The Duke University Union discussed creating a new committee in its first meeting of the new academic year Tuesday.
President Zachary Perret, a senior, introduced the idea to create a traditions committee that would help maintain the return of annual University events such as Tailgate, Last Day of Classes and Joe College Day.
"Every now and then some group will start a tradition and keep it going for a few years," Perret said. "The trouble is that these traditions are not up-kept in terms of drinking objectives-and when that happens things get shut down."
He noted that excessive drinking was one of the contributing factors that led to Joe College Day getting shut down during its initial run from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s.
"The [traditions] that we have built I think are worth protecting," he added.
A few DUU members were uncertain about the exact capacity that the traditions committee would serve, not only in DUU but with other groups.
The traditions committee would not take over any event from any of the other existing committees, Perret said. One function it could serve is taking charge of annual events that committees no longer wish to coordinate. It also would not interfere with traditional events that other groups such as Campus Council and Duke Student Government perform, but would offer its assistance to those groups if possible.
Some members of DUU were apprehensive about the idea of creating a traditions committee.
"I don't really know if I like it because the thing about traditions is that they're kept up only by the passion of the students themselves," said Senior Merideth Bajana, Cable 13 co-president.
She added that if the originial committee has no desire to continue a specific event, then handing it over to the traditions committee may just continue events that students no longer want.
"I don't agree with the idea of creating another entity because we have [the Union Consulting Group]," said Senior Lacey Kim, executive marketing co-director of the special projects committee. "Most of the traditional events have a committee or [are] a big part of a committee, so I just feel like adding a committee is kind of redundant."
Perret said the idea for a traditions committee was a commonly held idea that had been circulating through DUU for a few months. Various forms of a traditions committee are in place in student programming boards at other universities, he added.
The idea will be discussed further in next week's meeting and a decision could be made in the next three or four weeks.
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