Poor campus communication:
Is advertising or apathy to blame?

Would you know if Wesleyan needed to close for a week due to an electrical shortage? If you were a commuter, you probably wouldn’t find out until you arrived for one of your classes and saw that the entire campus was without electricity. If you were lucky, there might have been someone at the gate to fill you in, but most likely you wouldn’t have known about the situation until you showed up on campus.

If something significant occurred on campus, students would probably hear about it from word-of-mouth or on the news (it has been known to happen). But seriously, are you aware of what is happening on campus? If you check your mailbox you may find handouts, or you may occasionally notice a posting, but do you feel knowledgeable about the activities, events, and problems that take place on campus? Students are bound to hear about SOME events through advertising and announcements from professors; however, the key word to note is SOME. We should be aware of all the happenings on campus.

For those of you who don’t know, Native American art is on display in the library, Measure for Measure is a play currently running in Hofheimer theater, and yearbook pictures were taken a couple of weeks ago. Good, bad, or ridiculous, these are the types of occurrences that we should be hearing or reading about. Maybe more “Day One” handouts should be circulating, or maybe we should designate one obvious bulletin board on which enormous amounts of information could be posted. Perhaps making use of our e-mail accessibility would do the trick. Could the entire campus community somehow receive news updates via e-mail?

After contemplating these various questions, we must also consider the possibility that students are just becoming less interested in the information that is offered. It is feasible that students are so preoccupied with their jobs or with their families that they have no extra time to become an active participant on campus. If our yearbook ends up containing the same amount of pages as one issue of the Chronicle, is it due to a lack of communication or a lack of interest? It most likely is due to a little bit of both. If people are failing to be present at certain events, it is important for us to determine whether or not the lackluster attendance is due to poor campus communication.