Twenty years without female Spring Fling headliner is far too long

It’s that time of year again. Spring break has ended, finals anxiety is building, the snow is melting (well, not really) and soon we’ll find out who our Spring Fling headliners will be. As always, rumors began early this year. If Yik Yak and Tufts Confessions are any indication, students are extremely eager to find out who will perform. But in this annual ritual of giddy speculation, we find ourselves asking one depressing question year after year: are we ever going to get a female headliner?

It has been 20 years since Concert Board booked a solo female artist for Spring Fling. Even then, the artist, Queen Latifah, did not headline the event. If we look strictly at headliners, the situation is much worse: We have only booked one female headliner in the history of Spring Fling: Evelyn “Champagne” King. That was in 1983. 

Last year, in a slight departure from the norm, a few female artists -- members of indie rock group The New Pornographers -- did appear onstage. Two of their seven current band members are women. While this was a welcome change, it’s clearly not enough, especially since they were only the first of two openers for headliner Childish Gambino, and most students tend not to arrive at Spring Fling until much later in the afternoon. 

The lack of female representation in our Spring Fling lineups is absurd and, frankly, embarrassing. Granted, nearly every university that holds an annual spring concert has historically had male-dominated lineups, but other schools are making a serious effort to disrupt these patterns. Last spring, colleges across the northeast booked amazing female acts like Janelle Monáe (Harvard’s Yardfest), Lauryn Hill (Brown’s Spring Weekend) and Icona Pop (Amherst’s Spring Concert). A few weeks ago, Yale announced that Jessie J would headline their 2015 Spring Fling. If Concert Board announces a female headliner for this year’s event, Tufts will be in good company. If not, there’s always next year (or the year after that, or maybe the next one, as we’ve been saying for the past two decades).

To be fair, one can imagine how difficult it must be for Concert Board to find an artist in their budget that fits Spring Fling’s party atmosphere and appeals to a majority of the student body. Furthermore, the fact that women are underrepresented in the music industry, making it harder to find female performers who fit these criteria, is no fault of Concert Board’s. Sexism in the music industry is still a huge problem, as musicians like Nicki Minaj, Björk and M.I.A. have recently attested to in interviews. Still, here at Tufts we are not free from responsibility. If we want to continue to think of our campus as a progressive and welcoming space, we need to seriously re-evaluate the existing culture that has kept female headliners out of our Spring Fling lineups since before some of us were even born.

Maybe we’ll all be in for a pleasant surprise when Concert Board announces this year’s artists. If not, we’ll just have to wait until next year.