When we arrived at Tufts as freshmen, we found out that University President Lawrence Bacow was a fan of running. Some of us even broke out the spandex to join him and his wife Adele for their early-morning cross-campus jogs.
But we soon discovered that Bacow was not a fan of all sorts of running - in particular, the naked, inebriated running that traditionally takes place on a mass scale at Tufts on the last night of fall-semester classes.
In a campus-wide e-mail he sent the morning after 2002's Naked Quad Run (during which several students sustained alcohol-related injuries), Bacow made it clear that he preferred the Boston Marathon to the NQR.
"The combination of consumption of alcohol with a mad dash through an icy, hilly campus at night cannot continue," Bacow wrote, taking the tone of a disappointed and disapproving father. Deeply ashamed, the Tufts student body hung its collective head - which, incidentally, had a tremendous collective hangover - and the NQR was no more. (Just kidding.)
But we're not kidding when we say that several Greek houses were (temporarily) no more. Indeed, when we arrived at Tufts as freshman, those of us seeking Greek bacchanalia were met with... well, a lack of it, as three houses were briefly shut down in the wake of hazing incidents. Deeply ashamed, the Greeks hung their collective head, and hazing was no more. (Again, just kidding.)
Bacow gained a new right-hand man this year in recently-appointed University Provost Jamshed Bharucha, who came to Tufts after 19 years at Dartmouth. Bacow and Bharucha, who was chosen the previous April to take outgoing Provost Sol Gittleman's place, hit it off immediately: "We're having fun," Bacow told the Daily in September, adding, "Not a day goes by when we don't talk with one another...usually it's two or three times a day. Chemistry is important."
Though Tufts gained a new provost, it lost several deans, including the dean of admissions, the dean of the School of Medicine, the dean of the School of Engineering, the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, the dean of the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, the dean of the colleges and the dean of academic services and student affairs. (Phew.)
Tufts undergraduates also lost their Tufts Community Union (TCU) president, Melissa Carson, who stepped down partway through her term. Carson's resignation (her seat stayed vacant for the rest of the year) was only the latest in the Senate's troubles: As the Daily wrote in May, "declining outside interest in the Senate further complicated its already difficult struggle to improve its relationship with the student body."
But according to graduating Senator Ted Schwartzberg, the Senate had nothing to fear. In an admirable attempt to spin the situation positively, he told the Daily in May that "the fact that few students vote and even fewer attend our open meetings must mean they think we're doing something right." Wow, is it too late for this guy to replace Scott McClellan?
When Chike Aguh was elected TCU president for the following year, he told the Daily that "the student apathy that exists right now is partly something that we have inherited from student governments of the past," adding that "the present Senate and its counterparts are responsible for trying to undo some of that damage and make every effort to create the faith that students need to have in their representative bodies."
The President's Lawn was lacking in bodies when Spring Fling rolled around: The outdoor concert extravaganza was cancelled due to the characteristically nasty Boston weather. But luckily, students would have the chance to see Busta Rhymes play Spring Fling in 2005! Oh, wait...
In January, Tufts mourned the loss of Wendy Carman, who died in a fire that consumed her off-campus loft. At a packed service held in Carman's memory, the junior was described as a generous, kind and caring individual.
It was soon discovered that the landlord who had rented Carman her living space was in violation of 12 building and safety codes, and as the Daily reported in March, "Carman's landlord agreed to an out-of-court settlement of $53,000 to the City of Medford."
Liberal firecrackers Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Kurt Vonnegut spoke on campus throughout the schoolyear. But as the country geared up for war with Iraq, Tufts also produced some liberal firecrackers of its own: the members of the Tufts Coalition to Oppose the War in Iraq (TCOWI), whose plans to hold a moratorium the day war was declared were foiled when that day fell on spring break.
The Right was active on campus as well, proposing an unsuccessful amendment that would have granted conservatives representation on Senate as a cultural minority. As the Daily reported in November, the failed referendum on the subject asked students "whether they approved Amendment 3, which would have created a conservative culture representative on the Senate controlled by the [Primary] Source, a rightward-leaning campus publication."
The Daily also reported that then-Source Editor-in-Chief Megan Liotta "said that the group's biggest mistake was probably putting the Source's name on the proposal because the representative was then labeled a Primary Source representative, not a conservative representative as she said it would have been in practice."
Tufts' conservative community was more amenable than its liberal one to that year's Fares Lecturer, George H.W. Bush. Both the inside and the outside of the Gantcher Center were peopled with protesters and hecklers, one of whom, Liz Monnin, allegedly stood up and gave the former U.S. president the finger during his speech (and as a result, had her Alumni Association senior award revoked). Ah, sophisticated political discourse.
