Few Attend UC Town Hall on Wyclef

Despite widespread student frustration at the last-minute cancellation of the Wyclef Jean concert earlier this month, only two members of the general student body attended an open meeting to discuss the cancellation.

The meeting was the first “town hall discussion” held by the Fall 2005 Concert Inquiry Commission, an Undergraduate Council (UC) committee charged with investigating the failures that led to the cancellation.

Although the meeting was widely advertised on House e-mail lists, the audience was almost entirely composed of members of the UC and Harvard Concert Commission (HCC).

Several days before the planned Nov. 6 concert, the HCC canceled the show due to insufficient ticket sales. According to HCC Chair Jack P. McCambridge ’06, the cancellation cost the commission between $25,000 and $30,000.

Despite the low public attendance, the town hall’s organizers characterized the discussion as a productive one.

“I would have liked to have seen attendance a bit higher,” said Matthew R. Greenfield ’08, a commission member and one of the sponsors of the bill that created the commission. “On the whole, it was a productive conversation about concerts in general.”

Without constituents to consult, UC and HCC members offered their own speculation for what went wrong.

Some said Wyclef was a poor choice.

“I just felt like there weren’t enough people on this campus passionate enough to go to a concert just because it was Wyclef,” said John F. Voith III ’07, chair of the UC’s Campus Life Committee.

One UC member criticized the way the HCC carried out its operations.

“I felt like one of the main problems [was] that we were publicizing it with posters and t-shirts,” Samson F. Ayele ’09 said of the concert. “The way to really power out tickets is to get people personally involved in the selling of tickets.”

Some participants at the meeting suggested that the HCC focus on one bigger name show a year, rather than one a semester. McCambridge argued that this type of schedule would carry a large financial risk.

After last night’s town hall, Greenfield vowed that the Inquiry Commission would continue its efforts to solicit student opinion.

“We will certainly keep trying to reach out to students,” Greenfield said. “I think members of the UC could probably go to their constituents and come back to a UC meeting and say this is what my constituents, my neighbors said. This is why my constituents didn’t buy tickets.”

The Inquiry Commission is scheduled to deliver its report when the full council meets this Sunday.

“We will have a set of recommendations for the council on Sunday,” said Greenfield. “We’ll have a report that will be pretty comprehensive. If we can just bring to the council a more thorough understanding of how the process worked, then we will have done our job.”

—Staff writer Alexander D. Blankfein can be reached at ablankf@fas.harvard.edu