If you attend U of T, there may be telemarketing calls in your future. After you finish your undergraduate degree, the administration has plans for your personal information, and they include passing it along to corporations affiliated with the university. It’s called the Affinity Program and it generates revenue for a variety of activities at the U of T. Part of the marketing campaign for the program involves telemarketing calls to former U of T undergrads, who may or may not be done with their education. Some of the calls may also be pushing the hard sell, even if you’re still a student.
Laliv Clenman, a Ph.D student, was a target of one such telemarketing campaign, and had to lodge a complaint with the administration because she found MasterCard, one of the companies involved in the program, to be overly aggressive in its marketing tactics. The complaint stems from several calls that Clenman received in October from MBNA U of T MasterCard. (MBNA is an American company that issues credit cards) According to Clenman, the telemarketer that called her home attempted to sign her up for a credit card in her absence by trying to get information through her partner. While the caller did identify himself as being a representative of the company, it’s not clear whether he requested personal information from Clenman’s partner to enroll her in the program. Kyle Winters, the liaison between the university and MasterCard, concedes that representatives of the company are “permitted to extend the offer of a University of Toronto MasterCard to another member of [a] household,” but that trying to obtain personal information without their consent is forbidden. He thinks that Clenman’s partner may have misunderstood what was being offered, and Winters acknowledges that some of the telemarketers for the company speak very quickly, and this is something he has asked the company to change. “I’ve shared this concern with the telemarketing staff and have asked that the pace of the telephone solicitation be reduced,” he notes.
A second thing that Clenman found to be disturbing was MasterCard’s refusal to send information regarding the card to her home. Clenman said she felt overwhelmed by the volume of information she was receiving when the company called her a second time, two weeks later. So she could more fully understand what was being solicited, she asked for information about the card to be mailed to her home. To her surprise, the caller refused, saying this was “not possible.” According to Winters, the administration was not aware MasterCard was refusing to mail information about its products to its potential subscribers and that “this practice will be immediately discontinued and that mail requests [are] be[ing] facilitated.”
As for the general practice of marketing to students, Winters says that Clenman’s name ended up on MasterCard’s phone list because she attended U of T as an undergraduate. He defends the program on a whole, noting that it’s not the company’s policy to target undergraduate students, and the Affinity Program produces money for many divisions of the university.
