Crimson Tickets Are a Good Ivy Buy

The way Athletic Director John P. Reardon Jr. '60 tells it, it's not without good cause that Harvard students are shelling out money to see a football game today.

"The Department's budget is about seven million dollars, and revenues from every source possible only pay for about half of that," Reardon said this week. Income from ticket sales to students for the Dartmouth game today and the Yale game next month are an essential part of meeting expenses, he added.

Actually, Harvard's current ticket policy whereby students are only charged for the two biggest games of the year strikes a middle-of-the-road position in comparison to other Ivy Group schools.

Some universities--including Brown. Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania--supply students with complimentary tickets for the whole season but include a small facilities fee in tuition costs. Cornell provides its students with free tickets and does not add a facilities fee to tuition.

The rest of the Ivies--Yale. Dartmouth, and Columbia--charge students up to four dollars for every home game. And at Big Ten schools like the University of Michigan and Ohio State students can pay up to $6.50 a game.

Easy to Come By?

In comparison to these stiff prices, Harvard tickets seem fairly easy to come by Gordon M. Page, director of ticket sales, said this has not always been the case.

"We used to charge for the Princeton game as well but it became too expensive for the students," he said. In addition, Harvard no longer charges for admission to soccer games or any other regular-season athletic events, except the Dartmouth and Yale football games.

Despite the relatively low cost of attending football games, a number of differing sorts of criticisms about ticket policy have still been leveled around campus.

Some students, for example, said that in the past they have been unhappy with their seats at Harvard for the Yale game and felt that they were better accomodated when the game was in New Haven.

Under current Harvard ticket policy, students are randomly assigned seats from the student section of the stadium but classes are given priority by seniority, Page said.

He acknowledged that over the years pressures from Band seating and increasing tick ets sold to graduate students has decreased the number of good seats available to undergraduates. When the game is at Yale, students as well as alumni, have a better chance of getting good seats because the Yale bowl at 71,000 seats is almost twice as big as the Harvard stadium, Page said.

In addition, the standing-room-only status of both the Dartmouth and Yale games leads to problems with ticket scalping.

A former football player, Guillermo D. Adarme '85, said that members of the football team often scalped their tickets. "I know somebody last year who got $45.00 for a pair of Yale tickets," he said.

Reardon acknowledged that scalping was a problem for these two games but said that the athletic department had taken steps to counter the problem. For example, people receiving complimentary tickets from football players must now pick them up at the ticket office, in person.

A spokesman for the Dartmouth Athletic Department said that his university had no scalping problem. "We wish there was. Your scalping problem only comes when you're sold out.