Big Happenings on Campus

Local colleges and universities are great places to see up-and-coming bands, world-class speakers and more, often cheap. Here’s how to stay on top of what’s coming to campus.

By John Rossheim for MSN City Guides

You know how it goes: The day after that rising star of a singer-songwriter appears on your local university campus, you find out about it by stumbling on a concert review in the paper. Or you see a poster in the corner café for a great-sounding film festival that’s too soon to fit into your calendar.

Whether you’re a few years out of college or a few decades, odds are you feel that if you could only find out about campus happenings open to the public—and discover them early enough to plan to attend—you’d get to many more free or modestly priced diverse, high-quality events.

Take one example: The Milwaukee School of Engineering’s radio station sponsors concerts with up-and-coming bands on its downtown campus, says spokesperson Kathleen McCann. If you live in the Milwaukee area and were paying attention, “you could have caught Fall Out Boy or Motion City Soundtrack here for peanuts, but now you have to shell out a chunk of change to hear them at big venues.

How to find that hidden gem

You might discover hot-ticket events by reading your newspaper’s entertainment section. But when it comes to the rich array of more intimate happenings put on by many colleges and universities, the balkanization of academia makes it difficult to keep abreast of campus goings-on.

“The wider community may not know about the sheer volume of public events that take place on any university campus,” says Liam Otten, a spokesperson for Washington University in St. Louis. Why? “Many events are organized by individual departments rather than by the college or university as whole, which means that information often comes out as a patchwork.”

Of course, you can browse college happenings the old-fashioned way. “There’s a campus walkway under a busy street that’s the site of officially sanctioned student graffiti” that advertise events, says Otten. But if you want to be more systematic about it, you may need to do a monthly or weekly check of the Web pages of various departments or sign up for their e-newsletters highlighting upcoming public events.

Many colleges and universities are attempting to herd the independent-minded cats who work or study at higher-education institutions by creating a unified online calendar that’s populated with events from all over campus. As you might guess, there’s much variation in the willingness of the myriad stakeholders to collaborate.

“We’ve worked hard to make our central online calendar accurate,” says Betsy Winter Hall, editor of Temple University’s Temple Times. “The online calendar is the place from which events propagate” to other media outlets.

One last hint before we look into some of the campus happenings you might not have heard of: Look at the event listings in the school’s daily or weekly newspaper on a regular basis. You might even be able to get the campus paper delivered to your door, for cheap or free. “Members of the public do subscribe to the Temple Times in print,” says Hall. “We currently don’t have a charge for it.”