Students hoping to see author Salman Rushdie face-to-face who forgot to wake up early are out of luck.
Over 400 student tickets for next week's Rushdie speech were passed out in just over 30 minutes last Friday, Sept. 16, according to Dean of Students Bruce Reitman.
Tickets were given on a first-come, first-serve basis at the Student Services Desk in Dowling Hall. Students were required to bring their ID card, and they could receive a second ticket if they brought another person's ID card.
Rushdie will speak on Tuesday, Sept. 27, as part of the Snyder Presidential Lecture Series.
An Anglo-Indian novelist, Rushdie is perhaps most famous for being the target of a "fatwa" - a religious death sentence - by then-Iranian leader Ayatollah Knomeini a year after Rushdie published "The Satanic Verses" in 1988.
The lecture will be held in Cohen Auditorium in the Aidekman Arts Center. According to Reitman, 200 seats for the lecture are reserved for members of the general public.
Senior Sara Dalziel had a 10:30 a.m. class on Friday, and she could not go to Dowling Hall to get a ticket until 11:45 a.m., by which time the tickets were all gone.
Dalziel and her three housemates, who also did not get tickets, e-mailed Dean for Undergraduate Education James Glaser, who sent the original campus-wide e-mail announcing the lecture and the ticket pick-up time.
Dalziel said Glaser told her that if organizers decided to simulcast the speech on a screen outside the auditorium, he would hold tickets for Dalziel and her housemates for the simulcast.
Rushdie's most recent novel, "Shalimar the Clown," published in 2005, is a tragic novel about two religiously divided towns in the Kashmir region on the Indian-Pakistani border.
Lecture Series Co-Chair junior Ethan Stillman said lectures hosted by the student group have had no problems being simulcast. The group hosted Spike Lee two years ago, and Lee's speech was simulcast in Jackson Gym.
The group's student leaders made the request to their contract agent, who got the acceptance from Lee's agent. "It wasn't a problem at all," Stillman said. Lecture Series did not have to pay Lee for the simulcast. The only added expense was for the equipment.
Lecture Series ran into problems with another way to show lectures to more people than venues could hold. The group's leaders tried to broadcast last year's Morgan Spurlock speech on TUTV, the student-run campus television station.
But according to Stillman, Spurlock's agent told the Lecture Series agent that the lecture could not be broadcast over generally accessible TV.
Reitman said tickets for last year's Hillary Clinton speech for the Issam M. Fares Lecture Series were assigned just as quickly as the Rushdie tickets. "They, too, went out quickly," he said.
But Clinton's speech was held in the Gantcher Family Sports and Convocation Center, which hold many more people than Cohen Auditorium. The tickets for Clinton's speech were also assigned online through Webcenter.
-- Bryan Prior contributed to this article.
