Ticket Scalping

Four hundred Harvard students will be able to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra in its new rehearsal series, but students turned away from yesterday's ticket sale for the series will find they have just lost their only other chance to hear the Orchestra this year. The usual student rush seats for the B.S.O.'s Cambridge concerts have been abandoned.

The Boston Symphony started the new rehearsal series in response to student demand from local colleges. Harvard's allotment for this series is 400. Because of these new concerts, the University has decided that students no longer need the rush seats at Sanders Theatre; those seats are now going to faculty members.

The reason for this is that the faculty, in recent years, has oversubscribed its allotment to the Sanders' series. Last year, 106 faculty applications were unfilled. These were largely from the younger faculty members (applications are filled on the basis of length of service) who had not been here long enough to get tickets for the regular B.S.O. concerts in Symphony Hall. Since students now have a better chance of hearing the Orchestra, the Administration reasons, why should the faculty also not have a better chance?

This overlooks the fact that despite the new series, the cancelling of rush seats actually reduces the number of students who can hear the Orchestra. Under the old system, 82 seats were sold for each of six concerts--492 chances for a student. The new plan reduces this number to 400, which is even further from satisfying undergraduate demand. An average of more than 400 students every year is sufficiently interested in music to take Music 1.

The speed with which students fill Sanders Theatre for any musical events also indicates that many more than 400 want to listen to the Boston Symphony. And there is a great difference between the 90 cents a student pays for a rush ticket and the $8 he must put down for a new subscription. Finally, the Sanders concerts were designed by Henry Lee Higginson for the University "community," and any definition of a University community must include students.

The rush seats in Sanders have not yet been allocated to individual faculty members. Perhaps it is fair that these members should get some of the 82 seats. But certainly most of the rush seats should be preserved for students turned away from the rehearsal series or unable to afford the $3 lump payment.