No One Showed up to “Greet the Press,” Big Surprise
By Alexander Marriott UNLV Rebel Yell: May 1, 2003

Last Wednesday no one attended CSUN’s “Greet the Press” event except the guy who organized it (Dallas Fueston) and several other people. This paper has said that Mr. Fueston couldn’t understand why so few people turned out, despite heavy promotion of the event through flyers. Here’s a hint, if everyone wanted to sleep they could have just as easily gone home or stayed in their dorm.

Seriously though, I saw the flyers all over the place, but at no point did I ever come into contact with anything justifying the taking of my time to go to see it. It wasn’t made clear to me why I would be any better off going to “Greet the Press” event than just staying home and watching television, or writing those pesky term papers that are due. In fact the only real reason I can see for going to the event would be to have this silly charge, of the campus being “apathetic,” not leveled again.

As far as I can tell the students who attend this college have better things to do than to come and listen to journalists explain their craft, which I’m assuming you could hear in a journalism class if it interested you that much. All you have to do to tell that the people on campus care about politics and world around them is to ask them, any student here seems perfectly willing and able to forward their opinions on almost any conceivable topic.

To tell that perhaps there was a poor job done in marketing this event, or selecting it in the first place, one needs to recognize the fact that there are a great number of older students who go to UNLV, and the older one gets the more non-apathetic one usually becomes. Yet none of these older students, save for one senior citizen, showed up at this event. Even the people who are more likely to care didn’t care to “Greet the Press,” and to blame the students at large for this, saying that they are “apathetic” is to just keep up this cycle of stupid events that no one attends.

Perhaps if CSUN attempted to host debates on hot-button topics, that the students are arguing about all the time, between faculty or students, or bringing in academics for the specific purpose of arguing, then attendance would go up. Or if in marketing these things to students CSUN appealed to the self-interest of the students, making it clear why any given event is important to them, or providing vittles, given that it is our money they are spending anyway. It isn’t free pizza if we students are bankrolling CSUN.

Also, let’s be realistic, we’re not going to get a Berkeley-type (in terms of activism) campus in Las Vegas. There is already tons of stuff here for people who are just becoming adults to do, and campus events have to compete with these other activities for a person’s time. Also, a great number of those who attend class live on the other side of town and work as well and cannot be expected to show up at all campus events.

This is the reality of the situation on campus and instead of constantly crying about people not attending the snooze-fests they are planning, perhaps CSUN should reconsider what events they want to invest in and consider their audience a little better in the future.

On one last note, if the campus is truly just apathetic, why does CSUN keep hosting these types of events? Are they just stupid? If we’re apathetic to all of these, “Get to know your community” types of events perhaps they should cater to what the apathetic people want to see (gratuitous nudity) or perhaps they shouldn’t do anything at all and just send us students a refund check.