As you probably know, we are in the early rounds of the Mr. Campus Freshman contest right now, as Windsor explained last week. Each of our 24 My Campus branches is hosting a Mr. Campus Freshman contest at their school (e.g., Mr. Harvard Freshman, Mr. JMU Freshman, etc.). The winners from each school’s contest will then compete against one another in a couple weeks for the title of Mr. Campus Freshman! It’s a fun, entertaining contest based off of the Mr. Harvard Freshman Contest that Windsor launched at Harvard when we ran Harvard’s lifestyle and fashion online magazine before starting Her Campus.
However, it seems that this lighthearted contest has generated a lot of controversy over at Wellesley! Wellesley is an all-women’s college, so the Her Campus Wellesley team had students nominate guys they know to compete for the title of Mr. Wellesley Freshman and then represent Her Campus Wellesley in the national Mr. Campus Freshman contest amongst all our branches.
But, many women at Wellesley are up in arms over the fact that Her Campus Wellesley is going to be represented by a guy from another school, rather than by a transgender student at this women’s college.
We’ve been receiving TONS of emails from Wellesley students over the past few days voicing their thoughts and expressing their concerns over this issue. We have loved receiving all this feedback so that we can use it to make changes to next year’s contest and inform our understanding of Wellesley’s women – whom Her Campus Wellesley is meant to serve – and how we run Her Campus Wellesley in the future.
We thought we’d also share some of the feedback we’ve been getting with all of you, so that you can weigh in on it and tell us what you think! I’ll paste some of the emails we’ve been getting from Wellesley students about this (with the senders’ names anonymous) over the next few blog posts.
Please leave comments!! We are open to any and all feedback- hearing from you helps us to best embody our mission of serving college women.
To get us started, here is a post on Wellesleyfml.com about this very issue (you might need to scroll down).