Are you looking for a comprehensive list of student organizations on campus that will provide you with information about the group, their leaders, upcoming events, links to their websites or social media pages and accurate contact information? Well, good luck.
There are two different ways by which you could potentially access some (although not all) of this information.
The University of Tulsa has a page on their website titled “Student Organizations” which is a very basically formatted list that provides the name and type of organization. Some of the organizations on the list are hyperlinked to websites associated with the organization. However, the list is not comprehensive, more than half of the listed organizations don’t have linked websites, and a handful of the linked sites are no longer actively used by the organization.
For a slightly improved user experience you can sign into TU OrgSpace, an inefficient and underused website for which SA pays more than $5,000 dollars a year. Although the site provides more direct access to clubs, it still does not include every student organization and the event calendar has not been updated since April 30, 2016. In addition the site looks like it was created for Windows XP and hasn’t been updated since.
SA and TU could both do much better. An easy to use and navigate organization list could boost student participation, and would actually be fairly simple to create and maintain. Instead of paying for the use of a website, a regularly updated version of the list on the utulsa website with links to the organizations’ social media accounts or websites they regularly use would be sufficient. Because SA has easy access to information about active organizations through regular interaction, it would be a simple and straightforward job to create and maintain such a list. It would then be incumbent on organizations themselves to regularly update their social media or websites with working contact information and events.
It can’t possibly be a meaningless correlation that both student participation and access to accurate information about student organizations are in short supply. Our lack of participation on campus is not some ‘generational lack of involvement’. We want to participate, but in general we only hear about events and organizations through word of mouth and social media. If TU and SA are committed to student involvement, than they should make it an easier task.
