By Abby Rathbun
I hope you enjoyed Welcome Weekend here at the University of Louisville. I wouldn’t know how it went. I was at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I went to a concert by Matt Nathanson, a national recording artist with a Top 40 hit under his belt. We had, oh wait, our Student Activities Board, SAB, didn’t get anyone.
Before you point out our woeful condition as a university, let me remind you that Miami of Ohio is a public university about 45 minutes from Cincinnati, with a fairly similar student body population.
Why can our SAB not bring us a concert? I don’t think U of L should have a problem getting an artist or band to perform. We are a major metropolitan university, with national attention from our sports programs and a large student body.
I completely understand that it takes work and effort to pull off something like this. Is that why we don’t have anything so grand? It’s not just Miami of Ohio.
I saw Lifehouse, another national recording band with Top 40 hits, at Welcome Weekend at the University of Cincinnati a few years ago. If there is a more comparable university in the U.S., I certainly cannot think of it. It is, similarly, a commuter college, with an undergraduate and graduate population very close to U of L’s, only 90 miles away. It is also in an urban setting, in a less than perfect neighborhood.
If both Miami and Cincinnati can have great opening weekends, why can’t we? Because SAB needs to step up and aim higher than just the status quo. If Louisville is ever to transition from a commuter school to a more traditional, cohesive university, it needs to begin with the SAB working to bring students together. If people are going to make an effort to stay on campus, or to go back to campus, it should be for something worthwhile, not a showing of a movie. There is obvious dedication to Louisville football and basketball; it is the duty of SAB to transition that dedication and passion from sports to general campus life and to the university as a whole.
I won’t be at the next Welcome Weekend, but my hope for the freshmen of 2010 is that SAB can actually put together something worth attending.
