Zoe Oppenheimer | Student Life

After the cancellation of the Fall 2022 semester’s WILD, administrators discussed how their planning process has changed and why they are hopeful that spring WILD will be a success. Spring WILD is currently scheduled to take place on Friday, April 28. 

Fall 2022 WILD was canceled after capacity constraints on Brookings Quadrangle forced Washington University’s Student Programming Board (SPB) and administrators to try to find last-minute solutions. Despite the fact that the event is more than three months away, planning for WILD is ongoing. Rob Wild, Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Dean of Students, described the cancellation as something he “wish[es]” did not happen but could serve as “a learning experience.” According to Jasmine James, who serves as SPB’s advisor and Campus Life’s Coordinator for Programming and Marketing, SPB and administrators are trying to find solutions to ensure that the event takes place. 

Student Life reached out to the student leadership of SPB, who declined to comment on this story. SPB President Miri Goodman stated in an email, “[We] don’t really have many updates at the moment for WILD. We are still in the process of planning for the spring and working with our campus partners to make sure the event is successful.”

James wants to make sure that SPB feels “comfortable” throughout the planning process. She attributed the lack of comfort some SPB members felt last semester during the planning process to the loss of organizational knowledge during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“I [don’t] think that they’re uncomfortable, but they’ve never seen a WILD, they haven’t planned something to the scale before so I want them to feel comfortable in doing all of this,” she said. “I feel like [planning WILD is] a kind of adult work, which isn’t always what students are used to.”

To remedy this issue and provide students with the resources needed to run the concert, James has stayed in contact with SPB during winter break. The group’s first meeting with campus partners took place on Monday, Jan. 23. In addition to having more time to plan out the event, SPB student leadership and James will be attending a conference run by the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA) in Louisville, KY next month. 

Peggy Hermes, the associate director for campus life, hopes that attending the conference will help rebuild some of the institutional knowledge lost during the pandemic. 

The conference aims to teach students how to run events on their campuses in a way that is safe, successful and entertaining. Hermes described NACA as “an international organization that includes members that include different college campuses, industry professionals, vendors, agencies, artists, etc.” 

SPB had attended the event pre-COVID; James said that the knowledge of the NACA conference’s existence “was lost during COVID, too,” further accentuating the importance of attending this event. 

One contentious aspect of fall WILD’s planning was determining if the event should be ticketed, so that it could be held in Brookings Quadrangle as opposed to another venue. 

Wild described some of the ticketing related hiccups and stated that, “If you have more time to prepare for [WILD], [ticketing] is easier to manage,” he said. “That was one of the crisis points we had in the fall. We just didn’t have a lot of lead time to develop a ticketing solution.”

When asked if the upcoming WILD would involve tickets, Hermes responded with, “I think that is just going to be dependent on the venue.” 

Stan Sweeney, the Executive Director of Campus Life, described a range of ticket options.

“I’ve been in institutions… where students don’t go free, but they get a cheaper ticket price — it’s only subsidized,” he said. “So, you know, I think that’s kind of the practice that I’m used to.”

Sweeney echoed the point that the decision to ticket the event will be dependent on the venue. He also expressed that SPB will have to take in many different factors before deciding to ticket the event. 

One potential issue with ticketing is that it deviates from the tradition of WILD, an event that has never been ticketed. Dean Wild acknowledged that ticketing “is not the history and tradition of WILD at WashU.” As of right now, Wild “[doesn’t] know what SPB is going to decide.”

Administrators are planning on using the cancellation of last semester’s WILD as a learning experience, and are hoping the event takes place this spring. They repeatedly conveyed their three main goals for the concert: “to have WILD, to make sure that it is safe, and to make sure that it is student-led,” said Wild. “I think it’s just important for all students to know that we want WILD to happen.” 

Wild made sure to highlight the last of the three goals and state the importance of this being a student-run event.

“If you wanted WILD to be a university event, the four of us can just do it,” he said, referring to James, Sweeney, Hermes, and Wild. “Give us the money, we’ll just go hire a company to do it, but that’s not what WILD is. WILD is a student-run concert and we are here to ensure that [it] happens.”