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By Melissa B. Thompson
Last year a student was able to purchase tickets at the Quick Center for all of the speakers presented by the Open Visions Forum. Usually premium seating in the first ten rows was readily available.
However, students may have taken for for granted their ability to listen to Richard Holbrooke and Robert Pinsky from the front row, because this year it was a whole different scene.
Now a student requesting tickets for the Open Visions series is met with pages and pages of people on waiting lists. What happened in one year?
Dr. Philip Eliasoph, founder, director and moderator of the series commented on the increased popularity of the Forum. “They have been overwhelmed at the Quick Center with an unprecedented demand for tickets for OVF this year. It was described to me after tickets went on public sale the week of August as akin to a rock concert scene— people waiting on a two hour line to get any seats they could find for this season’s OVF lectures. I could not imagine that tickets for a lecture with Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto or Elie Wiesel could be comparable to seeing the Rolling Stones or a U2, or Dave Matthews — now those are enviable competitors!”
Although tickets may be “sold out” to the general public, Dr. Eliasoph points out that Fairfield University students are at the heart of the lecture series. “I can honestly say that there has not been a Fairfield student who we did not at least try to find a seat for any lecture in the past five years — but this year’s unprecedented demand will surely make that claim no longer possible!”
As for the current status of the forum, Dr. Eliasoph stated, “The community audience has come to expect a well prepared event; a mix of straight podium lecture and an informal, discussion; this is our formula and the audience response indicates we are gaining the confidence of our community audience… The unprecedented demand for tickets this year with most lectures “sold out” to the off-campus, community segment of the audience is the result of powerful “word of mouth”… word of mouth at the office cooler, at the bridge table, at the golf course — has brought us circles of friends who then bring their friends — and it just grows exponentially…. but we cannot invent more seats beyond the 750 seats at the Quick Center!” This year the schedule includes highly coveted speakers, such as Academy Award nominated producer Ismail Merchant, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, and best-selling author and journalist Dominick Dunne.
Jonathan Lubin, a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania (and coincidentally $250,000 winner on ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire College Edition) comments on a similar program at his institution. “Bob Woodward is speaking next week. The students turn out in droves to hear these people speak.” On the other side of the spectrum, Ryan Levitt, a junior at Boston College says that, “there is nothing at BC as organized as [OVF]. There are speakers that are sponsored by different clubs and organizations that bring them on campus, but it doesn’t occur too frequently and when it does the student turnout is just fair.”
How did the Forum gain so much popularity so quickly? Dr. Eliasoph offers some insight, “If somebody would ask me how we achieved this, I could not really offer a roadmap, but with our wonderful support staff at University College, and the constant belief that we had a valuable mission, we scratched and crawled during those first few years — now we have hit our groove: it was extremely difficult to invent this from a blank canvas six years ago — now that we are established the wind is at our back and we are sailing a bit more smoothly.”
Advice to next year’s ticket buyers: camp out in front of the Quick Center the night before they go on sale!
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