OU events need more advertisement

As we all know, Human Rights Week began Feb. 15, and ended Feb. 21, or did we?

There were six events involved in the celebration of human rights and thus available to students during Human Rights Week. The participating organizations are as follows: Amnesty International, Center for Social Justice and Sooners for Israel. The other events were presumably coordinated by the University of Oklahoma Student Association.

The events offered were quite spectacular. They included screenings regarding human trafficking, rape in the Congo, as well as a presentation from an Israeli Defense Force soldier.

I contacted UOSA President Franz Zenteno to ask questions regarding the particulars of Human Rights Week.

Zenteno told me quite a few things about the politics of Human Rights Week. I learned all student organizations are given the opportunity to participate, and the week chosen to celebrate human rights awareness is chosen by the international activism coordinator in UOSA.

What I was not made aware of, though, were the specific ways in which UOSA promoted Human Rights Week.

Zenteno informed me it is the responsibility of both UOSA and the organizations participating to promote the events. My question is: where was the promotion?

Zenteno said Human Rights Week’s goal is, “to create a positive awareness of the importance of human rights around the globe.” The recognition of human rights is of the utmost importance; it helps bring awareness of world events to the OU campus. How do they expect to spread awareness when advertisements never reached students?

The only promotion for Human Rights Week that reached me was the Facebook event invitation I received, which invited 3, 518 people to participate in Human Rights Week. OU has approximately 24,000 students attending its Norman campus, so how did the other 20,482 students find out about Human Rights Week?

This question I cannot answer, for I was not made aware of Human Rights Week until Thursday, two days after the events started, by a friend who is involved with UOSA.

After asking many students, friends and strangers on campus about whether they were aware Human Rights Week was underway, the general consensus was “no.”

I scoured the union, campus handouts and corkboards on campus and could not find a single advertisement with information regarding Human Rights Week. Maybe I missed them, or maybe they weren’t there. The only true promotion I saw was on a friend’s Facebook page, in which he had what appeared to be a flier for Human Rights Week posted as his profile picture.

With all things considered, Zenteno claimed the turnout “ha[d] been great,” and UOSA “wished more students could participate though, due to the importance of human rights.”

While I do commend the Facebook invite, that’s not the only way to reach students on campus. So many things could have been done to promote the events of Human Rights Week: chalking or the handing out and posting of fliers are just a few ideas. E-mails from OU advertising these types of events are usually deleted, and although they can be informative, they are rarely read by students. Word of mouth is always a useful way to deliver information and alert students about upcoming events.

Hopefully with the next event or series of events on campus, we can expect to see more promotion from not only the student government, but also the participating organizations.

— Armella Gottschalk, sociology senior


(2011-2-24/oudaily.com)