Does Vindicat suck at public relations? Yes ánd no

This week, the Dutch news cycle was pretty much dominated by just one small student association: ‘Vindicat atque polit’ from the - also small - town of Groningen. Vindicat is not just a regular student association, but a ‘corps’ – which is impossible to translate to English. Nonetheless, what distinguishes a corps from a regular student association is that the hazing (‘ontgroening’) might be somewhat harsher, the blustering (‘brallen’) a little louder and the banga lists a bit rougher – wait, what?

The banga list riot

Yes, you heard it right: some sorority students of Vindicat made a ‘banga list’, another fancy Dutch word that stands for a list with girls on it that are rated in order of how ‘doable’ they are in the eyes of the guys that drafted the list. On September the 22th, the website sikkom.nl published a story, in which they claimed that they obtained this banga list after they were tipped anonymously. This not only created a fuss in itself, but journalists kept digging and revealed that during this year’s hazing a student was kicked out of conscience, and that students who talk about these (or any other Vindicat-related) matters to the media must pay the board of Vindicat a sum of 25.000 (!) euro’s. You might expect this extraordinary series of bad media coverage to happen, because (as Harcup & O’Neill (2001) point out), bad news and follow up-stories are significant news values. But now, eight days later, Vindicat is the ‘loser’ of this media week. So how could this story be so huge?

How could this happen?

What is good to know first, is that Vindicat is a very mysterious, aloof organisation that is shy of any press. They therefore don’t have anyone in their board who is responsible for press contacts, for example. As a consequence of this, they just aren’t used to release press statements. This is exactly why they couldn’t control the media cycle that followed upon the banga list scandal. As Craig et al.

 (2014) learn us, it is possible to avoid negative consequences from negative coverage - but the first and foremost condition to do so is that you have to respond to it. If you don’t respond at all, then you miss the chance to neutralise all the negativity. Vindicat didn’t release a single statement until the 28^th (about the student that was kicked on the head) and the 29^th of September (about the sorority ‘culture’). At that time, politicians – and even the Minister of Education - were already discussing the student culture at Vindicat.

Smart use of culture

However, in the end Vindicat played it smart. In the press release they state that they will set up a  ‘’reassessment committee’’, that will ‘investigate’ the ‘culture’ within Vindicat. This seems like a very soft measure, but the Dutch have a longstanding tradition of setting up committees and trying to find consensus so this will keep everyone happy. As Barend and Van Gorp (2007) lay out, frames are often culturally determined – and the fact that the Dutch love to take part in the poldermodel makes the ‘committee’-frame a very smart chosen one.

Arnout Maat (#10003310) studied history, political science and political communication at the University of Amsterdam.