#Metoo: Music professor is suspended in Boston
mainA music professor and conductor named in the Boston Globe allegations of sexual misconduct at music colleges has lost his positions at three schools.
Eric Hewitt has left the Boston Conservatory and Boston College High School and is on leave from Phillips Exeter Academy.
According to the Globe, four former Boston Conservatory students accused Hewitt of sending them unwanted text messages, making rude phone calls, bullying them and sexually assaulting one of them.
More here.
Hewitt is a protégé of the late composer Gunther Schuller.
“Hewitt is a protégé of the late composer Gunther Schuller.”
Oh. Well that could explain a lot.
How so?
I’ve relayed this account on these pages in the past. As a music student at Wayne State University in Detroit in the early 1980’s Schuller came for a week residency. Late one afternoon as I was riding home on the bus on the way back home, I recognized Schuller walking down the sidewalk in a questionable part of town (7 mile and Woodward Ave.) and was even more shocked when he walked right into a seedy film/bookstore for which that neighborhood was well known.
So now walking into a seedy bookstore in a bad part of town constitutes sexual abuse?
What next? Will the purity police be our reading minds to weed out those with impure thoughts?
Ah, Highland Park, Michigan … the garden spot of America.
See my response to Larry, below (which I probably should have posted here).
Please do not drag the name of my esteemed teacher/mentor/friend Gunther Schuller into this.
I should clarify: rudeness and bullying were behaviors I witnessed often over the 20+ year span when I played under him. Never witnessed or heard about anything of a sexual nature.
Schuller’s “The Compleat Conductor” is 548 pages of bullying other conductors – past and present – with criticizing their interpretations (Oxford University Press 1997).
Amen.
The question is: are the texts unwanted now or were they unwanted then? Big difference.
They seem top have been unwanted now AND then…
“The Globe confirmed their accounts with contemporaneous communications, medical records, and multiple interviews with friends, family, colleagues, and professors who learned of Hewitt’s behavior soon after it occurred.
The Globe has confirmed that at least two of the incidents shared by the women — including the alleged sexual assault — were reported to conservatory faculty soon after they occurred.”
The original Boston Globe article is substantial.
What is the new definition of “sexual assault” these days please? I think we all need to be told because there are millions waiting to be named and shamed, Salem style.
I’m pretty sure that drugging someone and having sex with them against their will has been “sexual assault” for a long time.
But “Sue” doesn’t think so? That’s very accommodating.
From the US Dept. of Justice (https://www.justice.gov/ovw/sexual-assault)
Sexual assault is any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient. Falling under the definition of sexual assault are sexual activities as forced sexual intercourse, forcible sodomy, child molestation, incest, fondling, and attempted rape.