Fearing infringing the University’s trademarks and subsequent cease and desist requests, this piece is eschewing using the alphabet’s fifteenth letter.

Well, well, it seems that, yet again, the University has pushed an absurdist agenda that squelches free speech while unsuccessfully establishing undue influence regarding student statements. Last year, University marketers charged student clubs with printing the new, pre-affirmed University insignia with every pamphlet, business card and all printed material that the clubs distribute.
Student interests lambasted the University executives, claiming that they were illegitimately infringing First Amendment rights while burdening clubs with large reprinting expenditures; the clubs rallied, seeking the embattled guidelines’ reversal. Students triumphed, and using the University’s hues and ideas linked with its image was safe again. Briefly, anyway.
During the last several weeks, Zach, a Lundquist business graduate, started selling self-made calendars depicting twelve fair University girls cuddling in Jacuzzis, leaning in a bathing area, washing sudsy cars and the like.
The texts supplier at Alder Street and 13th Avenue that bears the University’s name briefly carried the calendar, and a representative there said Zach had cleared the item with the University’s trademark management department. Zach denied telling the retailer that the department had rubber-stamped the calendar.
Recently, the University’s trademark management department sent Zach a letter, requesting that he cease selling the calendars. Apparently, Zach using the University’s hues, students and defining letter laid unacceptably near infringing the University’s half-defined identity.
Zach pulled the calendars, but his lawyer suggested that the trademark management department lacked a sensible legal basis, and he was back vending them just a few days later.
While he isn’t in a legal bind yet, the calendars’ revived sales might yet incite a lawsuit.
That the University wants nary a link with the calendar makes sense. A bureaucrat might find it challenging answering a parent’s angry inquiry regarding their daughter’s presence in a green-and-lightning calendar featuring girls in garments that are at best skimpy. But that needn’t interfere with a private businessman selling a clearly legal item.
In fact, any legal act against Zach and his calendar business breaches the University’s design and just cause alike. The University graduating a business student, and less than a term later needlessly curtailing his legal business activities in misguided self-interest, sets a bad precedent.
Likewise, the University hasn’t any trademark claim with its students, hues and alphabetic letters, and Zach likely hasn’t unfairly used any blend that weds the emblems.
As it stands, the alphabet’s fifteenth letter might terminate its Sesame Street backing, lest partisans at the trademark management demand that PBS pull a green Kermit and a canary Big Bird.