More Should Have Heard Hillary

One of the most controversial and influential women to serve as First Lady became, last week, the first in that position to speak at Harvard. Unfortunately, in a situation all too familiar to some undergraduates, scores of students were lotteried out of the chance to hear Hillary Rodham Clinton in person.

But Clinton's visit highlighted a recurring problem with the IOP's most popular events: the lack of space for many interested undergraduates. Fewer than half of the 1,000 undergraduates who entered the Clinton lottery got seats in the Forum or in overflow; the remaining tickets were split among graduates, faculty and staff, according to the Forum's director, Heather Campion.

According to Avery W. Gardiner '97, chair of the IOP's Student Advisory Committee, the awkwardly-shaped Forum is Harvard's largest auditorium that allows for adequate security. Given this restraint, the IOP--whose mission is to "encourage undergraduate student interest in the dynamics of politics"--should do more to give undergrads access to prominent speakers. Perhaps, for the next such popular speech, consideration could be given to alternate venues, such as Sanders Theatre, which holds many more people than the Arco Forum, and could, with a little effort, be made as secure and media-friendly.

In keeping with its mission, the IOP should have given more than 50 percent of seats to undergraduates. Moreover, students who have recently received seats to lotteried events should have been given lower priority in the process. Mildly mitigating the problem this time, the IOP simulcast the speech live in Sanders Theatre and Science Center D and provided live feed of the speech on the Kennedy School home page. Nonetheless, with the speech also carried by C-SPAN, students without a ticket had the same access to Clinton as a cable television owner in Nebraska.

The IOP continues to stimulate political involvement and awareness on campus--it's just too bad there can't be room for more of us to join in the fun.