It’s a frustrating and all-too-common experience at Georgetown. You check your e-mail to find that a world-famous dignitary will be speaking in Gaston Hall, and you have the opportunity to see them up close if you respond to the e-mail. You eagerly click on the link only to realize that all of the tickets were scooped up by those lucky enough to check their inboxes in the five minutes after the e-mail was sent.
Georgetown is unique among many college campuses in the number of renowned individuals it attracts every year, thanks to its Washington D.C. location. The current system of first-come, first-serve online ticket reservations, however, fails to give all Georgetown students the same opportunity to attend these events. This flaw became painfully obvious with the recent announcement of high-profile speeches by Barack Obama and Madeline Albright.
There are other methods to equitably distribute tickets. In the past, they have been made available to those with the desire and ability to stand in line, sometimes for hours, to get into a good event. In theory, this sounds like a great system: those who want the tickets the most will put up with the wait. Again, though, this system is skewed towards those who have the free time to stand around for hours without other commitments. There are plenty of students who would love to stand in Red Square for Barack Obama tickets if not for an internship, a clinical or an unskippable class.
Previous attempts have also been made to make the ticket reservation process more available to all students in the form of an online lottery system. All students had a window of time to enter the lottery, and winners were randomly chosen regardless of when they applied. Returning to this method as standard policy for lecture ticketing would be the first step in the fair direction. An additional measure might be to apportion a certain percentage of tickets for members of each undergraduate class, graduate students and professors, so that each group might have an equal chance.
“We like certain things about the online system because it is technically more fair and not first-come, first-serve basis only,” Michael Jurist (SFS ‘07), chairman of the Lecture Fund said. In the four years Jurist has been with the Lecture Fund, however, he can only remember this online lottery being used three or four times, because of the risk that lottery winners might not actually attend the speech. This risk exists, however, under any system.
As long as there is more demand than supply for these tickets, luck will unavoidably be a factor in receiving one. Under an online lottery system, this luck would be a product of truly equal chance rather than personal e-mail habits. Georgetown would be hypocritical if it continued to bring speakers to campus for discussion of democratic practices without looking inward to consider whether its own distribution methods, in fact, are democratic.
