Julia McCarthy: Royce Hall venue for Clinton speech is mistake

The term “the one percent” is taking on a new meaning at UCLA.

After hours of waiting in line, a stampede and a ticket lottery, only a limited number of students – or about one percent of the student body – will have the chance to hear Hillary Clinton speak in Royce Hall.

UCLA will be able to advertise Clinton’s visit to prospective students and their families, telling them that students at this prestigious institution had the opportunity to hear Clinton, a potential future president speak, free of charge. Except they’ll probably leave out the fact that thousands of students were left without tickets after waiting in line for hours.

The Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership, which is hosting Clinton’s speech, boasts on its website that the goal of the lectures is “to share knowledge and expand the dialogue among scholars, leaders in government and business, and the greater Los Angeles community.”

This includes UCLA students, especially since the event is happening on campus. But the lecture’s organizers missed an opportunity to engage a less restricted segment of UCLA’s student population. Given the availability of a facility such as Pauley Pavilion, the lecture could have easily been able to accommodate a much larger portion of our community.

Jean-Paul Renaud, spokesman for the College of Letters and Sciences, which runs the lecture series, told the Daily Bruin that Pauley was not suited to house a lecture. He said that Royce is a more intimate setting for the Clinton lecture, while Pauley is usually reserved for basketball games and other large-scale events.

Royce’s capacity is about 1,800 seats. That can hardly be described as intimate.

Considering the event will not allow any direct audience interaction with Clinton,the use of Royce Hall for its intimate setting is hardly justifiable. Sitting in Pauley Pavilion and hearing the former secretary of state speak would essentially be the same experience.

Furthermore, UCLA’s arguments about intimacy are nonsensical when fundraising is a key function of the event. The Luskin lectures raise funds for the College’s Greatest Needs fund, which helps support student scholarships and faculty research.

According to Renaud, the fundraising goal for the event is between $25,000 and $50,000. If the event was held in Pauley, the potential for fundraising would dramatically increase.

Filling only half of of the almost 14,000 seats in Pauley and charging each individual $15, for example, would raise more than twice UCLA’s most optimistic goal for the Royce event.

Promoting an event centered around exclusivity for wealthy donors is a disappointing move by the university.

The fact that so few UCLA community members will actually be sitting in Royce Hall means that hosting the event at UCLA was little more than a guise for an opportunity to cozy up to donors posing as an educational opportunity for students.

Renaud said historically students have never paid for tickets to the Luskin lectures, and the university wanted to continue this tradition.

But this tradition, which has only existed since the Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership was first started in 2011, seems like a ludicrous reason to limit student involvement.

Luke Haeger, a first-year fine arts student, started a petition requesting a change of venue for the event, or the addition of more student tickets.

Without making the maximum possible effort to include students, the Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership loses out on the ability to stoke the dialogue it seeks to promote.

The administration responded to student demand for the lecture by creating a live-stream of the event in Ackerman Grand Ballroom.

If everyone could have been successfully accommodated in Pauley Pavilion, why have two separate locations for the event?

Dean and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Patricia Turner told Haeger in an email that providing students with access to leaders is the college’s top priority with the Luskin lectures.

These statements of assurance seem like a stretch when students were not, in fact, the central consideration in the orchestration of the event.

While much of the failure lies with UCLA, those from the Clinton camp who were involved in the organization of the event should have recognized the lack of focus on student engagement when booking Clinton to speak. Coming to a university campus but only speaking to one percent of the entire student population should have been an obvious misstep from the start.

Given that Pauley could have been a very realistic solution both to the accommodation of more students and to the issue of fundraising, it looks as if the priorities of the administration put students behind donors when they were organizing the event.

While the lucky one percent of students will certainly be the better for having seen Hillary Clinton speak, for the thousands that tried and failed to gain access, the speech is nothing more than a missed opportunity. This should serve as a cautionary tale for UCLA when world leaders visit the campus in the future.