Last week, the OU history department invited graduate students and faculty from various universities to present papers at the Mid-America Conference here at OU. This was a great opportunity for all involved.
It’s just that an unprecedentedly small number of undergraduate students were involved.
No one knew about it.
I am a history major, and I am currently in four undergraduate history courses. No one at this university mentioned this conference to me, e-mailed me or in any other way communicated with me about the event.
As far as I could tell, the history department’s Web site didn’t mention the conference.
Shortly after the conference I searched the OU Web site for a mention of it.
It seems the only entity that announced the conference was The Oklahoma Daily. However, as one who doesn’t always read the whole paper, I didn’t learn of the conference in this way.
Nor did anyone I talked to at the conference.
At the very least this demonstrated the limited ability of The Daily in informing students of university events.
I learned of this conference from my brother who doesn’t attend OU. He was presenting a paper at the conference.
I was lucky.
Much more could have been done to inform students of the conference. It could have been announced in class, an e-mail could have been sent, even if it were just to history majors.
But that didn’t happen.
Despite the poor communication about the conference, some undergraduate students attended, but not many.
Matthew DeSpain, Ph.D., informed his undergraduate students about the conference. I saw a couple other students who looked like undergrads, and I think they were probably in DeSpain’s class. Or maybe they were students who actually read the whole paper. I may never know.
To my knowledge, that’s the limit of the outreach to undergraduates.
The conference wasn’t even at OU. They had it five miles away at Embassy Suites, as though we don’t already have facilities for this sort of thing.
Because of this, students didn’t even have the opportunity to happen upon it accidentally.
There wasn’t even a shuttle available for students.
Luckily the weather was pleasant, and I could ride my bike to the conference.
In the hallway after one of the panels, I talked with a few people about the lack of publicity. No one had read the about it in The Daily.
One person said it felt like someone was trying to prevent undergraduates from attending the conference; like it was ashamed of us.
Another person suggested the opposite. Undergraduates weren’t invited because they might ask questions the presenters couldn’t answer. He said the conference was a Potemkin Village. The whole thing was orchestrated to make the graduate students presenting papers more comfortable. Tough questions from undergrads would spoil these plans.
He said we shouldn’t be killing their chutzpah with our insolent questions.
Cloistering graduate students from cheeky undergrads does not prepare them for academia. If anything it does the opposite.
I don’t know why they didn’t make a serious effort to invite undergraduate students to the conference. It was a great opportunity, but a missed opportunity.
It was a mistake not to better publicize the event, and because of this mistake, a lot of people missed a great opportunity.
I wonder what other great opportunities at OU we’re not hearing about.
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Tank 2 years, 7 months ago
Hey, you may just need to check with the History department about the email because I am an undergrad history major and I received an email about the conference.
Also, if you go the homepage of the History department there is a little blurb about the conference in the lower right hand corner of the homepage with a link to a website with more information. I'll admit it is hard to find, but that is where I initially found out about it earlier this summer.
Also, it was mentioned in one of my classes.
The funny thing is, I completely agree, it could have been better publicized. I wish OU had an event calendar that incorporated everything happening on campus or off campus and was easier to navigate than the OUdaily calendar. It would be nice if the university sent out an email with all the scheduled events each month.
eightbitgirl 2 years, 7 months ago
I do know that two of my history professors did make a mention of it; one actively encouraged us to attend for extra credit. The other two didn't. Even though I only have those classes one night a week, I wish they would have at least made a passing reference.
However, you're right - most of the other history majors I've spoken to had absolutely no idea, and the little tiny link in the corner of the history department's website was kind of pathetic in spreading the news of the conference.