During my underclassman years, everywhere you looked, students were wearing merch from affinity spaces and clubs. My favorite thing about Concord Academy was seeing a person not affiliated with an affinity space wearing a piece of their merch. In the list of things “we cultivate,” according to CA’s mission statement, empathy is the first. The merch culture was, then, the most CA thing possible — celebrating each other’s communities and empathising with one another’s experiences. These days, that is no longer the case. The merch landscape is sparse, and a large chunk of the merch is dominated by a singular club — TARITA Foundation.
Why the shift away? This year, the change from each club having its own funds to a shared funding pool disincentivizes fundraising heavily from both the clubs’ and the members’ perspectives. Club coheads know they will have shared money either way, so there isn’t much pressure to create good-looking merch and promote it. Club members’ money isn’t going to specific clubs anyway, so they aren’t helping support a club with their purchase. The administration’s new system means that both the effort it takes to run a club and the contributions students can make to groups they care about are devalued.
These reasons might not have mattered for affinity spaces, for which visibility is vital; however, this year, CA also banned affinity spaces from producing merch, citing sustainability reasons. Despite the countless other, much more wasteful practices at CA, like shirts created from single-day events, this double standard isn’t the largest issue with the ban. The real cost is the reduced visibility of affinity spaces. While walking through the hallways in 2023, one might have seen hoodies proudly promoting Men of Color Alliance or the creative “Gaywatch” (styled alike to a lifeguard uniform) hoodies promoting Gender-Sexuality Alliance. Today, they’re nowhere to be seen, not because of a fundamental shift in the student body, but because of deliberate decisions by the school administration.
CA’s merch is coming to its sad end, not because of a calculated plan from above to get rid of it, but because the administration is out of touch with the student body. This lack of care shows up in other aspects of our CA lives, too. In the years prior, all students had access to boarder bikes — a set of community bikes that anyone could borrow at any time. With the departure of the man responsible for them, John McGarry, the bikes are yet to be even mentioned, over halfway through the school year, despite numerous requests for them from myself and the rest of the student body.
It is clear that the end of merch culture is only one in a long list of symptoms of a larger problem — decisions being made not just without the student body, but by those who fundamentally do not understand what students really want.