In celebration of its 150th anniversary, the Tufts University Alumni Association (TUAA) is in conjunction with Programming Board sponsoring today's launch of Traditions Week to promote increased interaction between students and alumni.
"We're trying to find more ways to allow students and alumni to interact," Executive Director of Alumni Relations Tim Brooks said. "Students learn how helpful alumni are and that they are willing to be a part of their network once they graduate."
Traditions Week will feature a host of Programming Board-organized activities leading up to Friday's annual Tuftonia's Day celebration. These activities will revive and share alumni traditions with the current student body.
The tug-of-war kick-off event scheduled for today was cancelled due to the prospect of rain. Instead, the first event of the week, Brown and Blue Day, will take place tomorrow.
Tuftonia's Day, the culmination of Traditions Week, will begin with a carnival and conclude with a fireworks display on the Residential Quad, where alumni and students will be able to interact over dessert.
Mini Jaikumar, associate director in the Office of Alumni Relations, said that this year's events are special because they will involve more than just local alumni. Forty-two regional and international alumni chapters on Friday will also host 150th anniversary celebrations.
According to Jaikumar, alumni will also use the celebration to begin an initiative called 150 Acts of Active Citizenship, which encourages alumni chapters to plan and execute events that exhibit community involvement.
The goal is to complete 150 acts of service before the end of the sesquicentennial celebration in October.
"All 150 acts are group acts," Jaikumar said, referring to the alumni groups that have formed on local, regional and international scales.
Organizers stressed that the association's celebrations are for both alumni and current students.
"Today's students are making their own memories, and I think it's nice that there is a renewed effort being made to boost that Tufts spirit — that shared sense of a special place — which is what binds members of Tufts nation together, wherever they may be," Mark Sullivan, editor in advancement communications, said in an e-mail to the Daily.
TUAA has also been working diligently to prepare specific projects for alumni to participate in, such as an e-mail campaign coordinated by Sullivan. The project asks alumni to write brief tributes to Tufts with personal reminiscences of their time as students.
"Alumni were asked if they ever wore a freshman beanie or skirted curfew in a Jackson [all-female] dorm or placed a coin in Jumbo's trunk for luck," Sullivan said.
The response to the campaign was positive, with submissions totaling 27 pages, ultimately re-creating a "Lost Tufts," according to Sullivan.
"We received lots of stories about Jumbo and the night he burned down," Sullivan said. "Other stories described the old parietal rules in the Jackson women's dorms, and how you had to yell ‘Man on the Floor!' even if it were only your dad helping you with your trunk on moving day."
Additionally, a commemorative video and booklet about the 150-year history of TUAA are being produced for a showing this Friday in Cabot Auditorium. The 10-minute video, which was produced by Steve Eliopoulos (LA '89), uses past film clips found in a search of the Tufts Digital Collection and Archives.
Alumni and members of the Tufts campus have been asked to contribute nominations of exemplary Tufts graduates — both living and deceased — for recognition. The nominations include more than 350 individual candidates from various classes across the 150-year span.
The final selection of honorees will be shared in September — alumni recognition month — via a web-based presentation, according to Jaikumar.
TUAA is one of the oldest alumni associations in the nation, and every effort has been made to make celebrations accessible to all alumni, according to Jaikumar.
"We have chosen to celebrate through a variety of things happening at various points throughout the year, so that different people, with different interests, in different geographical locations, can participate," Jaikumar said.
Some of the Traditions Week events are also co-sponsored by the Tufts Spirit Coalition and the Office of Alumni Relations.
