UCLA administration canceled the Bruin tradition Undie Run on July 29, citing concerns about campus safety due to the ever increasing number of non-UCLA students partaking in the event.
Nevertheless, undergraduate student government councilmembers Addison Huddy, Tim Mullins and Jason Tengco have formed an Undie Run coalition to reinstate the jog through campus. The Undie Run coalition worked to pass a USAC resolution in August, calling for talks between councilmembers and the administration.
“It was the opinion of USAC for the coalition to work with the administration to find feasible solutions to the Undie Run,” Huddy said.
Huddy, Mullins and Tengco met with three administrators including Robert Naples, the associate vice chancellor and dean of students, to propose innovative solutions to reinstating the Undie Run.
“Our main goal is student safety. But Undie Run is a campus tradition and we intend to try and persuade the administration to restart talks with us about its future,” Huddy said. “We wanted to get the conversation started.”
The main concern for the decision to cancel the event centered on the fact that Undie Run had spread to the Los Angeles community where participants from outside areas would participate and , may not have UCLA’s best interests at heart.
According to Huddy, an important step in appealing to the UCLA administration about their decision to cancel Undie Run would have to involve a way to limit outsiders from participating in what should be an exclusively Bruin event.
Although Huddy would not reveal what suggestions the Undie Run coalition made to the administrators, he did cite the meeting as an important step in working to reinstate the event.
Different circumstances and concerns for student safety surround unofficial campus events at other schools such as Halloween at UC Santa Barbara.
Halloween at UCSB is an example of students participating in an unofficial campus event but the difference is that the event does not take place on campus grounds.
“The university cannot regulate Halloween because the partying happens on private property surrounding the campus,” said Carolyn Buford, the associate dean and executive director of student life and academic support services at UCSB.
Because Halloween happens on county land, the sheriffs tend to be in charge of policing the situation.
“They usually have a couple of hundred officers from the sheriff’s department patrolling the area and because the events happen on private property they maintain zero tolerance ““ they arrest on site,” Buford added.
At UC Berkeley there are no such large-scale events such as the quarterly Undie Run, however smaller events do take place.
“Some co-ops have naked runs through the library but they’re on a smaller scale and they don’t involve the whole school,” said Leslie Toy, a second-year English student at UC Berkeley and a writer for the Daily Californian.
These events are generally sponsored by clubs or co-ops, and do not utilize university funds or garner a lot of attention due to the small number of students who participate.
“The key to keep them going on is to be random, sporadic and small-scale,” Toy added.