Maggie Malin, Special to The Denisonian—
The Alford Community Leadership and Involvement Center (CLIC) office said goodbye to two of its six staff members in March, who left behind a plan and a firm campus-wide presence.
Patrick Fina, former Associate Director of CLIC now works as the Director of Student Life at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL.
CLIC’s former Administrative Assistant since January 2022, Mara Cannon, continues her Denison career with the Alumni and Family Engagement team, where she can pursue more of the face-to-face event-programming-based responsibilities that she prefers.
“April’s the busiest month on campus,” said Cannon, acknowledging that the office was “apprehensive as to what to expect” going from six to four staff members during this time of high demand.
Cannon’s previous management responsibilities represent much of CLIC’s functionality and include club budgets and contracts, student CLIC employees, and the organization’s community service endowment. These responsibilities have been delegated among the remaining staff. Through “working together” and “utilizing [their] student workers to help with some of the communication,” Cannon said the office intends to carry on “business as usual” for the remainder of the semester.
CLIC has dealt with large-scale staff shifts before, so they know how to handle them.
“The office has been preparing for the departures,” said Jakob Lucas ‘24, a Student Office Assistant for CLIC.
Lucas believes “CLIC is operating as normal” while actively seeking to fill the staff absences, and that “students should not be concerned” about any club functions falling through.
In the past three years, CLIC’s “presence on campus has definitely grown,” Lucas said. This growth is chiefly visible through the online organizational platform WhatToDU, developed by Fina and current CLIC Director Dana Pursley and launched for the 2021–22 academic year.
Emily Vermillion, CLIC’s Associate Director of Service and Civic Engagement since December 2021, didn’t work at Denison before WhatToDU existed, nor is she aware of there having been a direct call from the student body to instate such a platform, but she heard “how challenging it was” for the CLIC staff to assemble all the behind-the-scenes pieces (emails, Google Form responses, phone calls) that went into student event planning.
Vermillion described the platform as a “one-stop shop” for students and faculty alike. She feels as if the campus population is reaching the point where WhatToDU usage is the expectation and the norm. Many of the students for whom the multi-step scheduling process feels “like pulling teeth” are either graduating or learning, Vermillion said.
The platform will continue to be maintained by Vermillion, Lucas, and other CLIC employees. Its usage is a continued requirement for student organizations, and a heavily-encouraged tool for the student body as a whole.
Another marker of CLIC’s recent expansion into day-to-day student life is the Slayter posting policy, officially enacted in January. Despite its newness, Lucas joked that this policy is what CLIC is best known for— a number of students have learned by trial and error this semester that their posters require their club logo, relevant contact information, and an expiration-date stamp from the CLIC office in order to advertise their events in Slayter.
Like WhatToDU, the posting policy arose from a need identified by administration, in this case “trying to manage the sheer amount of flyers in [Slayter],” to “highlight and elevate” department-hosted or organization-related campus events, and to “decrease the amount of non-approved events;” that is, events not sponsored by a registered club or “random” posters unrelated to events entirely.
On the whole, CLIC is proud of Fina and Pursley’s joint creation and is well-equipped to keep running it. Where there exists an admittedly administration-centric edge to CLIC’s student life solutions, their outcomes intend to remain student-focused— it seems to have been working so far.