Spike Lee is the right thing for Lecture Series

Famed director Spike Lee is returning to Tufts as the Spring Lecture Series speaker, at a cost that depleted Lecture Series funding.

Lecture Series just recently secured the engagement with Lee, which will take place in Cohen Auditorium on March 10 at 9 p.m.

Tickets for the program, "An Evening with Spike Lee", will cost ten dollars and will be sold exclusively to members of the Tufts Community. Tickets for the event will be sold online, the date for the sale will be sent out via e-mail to all Tufts students. Further information regarding tickets will be sent to the student body via e-mail this week.

Lee has directed such films as Bamboozled (2002), Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing. He has also written and produced much of his work. To better acquaint the campus with Lee and his work, Tufts Film Series will be showing 25th Hour on the weekend of March 5-7.

While Cohen auditorium seats 620, only 585 seats will be available to the student body, a small percentage of Tufts' five-thousand-plus undergrads. The Lecture Series Board expects tickets to be in very high demand "due to the speaker's fame and his reputation as an entertaining and provocative lecturer," Lecture Series Board Co-Chair Jillian Rennie said.

Lecture Series is a TCU Senate-sponsored organization and part of the Programming Board. The group presents two speakers each school year, one per semester. The organization began discussions with Lee's agent before winter break, but only recently finalized the contract after securing additional funding.

Obtaining means to pay for Lee's lecture has been one of the most difficult aspects of the process this semester. Lee's bill tips the scales at $29,640.25, which includes $25,000 for the hour-long lecture plus first-class airfare from Los Angeles, hotel, food, and transportation to and from the airport.

Lecture Series needed more than $2500 in additional buffer funding to cover Lee's costs. The organization originally planned to charge seven dollars a ticket. "The main reason we wanted to do so much buffer funding is to keep student ticket prices down, because we feel as an organization that you already paid your student activities fee," Lecture Series Co-Chair Dina Vaynerman said.

However, the TCU Senate allocated only $1580.75 in buffer funds towards the lecture. The Senate cited budget shortages as a reason for granting fewer funds than requested. "While we do like to keep ticket costs low, there just isn't enough money in the TCU to give everyone what they want," Allocations Board Chair Andrew Caplan said.

Despite the high ticket prices, Lecture Series is thrilled to have secured the lecture. "Overall, we are tremendously excited to be bringing Spike Lee to campus," Rennie said. "We have been working incredibly hard to gather the funds needed to make this event a success and have been obsessing over the details to make the day of ticket sales and the night of the event go as smoothly as possible."

It seems the enthusiasm is shared both ways. "Mr. Lee has visited Tufts before, so we believe his willingness to appear again here is an indication of his feeling toward the campus," Rennie said.

The process of choosing a speaker is a lengthy one for Lecture Series. "The members of Lecture Series are... people that are very committed to putting on great events, and they have definitely been putting in the hours," Rennie said.

The first step in bringing a speaker to campus is a group brainstorming session. Lecture Series members first meet to decide on a group of people they'd personally like to hear speak. After creating the "dream list," price quotes and availability of the proposed speakers are investigated. The group then gradually narrows down the "dream list" to a single name.

"We discuss the strengths and unique points of each candidate, then we start rounds of voting until a speaker gets a clear majority," Rennie said. "We decided on Spike Lee from a very diverse and intelligent group of speakers, including authors, journalists, and entertainers."

Last school year the fall speaker was Kurt Vonnegut, with the Daily Show's Mo Rocca in the spring. Ben & Jerry's cofounder Ben Cohen lectured this fall. "This lecture compares in magnitude to the Kurt Vonnegut lecture last fall," Rennie said.