The Huntington News November 14, 2019
The independent student newspaper of the Northeastern community
@HuntNewsNU
NU ADMINISTRATORS PRESSURE SGA OFFICIALS TO WATER DOWN ANTI-RACISM RESOLUTION
re have been several recent incidents on Northeastern’s B mming from white supremacist and fascist ideology; AND
te supremacist sentiment has been demonstrated by the s ected via the #HereAtNU1 tag on twitter; AND Photo by Ingrid Angulo Authors of the resolution (pictured from left) include SGA Sen. Joshua Roller, SGA Vice President for Student Affairs Erykah Kangbeya, James Lyons and Elizabeth Torres. By Grace Horne and Isaac Stephens | News Staff Three weeks ago, Joshua Roller, a senator in the Student Government Association, or SGA, introduced a resolution calling on Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun to denounce white supremacy on campus and formally acknowledge the fascist organizing materials found in Snell Library this summer. At last Monday’s SGA meeting, senators unanimously consented to the resolution — but its content had been amended. On the Senate floor, Roller said administrators told SGA President Chris Brown that Aoun would not release an explicit statement about
the fascist materials and that the administration preferred the SGA resolution more generally reference a “trend” of racism. According to an SGA official with knowledge of the situation, NU Assistant Vice President of Student and Administrative Services Marina Macomber suggested to SGA leaders that too much time had passed since the incident for Aoun to respond to it directly. The official said both administrators and SGA leadership recognized that “it would look bad for [Northeastern] to respond to an incident almost four months later.” The official asked to remain
anonymous to protect their relationship with administrators. The authors of the resolution include Roller, SGA Vice President for Student Affairs Erykah Kangbeya and two students-at-large, James Lyons and Elizabeth Torres, who respectively represent the Northeastern Students of Color Caucus (NSCC) and the Latin American Student Organization (LASO). Seeing compromise as preferable to impasse, the group opted to change the wording of the bill after SGA leaders discussed the issue with Macomber. In the amended bill, the authors replaced clauses directly referenc-
ing the Snell Library incident with generalizations: One paragraph in the passed resolution references “an increase in white supremacist and fascist propaganda materials popping up”; another cites the popularity of the Twitter hashtag #HereAtNU. Roller said he was a “little thrown off ” by the administrators’ reaction to the original bill but still has hope there will be a response to the fascist materials specifically. Regardless, he said, he sees a watered-down statement from Aoun as better than no statement at all. “With a choice between [administrators] mentioning Snell Library
or them mentioning the entire trend, I would rather focus on the entire trend,” Roller said. “I want them to get the big picture.” To increase the likelihood of a response from Aoun, the bill’s sponsors also removed a sentence from the original text that claimed Aoun has never “made any official comment regarding the threat of white supremacy and fascist ideology in higher education.” The clause was a “dealbreaker” for administrators, according to an SGA official familiar with the matter, because it was untrue. RESOLUTION, on Page 2
Active Minds seeks to add emergency numbers to IDs By Jayden Khatib News Correspondent
Photo by Dana Murtada Husky Cards are printed at the booth in Speare Hall. Students can go there to get their card re-printed.
Over 700 people have signed a petition started by Active Minds at NU, a club that promotes mental health awareness, asking Northeastern to put the phone numbers for the Northeastern University Police Department, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline and the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center on the backs of new students’ Husky Cards. This petition is part of a nationwide Active Minds campaign for colleges across the country to put emergency hotline numbers on students’ IDs. Active Minds at NU hopes this change will help students in crisis reach help faster and fill in some of the gaps in the university’s mental health services. “We thought that this would be a good step in the right direction for Northeastern to start thinking
more about mental health. It was a good campaign that was fairly well established for us to start moving forward with to do some on-campus advocacy,” said fifth-year biochemistry major Sarah Williams, co-president of Active Minds. Active Minds leaders specifically chose the emergency numbers that they thought would be most helpful to the Northeastern community in times of crisis. “As a student at Northeastern, your first contact in an emergency should be NUPD ... but we know that for mental health topics or sexual assault topics, that NUPD may not be the first people that someone will want to speak to ... If someone is contemplating taking their own life, the National Suicide Prevention PETITION, on Page 4