BU Students Give Brownback Mixed Review

In a break from the typical campaign trail, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Sam Brownback, spoke at Boston University Monday, where he encouraged students to get involved in policy work for African nations and to take impact trips to continent that he says is often forgotten about.

Brownback, the republican senator from Kansas, kept campaign rhetoric to a minimum at the African Presidential Archives and Research Center 2007 lecture series. In fact, he only uttered the words, “If I were president” once throughout the hour-long speech.

The crowd of roughly 150 students, professors and members of the ARACP listened attentively while Brownback said his most important point was that the U.S. should engage diplomatic relations with African countries.

“There’s a lot going on in Africa that’s good such as economic development,” Brownback said. “But there’s also a lot of problems. There’s a huge amount of suffering and every time you go there you see the beauty of the people that are dealing with this suffering.”

Brownback, who has taken multiple trips to Africa, including a trip to the Darfur region of Sudan, encouraged students to travel there themselves. He also commended recent activist campaigns in recent years that were initiated by college students, such as the Save Darfur campaign and the Invisible Children campaign.

“Just go and see it because you’ll never be the same,” he said. “Definitely be safe about it, but go and you’ll be different. It’ll be a great thing for you and it’ll be a great thing for the United States.”

Brownback took a handful of questions from students in the audience and from a class of ten students from Morehouse University in Atlanta, who watched the lecture via satellite.

Boston University student Jeremy Binckes said Brownback hardly answered his questions about the pros and cons of privatizing the water supply in African nations and he wasn’t impressed with Brownback’s speech overall.

“The dialogue was good enough, I guess,” Binckes said. “But his speech was really based on anecdotal information and there wasn’t anything substantive on the issues he was promoted to address, which was the threat of Al Qaeda, Africa and U.S. security, but I guess it was better than a typical campaign speech—that would have been incredibly tactless.”

Most of the students attending the lecture were more interested in the topic of U.S.-African relations rather than Brownback’s candidacy for president. A number of students actually didn’t even know who Brownback is or that he was running for president.

“I didn’t know anything about him before tonight,” said BU freshman Melissa Kyle. “There are so few candidates you see even talking about this issue. I’m a democrat and wouldn’t vote for him for president, but I’d definitely get behind him and volunteer or support the Africa cause.”