Tickets for former President Bill Clinton's speech will be distributed through a lottery system on the Brandeis Web site, University spokeswoman Lorna Miles said. Clinton will speak Dec. 3 in the Shapiro Gymnasium in the Gosman Sports and Convocation Center at 1:30 p.m. in honor of the late Eli Segal '64, in whose honor a new Citizen Leadership Program in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management was established.

Students will be sent an e-mail on Oct. 30 with a link to a page on the Brandeis Web site explaining how to register for the lottery. Students have the opportunity to enter the lottery until midnight of Nov. 4. Students will be randomly chosen to receive tickets, and those chosen will be notified through an e-mail Nov. 13, Miles said.

The lecture is open to current Brandeis faculty, staff, students and trustees only, according to the Web site.

A lottery system was chosen to distribute tickets for Clinton's speech "because we have fewer seats than we probably have people who want to come," Miles said.

Miles said she wasn't yet sure how many tickets will be available for students through the lottery, but explained that the number of seats for the event will be similar to the roughly 1,700 available at former President Jimmy Carter's speech last January, also held in the Shapiro Gym.

Over 1,000 students waited in a line inside, that spilled outside the Shapiro Campus Center last January for tickets to Carter's speech, but Miles said that a new randomization system developed by Library and Technology Services enables the University to avoid a similar distribution process for the Clinton event.

"[LTS] has up-to-the-minute information and the ability to do randomization within different groups of students, faculty and staff by machine rather than us trying to do it by hand," Miles said.

Some students expressed concern that distributing tickets via lottery will be an unfair system.

Ryan Heisler '10 said he's worried that those who are most passionate about Clinton's visit might end up not going, while less enthusiastic people will win tickets.

Others, however, said they favor the lottery system over standing in line for tickets because it's less time-consuming and allows students who wouldn't have been able to wait in line an opportunity to obtain tickets.

"I like this system because if you unfortunately have other commitments that don't allow you to be present for the line for picking up a ticket, now you have a fair opportunity if you show interest," Casara Nemes '08 said.

According to the Brandeis Web site, Gosman will be closed from Dec. 2 until the doors open for the event Dec. 3. All attendees will pass through metal detectors and won't be able to bring in backpacks, cell phones, personal cameras, video recorders and signs or banners of any kind in accordance with requests from the Secret Service, the security force that protects all current and former presidents.

Clinton will speak for 20 to 30 minutes and then take questions from students in the audience, the Web site said.

Phyllis Segal '66, who invited Clinton to speak in her husband's honor, said in a telephone interview that she has raised $2.5 million out of her $4 million goal for an endowment to subsidize the fellowship program. The donations have come from about 80 friends and colleagues of her late husband, and range from $100 to $500,000, she said.

The fellowship program will award paid summer internships to selected undergraduates and Heller students with civic-minded organizations, and will sponsor a yearly public lecture on civic engagement, the first of which will be given by Clinton.

"[The program's] aim is to develop future generations of citizen leaders, and that's important because it's critical to the health of our democracy and the strength of our nation," Phyllis said.

Eli Segal helped run Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and created two prominent social justice projects as Clinton's assistant in the White House, including AmeriCorps and the Welfare to Work for Partnership. He died at age 63 of mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos, in February 2006.

"[Bill Clinton] was a very caring friend during Eli's illness, and since his death, he has been very eager to help us create this program in Eli's name," Phyllis said.