LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

‘Party planning’ is the new basket weaving

Walter F. Wegst, Las Vegas

Saturday, May 17, 2008 | 2:04 a.m.

Regarding the Las Vegas Sun’s May 10 story headlined “The academics of party planning”:

When I was in school at the University of Michigan the joke around campus was that the varsity athletes could always take “basket weaving” to improve their grade-point averages.

Now I find that UNLV offers an actual course called “Nightclub Management,” a course in “party planning” for which the final exam is interviewing nearly nude, beautiful women lounging around a hotel swimming pool.

I am sure that an A in this course counts toward a grade-point average just as much as an A in such mundane courses as physics, the classics (literature), chemistry, political science, mathematics, etc.

If this is the way in which UNLV believes it can achieve the status of a “world-class university,” then higher education is doomed. I would be interested to know how much taxpayer money directly or indirectly goes to support party planning.

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By JohnF

May 17, 2008

2:08 p.m.

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Event management is a rapidly growing, billion dollar field. Many of these events happen here in Las Vegas and many tens of millions of dollars are spent on them each year. The size and complexity of these events is growing all the time.

We can argue all day about the relative worth of event planners and physicists, but the fact of the matter is there is a market for event planners, and a very lucrative one at that. UNLV is doing as good, if not a better job of preparing its students for that field as any university in the world. The hotel college, of which event management is a part, is one of the few schools at UNLV that enjoys an outstanding international reputation. Event management is a growing part of that, as well it should be.