An apology to the community

Editor’s Note: this letter to the editor was written in response to an opinion piece published on the March 12 edition of The Record called “The new stopped@buzzed posters are problematic.”

Dear CSB+SJU community,

It has come to our attention that certain posters of our most recent campaign were not in accordance with the standards our community holds and that community members were upset, offended, and disappointed. We discussed this at our weekly team meeting, with emphasis on the difference between impact and intent.

We would like to make it clear that we would never intend to offend others or promote harmful messages. We fully support the message that health does not equal body size. The mission of stop@buzzed is to encourage students to make safe, healthy, and responsible choices, whether that includes alcohol or not. The main way we draw students in is by attempting to add a comedic aspect. The intent with these posters was to communicate that unhealthy and irresponsible drinking habits are not “cool.”. We chose characters that we felt communicated that message based on how they are portrayed in mainstream media. The people on the right in our posters are comedians who brand themselves on exaggerating unhealthy drinking behaviors and creating “trashy” stereotype videos.

Of course, that message did not come off the way that we intended, instead causing a hurtful impact, and for that we are truly sorry. This is a meaningful learning opportunity for our team. We now know that
even without ill-intent, harm can be caused. We recognize that we failed to see our media through other
perspectives. stop@buzzed is run by students and we haven’t all had the experiences in life to show us the perspectives that others have. The article written was eye opening and for that we thank you. In response we have formalized a set of Poster Guidelines that can be found on our myCSBSJU page to guide how we approve posters from here on out.

Thank you again for bringing this to our attention. We sincerely apologize and hope you can have the grace to see this as a learning opportunity for our team. We value all students and will be more aware of how the way we communicate our message could impact others in the future.

With kindness,

stop@buzzed