Parents from around the world will see a greener side of Tufts in two weeks.
Weathering a 25 percent budget cut for the annual Parents Weekend event, now in its 20th year, Tufts is planning to highlight the university's enduring efforts toward becoming more environmentally friendly.
Running from Oct. 16 to Oct. 18, Parents Weekend is titled, "It's Not Easy Being Green: Environmental Exploration at Tufts."
The university chose the environmental-consciousness theme in order to highlight Tufts faculty members who have strong backgrounds in environmental understanding, according to Provost and Senior Vice President Jamshed Bharucha.
"We have quite a few faculty members at the university whose work is directly related to the environment," he said.
Nancy Morrison, director of the advancement office's Parents Programs, agreed. "By having a theme, it allows us to look at faculty and draw good faculty members around the theme," Morrison said.
Parents Weekend is organized by the Parents Program in conjunction with the Office of Special Events.
When they first began planning in January, the event's organizers considered "ethical issues" as a theme for the weekend's events, but they later decided environmental awareness was more upbeat, Morrison said.
"We want people to come and be able to escape from their reality and think about a hopeful theme," she said.
As part of the weekend's programming, Director of Campus Sustainability Sarah Hammond Creighton will lead a Campus Sustainability Tour to exhibit Tufts' green initiatives.
Bharucha will host a seminar entitled, "Education for a Complex World," which will focus on the actions that Tufts is taking to educate students about how to address environmental concerns.
"My own remarks will be about how, at Tufts, we seek to prepare our students to be leaders in solving complex world problems — and environmental problems are among the most complex," he said.
Creighton cited student involvement as a major achievement of Tufts' environmental efforts. "We've had over 2,000 students who worked on projects in their academic work looking at campus-based environmental decisions," she said.
The theme complements Tufts history as a leading university in the area of environmental awareness, Creighton said.
"Tufts was really the first university in the country to embrace greening the campus, which began in 1990 when we issued the first environmental policy [from] a university in the country," she said. "We've really been at the forefront of this movement for the last 20 years."
One of Tufts' first major environmental endeavors, Creighton said, was to make Tufts a non-smoking campus in 1990. Since then, projects have addressed transportation issues, harnessing solar energy and serving locally grown food, as well as other ventures.
Tufts also spearheaded the creation of the Talloires Declaration, written in 1990 at an international conference in Talloires, France. The conference was organized by then-University President Jean Mayer. It signifies the first official pledge from Tufts administrators to support environmental awareness; to date, over 350 university presidents in 52 countries have signed the document.
Parents Weekend will feature faculty speakers from a variety of disciplines, including English, community health, biomedical and environmental engineering, economics, law and political science.
The weekend will also host an assortment of student performances. Various theater groups are scheduled to perform, including Torn Ticket II, Bare Bodkin and Traveling Treasure Trunk. Student a cappella groups such as S-Factor, the Jackson Jills, the Amalgamates, Essence, Shir Appeal, sQ! and the Beelzebubs will hold concerts.
This year, the budget for Parents Weekend was slashed by 25 percent in the face of hard economic times for the university. This cut resulted in less expensive staging for performances, the cancellation of a Friday night reception and small reductions in the amount of free food served.
Morrison said the cuts were made in order to avoid charging admission to Parents Weekend lectures, the perceived alternative to cutting spending.
"The administration feels very strongly that the program needs to be free," she said. "Just like the administration doesn't want the cuts to affect the student experience, we don't want our cuts to affect the parent experience."
Both Morrison and Bharucha said they hope that the weekend's events will interest and appeal to parents. "I want the parents to walk away feeling excited about what they've learned [and] feeling excited about the faculty who are teaching the students," Morrison said.
"I want [parents] to come away from it with a sense of excitement about the way in which the environment and environmental work is featured at Tufts," Bharucha said.
