This academic year has proven to be a tough one for Northeastern students. Northeastern converted from short quarters to lengthy semesters, we lost seven students and to top things off, in January, students became unruly when the Patriots won the Super Bowl causing damage to Symphony Road, resulting in a death of a student’s brother.
Last year, students voted to rai-se their student activities fee from approximately $35 a year to $100. Students did this with the promise that they would have a big name act headline 2004’s Springfest. In previous year’s acts such as local boys The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and eclectic hip-hop group The Roots were headliners, but this year students were guaranteed an artist that received heavy rotation on the radio and regular appearances on TRL. This year we were going to bring the dirty south up \north and Ludacris was going to be the headliner of Springfest.
With the $195,000 the Budget Review Comm-ittee (BRC) allocated from their concert fund to the Council for University Programs (CUP) they pretty much could have gotten anyone they wanted. NU beat out schools like Tufts University who simply could not afford him. CUP even had enough money to hire a decent opening act, Jurassic 5, but this all came to a halt with the Super Bowl aftermath.
On Feb. 1, thousands of students from Northeas-tern and surrounding colleges and universities poured into the streets to celebrate the Patriot’s second championship in three years. In what was probably a combination of drunkenness and adrenaline, students flipped cars and started fires and in the process a bystander was struck and killed by a car driving down Symphony Road. In the weeks following the incident, the university began receiving phone calls from disgruntled neighbors and city officials. In the end, President Freeland found that improving our relationship with the community was far more important than continuing on with “business as usual” and as a result the Springfest concert was “postponed.”
The night the decision was made, members of the Student Government Ass-ociation (SGA) and CUP staged a protest outside of Freeland’s annual Mardi Gras Breakfast on Feb. 24. By the end of the week the on Feb. 26, President Freeland held a meeting with the student body to explain his decision-making process. Hundreds of angered students, report-ers and news cameras filled the room. Students vented their frustrations, but in the end the president stood firm and did not change his decision.
This year, unlike others, Springfest went by unnoticed.
