As Vice Commodore of Yachting Club and one of the chief people in charge of this year’s What The Hell?!Con, I would like to respond to last week’s article criticizing the organization and the programming.

I am extremely disappointed that the writer focused so heavily on the organization of the Con without speaking to or quoting the people who were actually in charge of the event. Had the writer interviewed any of the Con’s organizers, he would have learned that Con planning was significantly held up by powers outside of our control.

We started trying to contact  Conferences and Events to confirm a date over the summer. Our first roadblock was the Jon Hatch incident. When Jon left Guilford, various parties mistakenly believed Yachting Club had lost their only faculty advisor. This was not the case; Ben Marlin has been an advisor for a number of years and Dan Katz was added last year.

Once this misunderstanding was cleared up, we found yet another roadblock. Staffing issues within Conferences & Events meant our request for reservations went unacknowledged until well into last semester.

We had, nonetheless, started contacting potential headliners at the start of the school year. This year’s guests were chosen with a strict budget in mind. Last year’s MC Frontalot concert lead the club to overspend significantly, and our budget was cut accordingly.

The rest of the Con’s programming is student-driven. If there were any events people would have liked to see, I suggest they volunteer to run those events at next year’s Con. I invite interested parties to join us on Sundays at noon on the rocking chairs outside Founders for the Pre-Meeting Symposium, where Yachting officers will be happy to help students interested in running any geeky event on campus.