For those of you who didn’t attend WUStock on Saturday, the atmosphere for headlining band Matt & Kim’s concert was electric. The crowd was engaged, the band was engaged and the South 40 became the place to spend Saturday afternoon. The Congress of the South 40 should be applauded for its planning and execution of the event.

We hope that Team 31 takes a page out of CS40’s book. The Congress was able to work with a booking agent to compile a list of potential bands that went to a student vote. The student body voted for Matt & Kim, writers of the song “Daylight,” and CS40 booked the duo and ran the event for $20,000.

We believe that W.I.L.D. would be much better served if it included more student involvement and provided more transparency when selecting the concert’s lineup. Taking these measures would eliminate criticisms of band selection by the small group of students involved in Team 31 and would add incentive to Team 31 executives to select artists that a plurality of students enjoy.

The recent student experience shows that this change in operating policy is needed. Student reactions to this spring’s headliner Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros have been largely positive; reactions over the selection of Method Man & Redman last fall were often negative. Students generally enjoy the W.I.L.D. experience regardless of the artist, but giving the student body a chance to select its ideal group could boost the overall value of the concert that much more.

We believe that if Team 31 sent out a survey similar to that of CS40 in order to determine what groups (or what type of music) most students wanted to see, attendance and enthusiasm for the concert would increase, and the number of intoxicated students at W.I.L.D. may even decrease. We think that for events such as W.I.L.D., which are designed to entertain students and distract them from the difficulty of school, those very students should be much more involved.

WUStock was an incredible event, and we believe that the student involvement CS40 included was directly responsible for that. We got to see a band that a majority of us were interested in seeing. We think that W.I.L.D. could be much better served if Team 31 followed CS40’s example and tried to get students more involved in the future.