The University of Wisconsin-Madison could use a little help in a few key areas. State funding for professor salaries would be useful, financial aid is certainly lagging, and it would be nice if someone could give the folks over at Associated Students of Madison a helping hand with that whole “Student Government” thing.

However, one could hardly argue we suffer from a dearth of student publications on campus. In addition to the two student newspapers, there is a music-oriented quarterly, a humanities-oriented quarterly, the occasional rogue satire newspaper and a per-semester cultural arts magazine published in conjunction with the journalism school. Add in the Wisconsin State Journal, Isthmus, Onion and Capital Times, and it’s obvious there is no lack of reading material on this campus.

But, apparently, you haven’t read anything “until you’ve read RED.”

Yeah, we thought it was a typo too.

On Monday, the campus racks held the promise of a new student periodical called RED Magazine, an 80-page glossy wonder purporting to cover “everything college.”

For those who’ve not had a chance to experience “everything college” or pick up this comprehensive student summary, here’s what it consists of:

• An analysis of the sconnie-coastie divide, which seems to affirm the stereotypes it attempts to dismiss — including a bizarre conception of the “sconnie” stereotype, which looks like a homeless Kim Basinger.
• A front-page feature on students who “do more than just spend their days in class and nights in bars” — which assumes people don’t know who Allan Evridge is.
• A romance column that assumes courtship was only thrown into nerve-wracking complications with the invention of text messaging.
• A position run-down of the presidential candidates that includes embryonic stem cell research under “civil rights” and has a rare moment of candor by admitting all candidate positions are “subject to change.”

RED also comes with bonus materials such as countless typos, garish design and other generic articles that encapsulate the idea of “college.”

But our ultimate dissatisfaction is not borne out of their choice of content. Rather, it’s the fact that our chancellor’s office actually funded this project. On the inside cover of RED, Casey Nagy, special assistant to the chancellor, is quoted as saying, “You’ve created a wonderful concept; it deserves a chance.” This is the same chancellor’s office, remember, that was run at the time by John Wiley, who was last seen telling us how dire the university’s financial situation was in Madison Magazine.

Sure, RED deserves a chance — in the free market. Subsidizing an unproven publication that fills no niche so they can produce 14,000 issues doesn’t give them a chance; it gives them crutches.

Perhaps RED will be able to sustain itself on advertising revenue, and this magazine is just a test run. But whether we need — or want — a magazine like this should be decided by consumers and advertisers, not the chancellor’s office.