All 800 tickets to hear Paul Rusesabagina, the man whose story was told in the film Hotel Rwanda, disappeared in under and hour and a half Wednesday.
Tickets began being distributed at 10 a.m. for the Nov. 15 lecture in Cohen Auditorium. According to Joanne Barnett, the theatre manager at the Aidekman Arts Center, the tickets for seating in Cohen were gone by 11:15 a.m.
Half an hour later, tickets for overflow seating in Jackson Gym were all claimed as well. "At 9 a.m., there were 20 people waiting for tickets," Barnett said. "The line was out the door at 10 am."
Tickets were given on a first-come, first-serve basis at the Aidekman ticket booth. Tickets were free, but students were required to bring their Tufts ID card to claim one. Students could claim a second ticket if they brought another person's ID. Students were also allowed to call ahead and reserve tickets.
"I had to wait in line forever," sophomore Rachel O' Donnell said. She arrived at Aidekman at 10:00 and got her ticket at 11:15.
Rusesabagina's lecture will be the first in the Merrin Distinguished Lecture Series, presented by Tufts Hillel and made possible by a gift from Seth Merrin (LA '82), a member of the Board of Trustees.
According to junior and Hillel intern Amanda Mendel, 800 seats were available in Cohen and Jackson combined. Of these seats, 200 were reserved for specific members of the Tufts community, including the students and community members who worked to bring Rusesabagina to campus.
When tickets for Salman Rushdie's Sept. 27 speech were distributed, they were all passed out in about 30 minutes. Organizers opened up the Balch Arena Theater for a simulcast of the lecture, and these tickets became available about a week after the first batch was released.
As manager of the Hotel Mille Collines, Rusesabagina sheltered over a thousand people during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. About 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu tribe members were killed.
