By Michael Naughton
President Richard Freeland entered the McLeod Suites on Thursday, Feb. 26 and stood in front of more than half a dozen reporters and television news cameras and over 100 students.
The crowd was waiting to have questions answered as to why the scheduled Springfest concert was postponed until the fall semester.
“We have a responsibility to ensure every student with a question gets an answer,” said Student Government Association President Michael Romano. “It is important to get answers, it is important to stand our ground and it is also important to be constructive.”
The SGA sponsored forum continued as Romano encouraged other students to take advantage of the opportunity to speak directly to their president.
Members of the Council for University Programming (CUP), who had been working for months to book a big-name act, had specific concerns.
“A lot of people … from many groups put in a lot of time that they didn’t have to put in and then I got off the train from work one day and someone said to me, ‘Oh, you know your show was canceled?’ … I really didn’t like that,” said Alvin Carter, a member of CUP.
The questions asked during the forum evoked different responses from Freeland.
“Right now, it is not about the concert, it is about who the university is and how we want to be perceived. We want to make a wonderful kind of statement about who we are,” Freeland said.
Cheers and applause could be heard coming from the suite as one student asked Freeland why there were no meetings with students before he made his final decision to postpone the concert.
“I cannot understand why we have not had a forum before you canceled the Springfest [concert],” said Thomas Boland, a student who attended the forum.
Boland had already taken matters into his own hands, designing a Web site where students could get an understanding of what was going on and protest Freeland’s decision.
The Web site, www.pillagefest.com, had collected nearly 2,300 signatures as of yesterday. Students protested they “reject the loss of their economic input and as conscious consumers demand and deserve reparations for the losses incurred.”
Two student leaders from SGA were among the first students to sign the petition.
“For me, it was a matter of joining fellow students,” said Executive Vice President for Student Affairs Allyson Savin.
The president of SGA also signed the petition because he said he felt it was a very rare occurrence to see so many students come together.
“It is very rare in any university where students break the trend of apathy, and the fact that over 2,000 students on campus had the initiative, devoted time and put forth the energy was a really positive outcome,” Romano said.
Not all students, however, were ready to sign the petition.
Although the majority of students present at the forum were in disagreement with the president’s decision, one student spoke in support of it.
“I do support the fact that [Freeland] canceled the concert,” said Kim Washington, the president of Northeastern’s branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). “Above all else, a boy died on campus … with that in mind, we need to stop and think… Ludacris is going to be at Worcester next week; go see him there. You can’t tell this boy’s mom that this concert is more important than her son’s life, you can’t do that.”
Many of the questions from students during the forum were concerning whether or not the $195,000 allotted from the Budget Review Committee for the event would be returned to the students.
“CUP is not going to lose any money,” Freeland said. “The university will bear any more [of the] costs.”
After the forum, students had a better understanding as to why Freeland made the decision to postpone the concert.
“I understand now why he made the decision that he did,” said Gilberto Osorio, a senior political science major and president of the Latin American Student Organization (LASO). “I still do not agree with the way he went about [making the decision].”
On Tuesday, Feb. 24, outside the President’s Mardi Gras Breakfast, dozens of students gathered, holding signs and dancing to Ludacris music, allowing Freeland to hear how some students felt about his decision as he walked past the protesters towards the Levine Marketplace.
Although the forum lasted an hour, students still had questions to ask the president. Romano plans to take the remaining unanswered questions to Freeland directly to get them answered.
