The Justice

Former President Bill Clinton's address December 3 will be held in the main area of the Gosman Sports and Convocation Center, a space that can hold over three times as many people as the Shapiro Gymnasium, the event's original location, University President Jehuda Reinharz announced in a campus wide e-mail Wednesday night.

Online registration for tickets to Clinton's speech has also been extended until midnight next Wednesday, Reinharz wrote. Students originally signed up from Oct. 31-Nov. 4 to enter an online lottery for tickets.

While roughly 1,700 seats were available to former President Jimmy Carter's speech last January in the Shapiro Gym, Gosman's smaller facility, the main area can accommodate approximately 4,000 chairs and 1,800 additional seats in the bleachers, according to University Spokeswoman Lorna Miles.

"Anyone who registered for a ticket who is part of the current campus community should be accommodated," Miles said in a telephone interview Thursday night.

Clinton will speak in honor of the late Eli Segal '64, his former adviser in whose honor a new Citizen Leadership Program in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management was recently established. The speech is the inaugural memorial lecture for the program.

Over 1,000 students waited in a line in the Shapiro Campus Center Atrium, but which spilled outside, for tickets to the Carter event. Miles said that 3,700 undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff had already signed up for the online lottery for Clinton's speech before the location change was announced, so many people who registered for the event wouldn't have been able to attend if it had remained in the Shapiro Gym.

"The move to a larger venue is in response to the enormous number of registrations for the lottery and in keeping with the community spirit that Eli Segal would have wanted," Reinharz wrote in the e-mail.

The event will still be limited strictly to Brandeis students, staff, faculty and trustees, however, because of concerns over clogging up the traffic flow in Waltham, Miles explained.

"Whenever there is a big event, we have to be very careful with the traffic flow and bringing anymore cars onto campus during the weekdays," Miles said. "We are still limited in that regard."

Miles added that the administration, particularly Director of Public Safety Ed Callahan, confirmed that moving the event to the larger space in Gosman would be acceptable with Clinton's security team as well as the Boston branch of the Secret Service, a security force that protects current and former presidents.

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