Every student pays the same amount of money for football tickets, so it’s not unreasonable to expect every student to follow the same rules when it comes to football seating.
Unfortunately, that is not the case at The University of Alabama, where some student groups are given blocks of seats in the south end zone of Bryant-Denny Stadium. Those seats are reserved until 45 minutes before kick-off.
The blocks are so big they give benefiting organizations 70 percent more seats than they need to accommodate their members, mostly so men in fraternities can bring guests and dates. Students privileged enough to have access to block seating don’t only have seats reserved for themselves, but they also have seats saved for others they invite.
This system is grossly unfair to women and minorities. Sororities, for instance, regularly lead the greek community in grade point averages and community service and could expect prime placement if they applied for block seating. This year, though, only one sorority applied for and got block seating, while 28 all-male organizations received blocks.
For most greek women, and most women on campus, access to block seating is determined entirely by who invites them to a game.
Block seating is also discriminatory, as the greek organizations that fill most of the section are racially segregated.
This year, there were some improvements in the way block seating applications were scored. Instead of a student-led committee divvying up blocks, applications were graded by an automated system developed by a third-party company. Some organizations saw their seats moved further back as a result, while other organizations benefited from a system that fairly evaluated their academic and service performance.
Most of the credit for these improvements goes to SGA President Matt Calderone, who showed leadership in implementing a system that removed the subjective “human element” from the application scoring process. The SGA also reduced the number of student seats reserved for block seating, reversing an unwise decision by UA administrators to expand block seating last season.
For most students, though, simply rearranging organizations on a chart does nothing to address the inherent unfairness of giving select students preferential treatment while others line-up hours ahead of kick-off hoping for a good seat.
Gamedays are our one opportunity, as a student body, to present a unified face cheering the Crimson Tide to victory. Once in the stadium, we shouldn’t be separated based on our race, our gender or the organizations we’ve joined.
We all buy the same tickets, and we are all cheering for the same team. We should all sit together, in one student section with uniform rules for every ticketholder.
While this year’s block seating process was a huge improvement over years past, the only way to eliminate the divisiveness and discrimination block seating perpetuates is to get rid of it.
Our View is the consensus of The Crimson White editorial board.
