Open Letter to the Daily Pennsylvanian

Hi DP. Let me do some of the work for you here, you can thank me later.

Moshulu summary:
- Multiple students were pepper sprayed
- At least one girl was near-assaulted by a guard
- Guards also assaulted and threatened numerous other attendees
- On the ship, it was not properly set up for the venue
- Doors were opened and closed at random
- Employees of Moshulu, loduly, reported students being uncooperative and the event hosters being unresponsive to concerns

The question is could all of this have been avoided? That comes down to one more question: Was Moshulu oversold?

Conveniently, the Moshulu POSH ticketing page no longer shows the number of attendees. This is not standard practice for downtowns, and does NOT happen by default. This was an intentional choice to hide information as to the number of ticket sales.

However, as of the time that the final round of "Last Call" tickets were put up for sale, roughly 1150 tickets were reported as sold on POSH.vip. This does not include any brothers of four entire fraternities who might be picking up bands for free (and therefore weren't ticketed), fraternities who total in size at over 200 people. Being generous and assuming this happened somewhat, and that the Last Call tickets sold out (they did), we can guess with reasonable confidence that the true number of attendees at Moshulu was 1200-1250.

Moshulu is very open and transparent about the holding capacity of their venue. If you go to their website, go to 'private parties,' and then hit 'check availability,' you can see exactly which spaces hold which amount of people. The only option that can hold 1200 people is the "buyout" option, which holds 1500 people.

The only problem - the "buyout" option includes the deck, overhead area, and hull of the ship. The Moshulu team purchased only the upper deck for standing and the Wheelhouse area for DJing. AT BEST, this holds 800 people.

Put simply, there is no way this event was not oversold. The hosters acted incredibly irresponsibly and undoubtedly oversold tickets, probably in the range of 20-40%. With a total revenue from the event at around $60,000, this is more than enough to qualify for genuine class action suits. It also calls into question the legality of the entire enterprise - fraternities are registered in PA as 501c3 nonprofits. Would a nonprofit be overpacking a venue like this... for profit? Whoever signed the contract, be it a representative of a frat or individual, should seriously be looking into liability concerns.

Anyway, DP, do your thing. I got the first half, I hope you do the second. I'm handing this to you.

- A concerned student