How to pack the house

With few exceptions, every other performance on campus charges a price. While tickets are usually only $5–$8, this weekend illustrated the immense success achieved by removing this barrier to attendance, though this merits defining “success” as maximizing attendance — probably not so successful if the goal was to maximize profits. But assuming our performing groups want a packed house and aren’t looking to pad their accounts with the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, I think we can safely move forward with this idea: Make shows free, more people will come and your goals will be better met.

Making shows free would take some serious restructuring. There are a number of production costs, beginning with the largest cost facing any group: space rental. This seems silly to me. While the operating budgets of different facilities on campus are treated as discrete, at the end of the day they are all still Princeton facilities, owned by Princeton University. If we already own the space, making it free to student groups should be not only easy to do, but also beneficial to students and campus culture.

Then, as with any other student group, performance groups would apply for ODUS or Lewis Center funding to cover the other production costs — which they will no doubt receive — and ultimately make the show free for students to attend. ODUS, and nearly every other entity on campus, already showers gifts upon us — why not begin a practice that will direct part of that budget into investing in our student performers and campus culture rather than handing me the umpteenth T-shirt to hit the bottom of my maybe-I’ll-sleep-or-workout-in-this-one-day pile?

Let’s consider Frist Campus Center: The University will operate the space whether or not students rent the theater. I’m unconvinced that the University is entitled to recoup any expenses by passing the cost on to student attendees. If operational costs are that much of an issue, then attendance should become a determining factor in budgeting. Every student should swipe their Prox at any performance, study break, give away, public lecture or other University funded event. When budgets are being prepared for the next year, the most popular events or groups should receive the most funding. This would also help ensure that University funding is going to programming students actually want, as opposed to the current practice, which is based on what a limited group thinks is beneficial to campus life. Additionally, such an attendance-based mechanism could help assign performance spaces based not on the group’s ability to pay, but on its ability to attract a crowd.

So, I guess the question comes down to if we want to leave patronage of the arts to only those students interested (i.e., allow the ticket buyers to continue footing the bill for the performance groups) or if we think the University ought to take up this role for us. While I will entertain arguments as to why it’s ultimately not the University’s job to pay for our entertainment, or a Libertarian’s support of our status quo (those who want it, pay, and those who don’t, don’t), I don’t see these as immediately related to my claim based on current University practices.

To the former, I’d say that, at this time, the University has already decided to make athletic events free to students. If the University has already acknowledged ticket price as a barrier to attendance and has started subsidizing entertainment to make it free for students, I don’t see why performances should be any different than soccer games. And to the latter, the University has, to some degree — though its success is a topic for a whole other column — committed to making the Princeton college experience accessible to students of all economic backgrounds, so the “those who want it should pay for it” model doesn’t quite fit with the stated goal of the University.

All in all, it just seems there is no configuration in which the benefits don’t outweigh the costs. The costs are surely present, but the University already spends money so frivolously when it come to ODUS groups and other student-sponsored events that this change should hardly make a difference. As stated, an influx of funding requests may even have the positive benefit of forcing the Projects Board and ODUS to examine more critically other requests for funding. And of course, the other major benefit would be boosted attendance. It’s pretty easy to “sell out” when selling doesn’t require buying.

Lily Alberts is an economics major from Nashville, Tenn. She can be reached at lalberts@princeton.edu.