Editorial: Improve event ticket distribution

One of the best parts of being at Princeton is the prominent speakers the University attracts. Most recently the University community received a visit from the Dalai Lama on Oct. 28. However, the Dalai Lama’s arrival also shed light on the University’s cumbersome ticketing system, which currently requires students to wait in line at Frist Campus Center during inconvenient time blocks on weekdays, including during scheduled class time. This leads to several problems. The first issue is that, in certain cases, students have to choose between tardiness or absence to a class and waiting in line for a ticket to a promising lecture. While the administration has attempted to mitigate this issue by allowing students to present a maximum of one other prox to get a ticket for a friend, for large-scale events, the student interest is often so great that there are simply too many students with proxes for the few who are actually available to stand in line.

This leads to a second problem that arises from the current ticket distribution system: the resale of originally free tickets. In wake of the high demand for Dalai Lama tickets, hundreds of ticket exchanges via the Free and For Sale Facebook page and email listservs were initiated among students, despite the explicit no-exchange policy found on the back of the ticket. While it is arguable that some of these sales were justified given the amount of time spent waiting in line, the only defense of the Office of Religious Life, which sponsored the event, was to send out warning notices to those they discovered selling tickets. If the University wishes to preserve the integrity of free campus lectures and the no-resale policy, a better model for ticket distribution is needed.

The Editorial Board proposes that, for future large-scale event ticket distributions, the University use an online lottery system. Such a system would allow all students to request a ticket online during a finite period of time. If the event is oversubscribed, a lottery would be initiated, and only the students randomly selected would be issued tickets. Another benefit of this system is that tickets could be issued to individual students, eliminating the possibility of exchange or resale. Instead, if students can no longer attend an event they requested a ticket for, they can cancel their request on the online system, and the ticket could be reissued via the lottery. While there is a risk that the ease of getting a ticket through a simple request online would cause more negligence in attendance and/or canceling, it is typical to have wait lines outside of popular events to guarantee all seats are filled.

In theory, the prevalence of smartphones on campus would allow the University to issue online tickets–potentially with code to be scanned upon arrival at the event. This would be much more convenient for most students and would have the added benefit of helping to cut back on paper waste. For those who do not have a smartphone, they would have the option of printing the ticket out. The Board urges the University to test this ticket distribution method on select large-scale events such as the upcoming lecture by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan ’81.

The following proposal would protect the integrity and efficiency of University-sponsored events. More importantly, the proposed system would allow more students a fair opportunity to learn from and be inspired by the leaders and scholars the University is fortunate enough to host.

Jeffrey Leibenhaut ’16 abstained from the writing of this editorial.

TheEditorial Boardis an independent body and decides its opinionsseparately from the regular staff and editors of the ‘Prince.’ The board answers only to its Chair, the Opinion Editor and the Editor-in-Chief.