Going to the student affairs section of the official UMB website one can see a plethora of the different clubs the campus has to offer. Get this—there’s a Cricket club! Let that sink in for a few moments. There is a union of students who share an interest in all things Cricket—maybe they even play a little. Surprised? Of course you are. There is no promotion of the clubs which focus more on people’s interests. This is not to say that I haven’t been in a situation where someone has come into my Jane Austen course to talk about his…Jane Austen club and all of the cool activities they do. That isn’t to say that I haven’t seen the flyers up in McCormack about UMB’s Anime club (I happen to love anime by the way).however, what is telling is the fact that after more than three years at UMB I still don’t have any clue where the Anime club is and I confess that I have not paid a visit to the Jane Austen club (although I like the movie “Jane Austen Book Club”) very much. The point I’m making here is that the visibility of these interest based clubs is significantly less than the ones on the second and third floors of the campus center.
Compare the kind of publicity that clubs like the Asian Student Center or Casa Latina get to the Anime Club or, for that matter, the aforementioned Cricket Club and you will see what I am talking about. Does the Cricket Club have a cool cubicle/office area to hang out and discuss the things they find important like the culture clubs on campus do? Is the university trying to say that the Knitting Club is less important than the Albanian Club? Does it matter that the Knitting Club doesn’t actually exist? The answer is no! Supposing I actually wanted to start a club where students who enjoyed knitting, reading about knitting, or even just watching other people knit? I just want to know that my club stands a fighting chance of being able to recruit enough members to stay around and to stay relevant. I assure you this would be a lot easier if the other clubs on campus had the same level of visibility as the other clubs.