While organizers said the Boston University Ideas Festival provided a venue for different groups on campus to converse about different issues, few of the organizations that planned to sign up attended.
The festival, which ran Friday through Sunday, featured a debate on intellectual independence, a campus-wide “Blog-a-Thon,” a conference about solutions in the Middle East, a creation of a social contract and a sexual assault symposium. However, the sexual assault symposium sparked controversy due to its approach.
Demarius “DJ” Walker, a College of Arts and Sciences junior and main organizer of the event, said the sexual assault symposium did not happen for two reasons. The leader, School of Education Professor Carl Hobert, was unable to attend, and the Center For Gender, Sexuality and Activism actively campaigned against the panel.
“The Center for Gender, Sexuality and Activism objected to the symposium on the basis that they did not think the approach was appropriate to deal with sexual assault, and I can at least respect that,” Walker said.
In an open letter to the BU community, the CGSA stated the sexual assault symposium was “inappropriate” and “insensitive” because it used “traumatizing tactics.”
The symposium was scheduled to work through a date rape case study in which different people would view the case from different perspectives, Walker said. Some people would read the study from the perspective of the accused and some the accuser, some would read the case as the police and others the bystanders.
The program was expected to be conducted by Hobert, director the nonprofit organization Axis of Hope. The organization, Walker said, does this kind of workshop routinely.
“The way that the workshop actually worked was pretty set in stone,” Walker said. “He has a pretty routine way he goes about conducting the workshop.”
The CGSA, however, deemed the role-play of a case study inappropriate.
“The role-playing exercise is predicated on the assumption that there are multiple ways to interpret a case of sexual assault – or that there might be ambiguity or a ‘gray area’ when it occurs,” the CGSA letter stated. “This disempowers and casts doubt on survivors.”
The creation of a “social contract,” another aim of the Ideas Festival, never materialized.
“What we ended up doing [instead of creating a social contract] was creating a declaration of intellectual independence,” Walker said. “What that means is we wanted to define, over the course of the next year, what we would be attempting to do, and a part of that is creating the social contract.”
Beyond the symposium itself, Walker also faced criticism due to a comment made in a video hosted on Nyoombl about “sex culture at BU.”
“There are a lot of females at BU, at least from my perspective, who are not respecting of themselves,” Walker said in the video. “I think when it comes to how much of your body you put out there, that’s a part of a question about how much you respect yourself.”
Walker said the comment was taken out of context.
“It was about talking about sex culture at BU, another part of BU Ideas festival, and the social contract,” Walker said. “So I wanted to talk about how individuals approach sex at BU. So the controversy started from a bunch of different places.”
Howard Male, president of Student Union and a School of Management and School of Hospitality Administration senior, said the ideas festival was not a “Union-sponsored event.”
“There are a lot of passionate student leaders focused on issues that feel current to our student body right now,” Male said. ”I hope that all of the discourse is done in a way that’s leading toward a community of integrity and respect.”
Walker said the video and the festival as a whole was created to engage the community in conversation.
“We wanted to talk about sex culture at BU, we wanted to talk about leadership culture at BU, we wanted to talk about academic culture at BU,” Walker said. “We wanted to use Nyoombl to have a series of conversations that would spark interest, and I guess we did, but not in the way that we were hoping to do.”
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