Bill Clinton Speaks on UF Campus
March 2003

By noon on Thursday, April 3rd, there were already hundreds of students 
and a few Alachua county residents waiting outside the O'Connell Center 
to hear former President Clinton speak.  

Excitement was high, guidance was low, and the line was taking an odd turn.  
Eventually, a few clever line members recognized that, if people continued 
to simply stretch around the concrete back to the O'Connell center, room 
would be a bit scarce.  The line was reorganized by the crowd to stretch 
down Stadium Road.

By 12:45, protestors began crawling out of the sandalwood works.  Along 
with a roaming group of anti-war protestors, the crowd was treated to 
monologues from a protestor with a large pro-Jesus sign strapped to his 
body who main repeated the sentence, "I don't like Clinton.  He is a bad 
bad man."

After the first few hours in line, the first of the crowd frenzies 
came around 1:30.  Papa John's, demonstrating infinite foresight, came to 
distribute free slices of pizza.  At 2:30, the line of thousands of students 
suddenly surged towards the entrance of the auditorium for no identifiable 
reason.  With no barricades or crowd control, people pressed sardine-like 
against each other, all vying to be one inch closer to the doors.

After ten minutes of blistering body heat and lack of air circulation, 
a female fainted in the crowd.

"It freaked me out," said Austin Serkin, senior online media student.  
"This girl fainted right near me, and people were calling for a doctor, 
but no one ever came. What if something had happened to me?"

When people finally managed to make it inside the doors, they were perturbed 
to find that the floor seats were blocked off and that the only available 
seating was from the bleachers to the roof.

Over the next hour, students began to wonder why the floor seats of the 
O'Connell Center were so slow to be occupied and, in same cases, roped off.  
Despite Accent being student-funded, only alumni, community bigwigs, and Accent 
members were allowed to sit in the coveted floor seats.

Despite the tribulations students went through to score seats (or to simply 
be rerouted to another room to watch the speech on satellite feed), the 
Honorable William J. Clinton gave an amazing speech.  Using his signature 
down-to-earth style, he brought the Iraq conflict into focus and shared opinions 
on his own past decisions as president.

For most students, former President Clinton's speech was worth the hours 
of chaos.  In the words of UF law student Matthew Hawk, "Seeing Clinton was 
one of the highlights of my undergraduate career, but being kicked in the shins 
for two hours beforehand definitely detracted from the experience."