What were you doing last Wednesday at 8 p.m.? Getting out of class? Maybe grabbing a bite at the Tavern?
Well, if you weren’t online reserving your Founders Day Ball tickets, or even if you were, chances are you didn’t get any. By 8:01 p.m., all 575 undergraduate tickets had been reserved.
You probably knew that already. What you might not know, however, is that AU just went through this same story not too long ago.
In 2009, the ball was held in an expensive, high-profile venue: the Mellon Auditorium in Federal Triangle.
Six hundred tickets sold out within hours. Two hundred more students packed a waiting list.
As the situation became contentious, two undergraduate senators led the charge to pass a bill directing the Student Government to make more tickets available.
The bill was controversial, with executives calling it “unfair,” “unnecessary” and “slanderous.” But the Senate passed it with an 18-2 vote, and the SG managed to make an additional 250 tickets available, thanks in part to a surplus of Student Activity Fee revenue that year.
Of course, I can certainly recognize that planning an event of this scope is incredibly difficult. And as far as Founders Day Balls go, the SG doesn’t have much recent precedent to follow.
The 2008 ball doubled as President Kerwin’s inauguration ball and hosted 1,000 students, thus ruling it out of comparison.
The 2010 ball didn’t even take place due to the unprecedented incompetence of SG that year.
But SG did put on a successful ball in 2011 and did a lot of things right to get there. The venue, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, was nice but not excessive. The tickets were cheaper than in prior years. And, most importantly, 600 tickets were available and a limited amount was sold each day to ensure the event wouldn’t sell out immediately.
Surely, this year SG executives could have anticipated a higher demand for such a high-profile venue as the Library of Congress before they decided to open the event to all undergraduates, graduates, staff and alumni; make the tickets free; and make all of them available online at the same time.
Regardless of what attendance numbers in the past may have been, this year’s Founders Day was promoted as being about bringing the AU community together. Yet 675 attendees represent only about 10 percent of AU’s undergraduate students alone.
Also, the $90,000 budget for this event represents $133 being spent per student attendee. That sounds like quite an expensive dinner. I can think of many other ways in which that money could be spent to benefit the entire student body as a whole.
At the end of the day, though, the problems plaguing Founders Day are not attributable to its organizers as much as they are to the system in which the SG exists.
American University is so entangled in its own bureaucracy that it fails to ensure effectively that the SG is using its 72 percent portion of our Student Activity Fee efficiently and transparently. It is my hope that the SG will learn from this experience and ensure that future Founders Days are more efficient, more open and administered in a more equitable manner.
In the meantime, let’s all keep our fingers crossed that the SG can find some meaningful solution to this year’s bibbidi-bobbidi-boo-boo.
Douglas Bell is a junior in the School of Communication.
