Dunne forbids '07 ticket selling

Under the "graduation tickets" heading on Point's TigerTrade, listings express many seniors' desperate desire to get a few more seats for their family and friends.

"Need 3 Tickets!" one posting reads, typical of the requests from seniors looking for tickets to various Commencement events.

Until Friday, strong demand — and a fixed supply — supported a flourishing market of graduation ticket buyers and sellers on TigerTrade. Following an article in The Daily Princetonian discussing the ticket trade, the University clarified its policy regarding Commencement tickets and forbade seniors to exchange them for money.

In an email to the senior class, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Tom Dunne said students do not have the right to profit from their tickets to Commencement events. Citing the "sense of shared experience and common purpose" that comes with being part of the University community, he wrote that "[s]elling tickets undermines that spirit of community, and undermines the sense of class unity that seniors have worked hard to create."

Though the University cannot monitor offline ticket exchanges, Dunne said in an interview that "tickets would be taken away" from students who try to sell them on TigerTrade.

"Clearly, [it demonstrates that] you don't need them for your own family, and it is a violation of University policy," he said. "It would be very atypical of Princeton for Princeton students to create an environment where families with financial means would be able to buy up as many tickets as they want, and people who don't have that luxury are left out of the system."

"It's not keeping with the spirit of what Commencement and Princeton are all about," he added. "It seems to countervail ... class unity."

Dunne also emphasized that this is "not new policy. It's been in place since I've been in Princeton, and I think well before that."

But senior reaction to the policy clarification remains mixed. While some students applauded the University's efforts to prevent financial issues becoming a problem for seniors with large families, others worried that some tickets will go unused.

Tara Hariharan '07, for example, is concerned the ban may result in an overall decrease in the number of tickets available because seniors may be unmotivated to give them to other students.

Dunne, however, said he believes that most tickets will be used up. "There is a high demand for tickets for sure, and my understanding is that [there is] mostly an equilibrium where students could figure this out amongst their friends. They find tickets in the system that can't be used, and I hadn't gotten a sense from students, even anecdotally, that there is this lucrative black-market demand for the tickets."

Other students agreed that allowing students to sell tickets promotes negative spirit on campus.

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In a posting that has since been removed from TigerTrade, Mira Guo '07 asked for a minimum of $100 per ticket for each of two Baccalaureate, four Class Day and five Senior Prom tickets.

"I can definitely see a situation where, as Commencement approaches and people get more desperate for graduation tickets, other students start scalping the tickets for several hundred dollars each," Guo said in an email. "I can understand the University wanting to avoid that kind of a situation. Not selling tickets will certainly prevent the atmosphere surrounding graduation events from becoming that way."

Hariharan said she does not think ticket sales harmed the senior class' sense of unity. She had started negotiations to sell some of her extra tickets on TigerTrade when Dunne emailed the seniors. Though she has now stopped selling, Hariharan said both sides benefited from the interactions involved in earlier sales.

"I feel like at least selling things to each other or negotiating with each other means that we are connecting with each other," Hariharan said. "If I was told that I was not allowed to [sell tickets], I would have given them to my closest friends, and I wouldn't have gotten to know other people."

Steve Batis '07, however, agreed with Dunne, saying that students should not exploit each other by selling tickets they received for free.

"The goal of graduation is to have your family here and the people you care about," he said. "I don't think we should be putting up barriers for students who don't have the money for extra tickets."

— Princetonian senior writer Angela Cai contributed reporting to this article.