If someone continues to call something a success in the face of mounting protest, does that make it true?
Penn State football ticket officials seem to think so.
University ticket officials have continued to call the new paperless football ticket system a success despite its unpopularity among Penn State students and ineffectiveness in achieving its stated goals. In fact, the identification card-based method has confronted students with a new set of issues.
Unlike in previous football seasons, students now have a deadline to meet if they wish to sell their seat for Saturday's game. The 5 p.m. Thursday cutoff means students must decide relatively early in the week whether they wish, or are able, to attend that week's game. This leaves no breathing room for a student to sell their ticket if he falls sick the day of the game or does not want to brave the elements -- like Saturday's -- to watch the game. Students with tickets did pay for them during the summer, yet they are unable to exercise latitude in their use.
If major revisions aren't made to the system soon, the disgust Penn State students feel toward the issue will only continue to grow.
Officials met with students last week at a University Park Undergraduate Association (UPUA) meeting that addressed student complaints, but ticket officials maintained their position that the system is effective.
Meetings like this can sometimes serve as springboards toward revising faulty policies, but ticket officials did not sound sincerely interested in making concessions on the matter. Are they just going to deny the flaws that mar the ticket system until students break down and accept it as unchangeable?
The fact remains -- no matter how many times university officials say the new system is a success, saying so does nothing to make that statement true. Scalping is still easy through the transfer service, processing fees still add unnecessary cost to seeing a game and transfer and sale deadlines
still restrict students in managing their own tickets.
Though big-game prices are standardized downward, tickets in the transfer pool seem to be hard to come by for those big games -- both of them; lesser games see ticket prices that are, indirectly, standardized upward.
And even if the system stands -- further still if it's corrected and works perfectly to plan -- it still can't approach the convenience of paper vouchers.
