For the Formula SAE team at Canada’s Waterloo University, this is a real life version of “Wormer dropping the big one” as their team has been suspended because of a bikini photo involving their car and will be unable to compete in the international competition they designed and built their car for. As lame as the decision is by the university is, it gets worse when you learn that the girl posing in the photo is an integral member of the team and the photo was being used as an entry on a charity calendar to support causes pretaining to women.
In typical beaucratic bullshit-ease, the university said that they were suspending the team for, “misuse of the student design centre space for an unauthorized photo shoot.” It truly stinks that a group of highly motivated, talented, and focused students are having all of their hard work thrown into a trash can because of a photo, which was not obscene, dirty, disrespectful, or wrong in virtually any way. Putting the clamps on the girl who posed would be heavy handed, in our opinion, but canning the whole club is Stalin-esque.
We hope cooler heads prevail in this one and the Formula SAE team gets their shot at heading to the international finals in Michigan. They’ve obviously worked hard to get their stuff together and running, they should definitely be there, bikinis or not.
Thanks to Daphne for the tip!
(Waterloo University suspends Formula SAE team over bikini photo)
As a member of the McGill Racing Team based in Montreal, we’ve openly expressed our support of the Waterloo FSAE team. The female population is often in the minority of engineering student bodies and this kind of topic comes up often in conversation. Frankly, the Waterloo administration blew it, hard.
While not all schools support their student design teams with open arms, they are always quick to condemn and distance themselves from anything that could remotely be viewed as bad press. Guess what? This picture is all over the internet and the story is circulating among campuses worldwide. More than likely, more people have seen this picture because of the school’s reaction. Congratulations.
The German equivalent of FSAE is Formula Student Germany (FSG) and at least two teams used to publish an annual calendar featuring their students. The bottom line is: these the guys AND gals have done this many times before without such a huge controversy.
Universities often openly support or at the very least, facilitate, parties and boozefests disguised as “school events” (Frosh, anyone?). Why Waterloo decided to crush their FSAE team is beyond logic.
You can see some of the reactions from the FSAE community here: http://fsae.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/125607348/m/46120677941?r=12120687941#12120687941
and some examples of other teams’ photo shoots here:
http://racing.sx.fh-stralsund.de/index.php?option=com_phocagallery&view=category&id=57:&Itemid=113
DART used to publish a calendar with their FSAE car but have since switched to an electric Formula competition and were forbidden (?) to make anymore calendars.
http://www.dart-racing.de/cms/de/team-team
Bangshifter and engineering student,
Darren
fsae.mcgill.ca
Ok……where the hell is the car in
the photo?