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[h=1]Wake Forest Makes Tailgates More Inclusive[/h]
The university adds music, seating, food trucks and tent rentals to pre–football game tailgates, hoping to draw students who have never felt welcome at the fraternity-dominated events.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/11/18/wake-forest-reimagines-tailgate
The university adds music, seating, food trucks and tent rentals to pre–football game tailgates, hoping to draw students who have never felt welcome at the fraternity-dominated events.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/11/18/wake-forest-reimagines-tailgate
When tailgating—and football—were canceled last year due to the pandemic, administrators used the reprieve to re-evaluate the student tailgate experience.
Pre–football game tailgates at Wake Forest University have traditionally been dominated by fraternities, featuring tent after tent emblazoned with Greek letters, housing groups of raucous—often inebriated—students huddled together in their usual places.
“Not only did you have a tailgating area that was not generally inclusive to the entire undergraduate population, it was very much focused on each individual tailgate spot,” said Tim Wilkinson, associate dean for student engagement. “If you weren’t a member of a fraternity or sorority, you didn’t necessarily see a place for you, because you saw Greek letters.”
When tailgating—and football—were canceled last year due to the pandemic, administrators used the reprieve to re-evaluate the university’s insular, decades-old tailgate tradition and brainstorm ways to make it more welcoming to all.
Students returning to campus this fall found a vastly different scene at Truist Field. The tradition known as the DEACTOWN Student Tailgate now included a stage featuring music from a DJ, two bars and free fare from local food trucks, as well as new seating and eating areas. It was all part of the initiative the university launched to attract all students, including those who don’t typically attend football games.
The university also purchased tents, which student organizations can book to tailgate, and provided access to tables and chairs. In the past, student organizations were responsible for bringing their own tents, music, food and alcohol, as long as they followed Wake Forest’s social hosting guidelines, said Wilkinson.
“We wanted to really think about how we could take cost out of being a determining factor for students attending tailgates, as well as have a unified experience,” Wilkinson said.
Hobart collaborated with Wilkinson and José Villalba, vice president for diversity and inclusion, and their university departments to create the new student tailgate experience. Villalba said the focus on diversity and inclusion grew out of the university’s R.I.D.E. framework—Realizing Inclusion, Diversity and Equity—along with the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020.
“It’s not so much that athletics said, ‘We have a problem here’ as much as it was that athletics said, ‘Do we have a chance to make something that has worked out fine, but that could work out even better?’” Villalba said.
Pondering such questions gave the university a chance to recognize aspects of tailgating culture that could be inequitable, including the cost for students to attend or for organizations to register, Wilkinson said. Additionally, because student organizations previously had to bring their own tents and stake out their own areas within the tailgate, it created an “individualistic” culture, Wilkinson said.
The live DJ allows students to listen to music together, Wilkinson said—rather than see who could blast tunes louder, as they did in previous years. And with the addition of food trucks and two bars run by the university, Wilkinson said students can rent tents without feeling pressure to bring alcohol, since the university is supplying it.
Villalba said he knew the new tailgate was a success when the Wake Forest School of Divinity showed up this year for the first time in ages. He noted that the divinity school is one of the university’s most diverse student groups, both racially and socioeconomically.