Letter to the Editor

The biggest problem facing school-sponsored events is their perceived lameness. Let’s face it: no one wants to go to a concert with five other audience members. This past Thursday, February 2, I was walking back to Larrabee from the library with a friend at eleven or so when we both heard loud music coming from Cro’s Nest. It didn’t sound like a documentary or the muffled blast of student-crafted hip-hop, and we were intrigued. After some searching, I’ve found the official name of the event: “S2D: A Taste of the Blues.”
A Rhode Island blues band called Young Neal and the Vipers camped out in Cro’s Nest to play a few impressively long sets, and the room looked like a café, complete with a huge buffet of delicious and free southern food (collard greens, grits, mashed sweet potatoes, cornbread, and on and on). The point is that it wasn’t lame. Not even close. But I had no idea it was happening until I stumbled upon it by accident! There was one advertisement on the whiteboard on the first floor of Cro, and the notification was shoved to the bottom of the daily “what’s-happening-on-campus” email, which I’m pretty sure most people ignore in the first place. The Something to Do (S2D) program clearly has good ideas to keep Conn students occupied and entertained, not to mention the resources to make the events happen for free, but routinely falls short when it comes to advertising the events.
I don’t think the problem here is apathy, a catchall phrase that prescribes a lot of problems here. The blues event was well attended, but only in terms of the size of Cro’s Nest. The room was full of people dancing, eating, and hanging out, but there couldn’t have been more than fifty people in the room at any time throughout the night. This is a campus of thousands of students, and I know more kids would have shown up if they’d known about it.
So, perhaps this is an open letter to the S2D council, and FNL, and SAC, and any other acronymic council that’s listening: advertise. As long as you keep coming up with innovative ideas, there will always be people in attendance, but they’ll only come if they know about it. And if, after advertisement, people still don’t take advantage of events like the blues band, then we have another problem. But “A Taste of the Blues” was the most fun event I’ve been to in recent memory, probably because it differed so much from the usual Thursday night fare. The diversion is more than appreciated, S2D, but you have to let us know it’s happening.
-Heather Holmes ’15