Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Syracuse University today stirred up controversy Tuesday, but not for political reasons.

A throng of students rushed to Schine Student Center Tuesday morning to pick up tickets for the vice president’s speech on Wednesday, and many wound up disappointed. The university advertised that tickets would be available, starting at noon and lasting until 5 p.m.

But the box office began dispensing tickets at 11 a.m., an hour earlier than students were expecting to accommodate the growing line of people waiting for tickets (some since 8 that morning), said Sara Miller, associate director of national media relations at SU. She said tickets sold out by 12:30 p.m.

‘Additionally, the box office was making available tickets to Juice Jam, which further extended the line through the Schine Center,’ Miller said.

Biden, who graduated from SU’s College of Law in 1968, is on campus Wednesday to chair a speech on college access and affordability. The speech is one part of a series planned by the White House Task Force on Middle Class Families.

Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, higher education experts and SU Chancellor Nancy Cantor will also take part in the discussion.

Biden will speak at 10:30 a.m. in Goldstein Auditorium in Schine. The event can be viewed on News10Now (Channel 10) and at a live Web stream at http://biden.syr.edu. A question-and-answer session between Biden and students will be held afterwards, said a representative from the vice president’s office.

Marlene Rizzo took time out of her lunch break to grab a ticket to Biden’s speech. She had read tickets would be available at noon, but when the administrative assistant at SU’s Center for Environmental Policy and Administration arrived at the box office at 12:20 p.m., people in line told her tickets had already sold out.

‘They were really frustrated and I was frustrated too, because it was my lunch hour,’ Rizzo said. ‘It was disappointing and I think particularly for the students because an opportunity for them doesn’t happen like this often.’

Bridget Yule, the director of the Student Centers and Programming Services, said 1,000 total tickets were available for the event – 400 were invite-only and not available at Schine, 100 were standby tickets, and the rest were regular tickets.

Yule said regular tickets for the event sold out at 12:30 p.m. and standby tickets sold out 15 minutes later.

‘Maybe it was just miscommunication between the university and the people selling the tickets,’ Rizzo said. ‘But unfortunately this mass e-mail went out, so a lot of people knew that this was supposed to go on sale at noon. If (students) have to be in class, they can’t be in line waiting for tickets.’

Tyler Condit, a senior broadcast journalism major, was filming the line of people in Schine for a class assignment.

‘People were pretty excited,’ Condit said. ‘And the line was monstrous; it went from the box office to the [front] doors, and around the wall, and out to the back again. It filled up all of Schine.’

‘I just think it was ridiculous that they sent out all those e-mails and got people excited like it was a big event and a big deal, and then sold the tickets early,’ said Sara Turney, a junior political science and finance major.

Turney said she ran from class to Schine and waited for more than 20 minutes only to be told the box office was out of tickets.

‘On a campus that’s usually so apathetic toward politics and getting involved, a lot of people wanted to see this,’ she said, ‘Next time something like this happens, though, people won’t be as excited, because they were disappointed in the end. I probably wouldn’t try to get tickets next time. What’s the point?’

blbump@syr.edu

– Staff Writer Caitlin Dewey contributed reporting to this article.

Published on September 8, 2009 at 12:00 pm