Why Iowa State’s VEISHEA celebration should be retired
By Brian Spaen
Yesterday, Iowa State officially retired VEISHEA, but that didn’t stop people from trying to revive it already on social media.
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The first question I have from the people that are behind this — is it through good intentions? Are they trying to revive activities for students to do or is it just to invite their friends to drink?
If it’s the latter, it’s exactly why the event is no longer a thing. Some people that are upset over this are the people that are upset they don’t have a whole week to invite their out-of-town buddies rom all over to drink. That’s not what VEISHEA actually is.
In fact, VEISHEA in itself doesn’t even exist anymore. Originally celebrating the colleges of veterinary medicine, engineering, industrial science, home economics, and agriculture, the colleges have now changed but the week-long celebration continued under the same name. Some don’t even consider VEISHEA an acronym anymore; the Iowa State Daily just spells it as a capitalized word, “Veishea”.
Of course, I feel bad for everyone involved in the actual VEISHEA activities that were organized by the committee ran by the school. They spend a whole year setting up the activities on campus. Stuff that actually acknowledged what VEISHEA was. The events that lots of people didn’t even know were happening because they were busier figuring out when and where they were going to drink all week/weekend long.
Honestly, the week-long tradition morphed into a ugly scene in Ames that people ended up dreading more than celebrating, especially those that aren’t students in town. VEISHEA needs to be retired — it needed to be retired long ago — and perhaps the school can restart a celebration that doesn’t result into a week of random people coming into Ames and destroying everything.
Why in the hell would they care if something gets smashed? They’ll ship their incredibly hungover self out of the area the next day.
If people want to revive this event, they should just remove the VEISHEA name for good. It looks like they are setting up activities for students and actually have a new acronym — DEFINOVE, which certainly doesn’t have the same ring to it. But it will have to take the power of the people behind this to keep it from becoming a week-long drunk idiot marathon, and that will be incredibly hard to do.