As the semester draws to a close, UNC must once again look on from afar as Duke University draws high-profile musical acts to campus for their annual Last Day of Classes Concert (colloquially known as LDOC).
It hasn’t always been this way, though, and it’s high time UNC developed its own annual end-of-the-year bash.
From 1963 to 1971, UNC hosted a festival called “Jubilee: A Salute to Spring.” Over eight years, the organizers of Jubilee brought a number of notable acts to campus. (To name a few: The Allman Brothers Band, Johnny Cash, The Temptations, Neil Diamond, James Taylor, B.B. King and Chuck Berry.)
This year, Carolina Union Activities Board made a start at reviving UNC’s long-lost festival. While the idea was great, the concert’s publicity was sorely lacking, and its audience was limited mostly to those who heard about it by word of mouth.
Rather than scheduling the event at an awkward time in the middle of the semester, future attempts at reincarnating Jubilee should be aligned with the natural student excitement and festivities that come with the end of classes.
Jubilee was discontinued in 1971 to allow concert funding to be distributed more evenly throughout the school year. It was decided that more smaller concerts were preferable to one larger festival-like celebration in the spring.
But things have changed since 1971, and we think CUAB should give the old model a try. Staging a concert at the end of the year would, in conjunction with Homecoming, bookend the academic year in celebration.
With the addition of Jubilee, CUAB could focus its funds on two celebrations that would reach to a wide cross-section of students. Its current method — spreading its budget to numerous niche concerts throughout the year — leaves a few students pleasantly surprised but leaves far too many dissatisfied.
UNC might not be able to offer quite as robust a budget as our private peers, but CUAB does get $13 in fees from every student here, which amounts to about $364,000 annually.
