A campuswide survey sent by the Tufts Community Union Senate at the end of the fall 2025 semester found that Tufts students generally do not feel supported by the Senate and do not know what it does.
In questions relating to knowledge of the TCU Senate’s activities, results on a 1–7 scale averaged close to the middle. Admin & Policy Committee Chair Spencer Kluger, a sophomore, concluded that students would like more transparency and communication from the Senate.
“Some people wrote in responses just desiring that they knew more about what we were doing, the events that we’re hosting, how our budgeting processes work,” Kluger said.
The Senate’s Outreach Committee has been working on multiple projects to increase communication and transparency with the student body. Outreach Committee member Anastasiya Korovska, a junior, said that the Senate is pivoting away from social media-based outreach towards hosting more in person events.
“I think we overlooked that some people may not have us on our Instagram, or might not get that exposure through social media,” Korovska said.
The Senate held ‘TCU Talks’ last Wednesday in the Mayer Campus Center, where senators met with students, informed them about current and past initiatives and received student feedback. The Outreach Committee wants to make ‘TCU Talks’ a regularly scheduled event to improve direct communication between the Senate and the student body.
“We’re trying to create a structured schedule of committees tabling in the [Campus Center],” Korovska said.
She cited a new project that would involve a rotating schedule of committees tabling at different areas around the Mayer Campus Center to share their plans with students.
“A different committee may table each week or every other week and kind of share what projects they’ve accomplished in the past, what ongoing projects they have and maybe get input from students on what future projects they would want,” Korovska said.
Aside from the tabling, the Senate is bringing back their monthly newsletter as a periodic summary of their activities and initiatives in a monthly email to students.
For Kluger, the newsletter is a great way of expressing to students the extent of the work the Senate does beyond their weekly Sunday meetings.
“It’s good to highlight just the amount of work that is going on behind the scenes,” Kluger said. “It’s Gen-Board meetings, it’s committee meetings, it’s people meeting with administrators and faculty and staff, and everyone just working together to best support students in every manner that we can.”
The release date of the newsletter has not yet been confirmed.
97% of survey respondents said they would like to see example syllabi when registering for courses.
In an interview with the Daily, Professor David Denby expressed several concerns about such a requirement. He felt that knowing the exact grading system and number of assignments when choosing courses would lead to students picking the classes with the lightest workload.
“You don’t really want students choosing classes according to the workload, because that’s going to put an incentive to lighten the workload to get better enrollments, and it’s going to push things in the wrong direction,” Denby, who joined Tufts’ philosophy department in 1996, said.
Denby also discussed problems that could arise due to the contractual nature of syllabi in the eyes of university administration, suggesting that example syllabi could limit a professor’s flexibility in course content.
“The university administration sometimes likes to use the language of contracts when you talk about syllab[i],” Denby said. “If it’s a contract and you don’t stick to it, then the student can come back at you. And often classes need a bit of fluidity, so you might, halfway through, change your mind, want to discuss something else. That’s how classes have always been.”
Denby also referenced the potential for publishing syllabi online to lead to scrutiny from outside sources.
“There are a lot of people scrutinizing university syllabi to try and find out if there’s too much DEI or something like that,” Denby said. “You don’t want some government person coming in saying, ‘We demand that the philosophy department not talk about race anymore.’”
Kluger, believing the first survey to be a success, is interested in doing another survey at the end of the spring semester.
“I think the number of responses that we got was really incredible,” Kluger said. “Understanding where students are, what they need, how we can support them, is a huge part of our mission. I think having done the one last semester, [which] went really well, means that we should do them more often.”
