Who's Coming!?

As most people probably don’t already know, Thomas Friedman is coming to speak at GW this week. Thomas Friedman, one of the top columnists at the New York Times, an author who has written 2 best selling books in the last fews years, and is coming on January 21st to speak at an event that is free for GW students. Unfortunately, the majority of the student body has no idea that he's coming, and is going to miss out on another spectacular event that GW isn't capitalizing on by marketing correctly.

If you enter into Google "Thomas Friedman GW January 21", the first things that pop up are a Facebook event that has a mere 40 confirmed guests, Dean of Freshman Dean Siegel's Facebook fan page status (in his defense, it is in no way his job to market this event), a tiny listing on the Student Activities Center website, and a small listing on the University Calendar.

The entire Freshman class even got his book assigned to them, as the GW Hatchet reported back in October.

The book is part of this year’s Freshman Reading Program, and Dean of Freshmen Fred Siegel challenged the class of 2013 to read the book over the summer and write a response to it as part of an essay contest.

There have been many amazing events since I arrived at GW in the Fall of 2007, from every former Secretary of State at the same time to Public Enemy, and the student body never really hears about them until 2 days before, when the tickets are sold out. Part of the reason people come to GW is to see great speakers like this, and the access that the school has being in DC is completely nullified if nobody hears about the amazing things coming here.

If you don't know anything about Friedman, here's some entertaining commentary he had on the recession back in March: