people to have fun and be creative, but when people realize that they can post and let their ideas fly to the whole university, a lot of times they’ll take advantage of it.”
As for now, Harmon said any novelty organization submitting to TCU Announce will have to appeal via e-mail before being posted.
