Op-ed co-written with Rachel Lepine
Recently, we were trying to gather information about a story for the Western Carolina Journalist. Our initial research had us believing that this story was about a fundraiser that went to the athletics club at WCU. That information was far from the truth.
It turned out that the story was not a month long fundraiser, but simply celebrating the ways that people donate to the school. The donations were not going to one club, but many across the whole school. I Love WCU is not an organization itself, just a name for other organizations to use.
Over this entire journey to find out more about I Love WCU, we asked students if they knew about this fundraiser; not a single student knew.
Finding out this information took hours of research, sending many emails, calling numerous phone numbers, and getting sent to many different people.
A lot of the people that we were told would have information only had bits and pieces, very few had the entire story. Even between the faculty and staff communication is difficult, nobody knew who was in charge of this information.
The former director of Annual Giving (advertised as the department in charge of this fundraiser) couldn’t give us much and told us he wasn’t “the right spokesperson.”
You would think that being a donations celebration the school would have the information somewhere about what it was. But what was published, was not very clear.
This event got us thinking, “Why is it so hard to find information on this campus?”
Think about the places to find everything you need to know about the happenings on campus. There is Engage but not everything about the school is listed there.
You could try Instagram but what account or which account would have the information you are looking for?
We looked on the main WCU account for information, but only found one video posted 5 days before the end of the event that announced the contest without explaining what it is.
There are the school newspapers, but even journalists can’t write about everything. If you are desperate you may resort to googling your question and see if something was put on the WCU website (fair warning, many articles written there aren’t dated).
We found an article from WCU Stories that pointed us in the wrong direction for a while. It states, “The focus of “I Love WCU Month” will turn toward student-athletes and members of the Catamount Club during men’s and women’s basketball games in the Liston B. Ramsey Regional Activity Center, with special video presentations during halftime of both contests.”
Many things are almost impossible to find. For instance, did you know that WCU students don’t have to buy a ticket to go to sports events? We didn’t, we only found out through a friend. We searched multiple times for this information, and it was nowhere.
Then the school complains about low attendance at campus events.
The WCJ has published many stories that address issues like Aramark, Advising Day, ableism, global/environmental issues, raising fees, etc. Issues at this school have a major common struggle: misinformation and a lack of communication.
We see this in many departments whenever we gather information for articles or need sources from faculty/staff. Either people of WCU are reluctant to give information or do not know the information for their department.
One example is SGA and their reluctance to give information about the elections. Candidates were not allowed to campaign publicly or talk about the election if they didn’t want to be disqualified. Not many students knew about the election, who was running, etc. In the article, it was found that out of 11,877 students, around 8.74% or 1,039 students voted in the 2021-2022 academic year.
How are students supposed to attend events and participate on campus if there is no uniform, updated, accessible/visible source or place of information?
