Have you ever talked about the Tufts hook-up culture with your friends? Have you sat around discussing how politically correct Tufts is? Have you talked about what interracial dating looks like at Tufts and in the real world?
These are all programs that our group, formally BEATBias (the Bias Education and Awareness Team), facilitated over the past year. This year we are off to a fresh start and have renamed ourselves SPEAC — Students Promoting Equality, Awareness and Compassion. We changed our name this summer because we feel that the acronym SPEAC better addresses our goals for the Tufts campus. We want to promote honest campus dialogue through which people feel comfortable expressing their views and opinions on issues that are important to them. We are trained in facilitation of such dialogue and hope to create spaces where people can have these tough discussions in a way that promotes a more cohesive community.
Tufts is a campus full of active citizens and public service scholars — people who are real "doers," who are itching to get out on the front lines of all kinds of issues relevant to our society. This makes our student body quite a force to be reckoned with.
While pursuing discourse can be difficult and emotionally loaded, we believe that conversation is a very productive action, in and of itself. Promoting conversation about issues specifically pertinent to our campus and our student body allows us to turn a critical and analytical eye on the issues that are not only at our doorstep, but are also inside our home that is Tufts University.
The fact is that despite the general belief that Tufts is an accepting and liberal space, incidents of intolerance happen year after year. These incidents result from a myriad of factors, but the SPEAC team believes that having conversation around the root issues of these situations and implementing proactive programming can help our community reduce these occurrences and respond to them in a unified way.
We hope to promote a campus environment in which students feel safe expressing their views — including, but not limited to, those on religion, sexuality, race, culture and current events. This means that no matter what you identify as or where you come from, you should feel comfortable sharing your experiences. We do our best to create this space at all of our events and hope to promote this environment throughout our campus.
If you are interested in creating a space to talk about an issue that is important to you, we are excited about the opportunity to collaborate. We would love to hear from you at tufts.speac@gmail.com.
We also hope to see you tomorrow evening at "Open Minds SPEAC Out" at 7 p.m. in the Hill Hall lounge. We will be breaching the topics of race and white privilege in response to guest speaker Tim Wise's ticketed lecture, "Colorblind," which is tonight at 7 p.m. in Cohen Auditorium.
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Samantha Frank is a senior majoring in French and community health. Alexandra Lis-Perlis is a sophomore who has not yet declared a major.
