Reckless In-tent-city

Something is rotten in the state of K-ville.

Duke Student Government vowed to reform the process of tenting for men's basketball tickets after last year's camp-out degenerated into a six-week fiasco. That determination to prevent students from spending half of the semester shivering on the muddy lawns outside Cameron Indoor Stadium inspired DSG to craft a number of preventative by-laws: Tenting must be limited to 10 days prior to a game, students could camp for a preordained set of games and tents could on no account be registered before the appropriate window opened.

That was then, this is now: A tent full of freshmen flouted the policy days before Thanksgiving break, and line monitors' resolve snapped immediately. The fact that these first campers were in line but, by virtue of the fact that their tents lay unpitched on the ground, were not actually tenting offered them a convenient loophole-one that monitors were unwilling to close. DSG's tenting by-laws explicitly state that no tents can be registered during Thanksgiving, but by Sunday night more than several dozen tents had been, for all intents and purposes, officially recognized.

This year's policy, with its slipshod enforcement and tunnel-sized loopholes, does not reward the "die-hard tenters," but only those cynical, crafty or well-connected enough to realize that it would never be properly enforced.

The policy announced earlier this semester looked difficult to enforce from the outset, and the by-laws regulating the process stood on shaky foundations. But this does not excuse those charged with enforcing the policy-even policy on a subject as trivial as lining up to watch a game-to state publicly one policy and then enforce another. Krzyzewskiville exists to offer every student a fair chance to earn a prime spot in Cameron, and this year's line monitors are in the midst of depriving them of that chance.

A second consecutive year of conspicuous failure on the part of K-ville's organizers could do more than inflict misery on the 1,500 or so students who choose to camp out. It may spell the end of a Duke tradition: Administrators may feel that DSG is not sufficiently competent to regulate this process if students' health and safety are endangered, as they are by the rule against pitching tents during the "pre-tenting" campout, and if the system become grossly unfair, as it does when line monitors control the release of information about the policy. If students cannot control the distribution of tickets effectively, then K-ville may be replaced with a lottery system.

Amid the politics and trickery exists a great irony: Krzyzewskiville should be almost as fun as the game itself. This season, Duke is blessed with a top-flight team, balmy weather and a Carolina game that falls reasonably early in the season. Some mistakes may be inevitable two days into the first campout of the season, but the clash with UNC is less than two months away. Enough students take this game very seriously-it's time that line monitors do the same.