University of Virginia Library

Using U Hall

A nagging problem of facilities confronted
the University in a dramatic way Wednesday
night. F. Lee Bailey was speaking in Cabell
Hall Auditorium under the auspices of the
Student Legal Forum. About 1600 people
wanted to hear Mr. Bailey; there are only
about 1000 seats in Cabell Hall Auditorium.
Fire marshals, who learned subtraction at an
early age, came to the incisive conclusion that
there were too many people in there and that
some 600 had to go. So they started turning
them away from the door, and a couple of
hundred were ushered out of the auditorium
and listened to the speech via loudspeakers in
the lobby.

The reason for this, as Forum President
Mike Cardoza pointed out, was the $512
rental fee that the Legal Forum would have
had to pay for the use of University Hall, the
only auditorium-type facility on the Grounds
larger than Cabell Hall. The Student Legal
Forum, which charges no admission and pays
no honorariums, operates on a shoestring
budget and couldn't pick up that kind of tab.
The rental figure is an inflexible minimum fee
set up in 1965, at a time when the only
crowds too big for Cabell Hall were likely to
be concerts and other events which grossed
enough to pay the rent.

The University is much larger now, and
will become even larger in the near future.
Cabell Hall is not big enough to house the
type of event that will become more and more
common - the ones that make no money and
yet draw a crowd in excess of 1000 people.

So it would seem that it's about time to
make University Hall available to sponsors like
the Legal Forum at a rate they can afford.
The Calendar and Scheduling Committee has
been studying possible means of making
University Hall available to such groups. It
appears that the actual cost to the Athletic
Department for opening University Hall to a
group such as the Student Legal Forum is no
more than $125. The fee, however, is
inflexible; in 1965, apparently, no one
foresaw anything but large, paying crowds
using the building. The first thing that the
Committee ought to do is to insure that any
student group which sponsors a free event
which figures to draw too many people for
Cabell Hall can use the building at cost.
University Hall is a University facility.
Student fees pay for the bond issue that built
it; and it ought to be used by students who
aren't making a profit in much the same way
that any other University facility is made
available.

On the other hand, some groups,
particularly non-student groups, which stage
events in University Hall have been getting
away with reduced rates, again because of the
inflexible schedule established in 1965. The
rates for such events ought to go up,
especially in the case where a non-student
group is attempting to make a profit out of
the use of the Hall.

There ought to be one other consideration
- the type of crowd which will use the
building. Some events, like pop concerts,
cause more damage and require greater
maintenance than others, such as the Legal
Forum type of crowd. There is presently no
adjustment that can be made to compensate
for this factor. The upshot of the whole thing
is that University Hall is not serving the
community as it should, or as it was meant to
do. We hope that the Calendar and Scheduling
Committee, when it meets next week, will
take steps to alleviate the problem.