As the Tufts Community Union Senate’s year comes to a close, the Daily looked back on a year of budget challenges, new initiatives and institutional changes.
Budget constraints on the Senate have led to significant restrictions on student organizations, from club travel to album recording funds for a capella groups.
A Religious and Philosophical Student Organizations Community Senator seat was created, while the University Chaplaincy launched a separate $50,000 fund for religious student organizations.
The Senate also passed several student-focused initiatives, including a dining feedback survey, a sports equipment rental program and funding for a participatory budgeting initiative. A survey sent to the full student body, however, revealed that students felt largely unsupported by the Senate.
At its final meeting, the Senate passed a resolution urging Tufts to grant course credit to members of the performance groups, while Treasurer Brendan French was elected president for the 2026-27 academic year in a student-body-wide election.
Graduating seniors in the Senate spoke to the Daily about their highlights and what they took away from this past year.
Outgoing President Dhruv Sampat said he believed the TCU Senate had one of its most productive years.
“All of Senate and every senator has been so impressive and has taken so much initiative of their own, and seeing that, I think we’ve had one of the most productive years,” he said. “Big ticket items that were long-term were also addressed — things like increasing the student activities fee, engaging in discussion and dialogue about open syllabi, experiential learning — all of those things were projects that we actively pursued.”
Sampat also discussed progress on projects the Senate worked on over the past year, saying that he viewed the projects as successful in the short, medium and long term.
He mentioned the farmer’s market and the textbook exchange as short-term projects, the campus-wide survey from the Administration & Policy committee as a medium-term project and the push to raise the student activities fee as an example of a long-term project.
Eraste Talla, a class of 2026 senator, brought up the textbook exchange — which included moving the shelf to the Tisch Library — as something he was proudest of this year.
He also echoed Sampat’s sentiment about the Senate’s productivity. “We’ve had so many projects this year,” Talla said. “They were all really, really good.”
Sampat also brought up the Tuition Transparency Town Hall, which was hosted in February and included presentations from several university administrators, as a highlight of the year.
“I think [the town hall] was incredibly exciting, not just because it’s an event that’s a one and done sort of thing, but it started a conversation that is very important for all of us to have,” he said. “It is the first time we were able to get the administration to answer questions directly from students, live.”
Alexander Vang, TCU vice president, said that he was proudest of his commitment to the General Board and the implementation of a project proposal form.
“I made sure that [the committee chairs] felt supported in terms of who to reach out to for admin, how to reach out to them and ensuring they knew how to mentor their committee members as well,” he said.
“The project proposal form implementation this year was an instrumental thing that I spearheaded,” Vang added. “We’ve never had anything like that, at least in my time here on Senate, and I think it was a great starting place to replace the project tracker that we have that no one really filled out.”
Vang also said one of the main things he took away from his time on the Executive Board was learning how to best support communities at Tufts that he believes are not always the most visible.
“[There are] specific challenges or structural barriers in place as well that first generation college students face that aren’t tied to just financial aspects,” Vang said. “There is a lot more of a social aspect.”
The senators also discussed some of the challenges they felt the Senate faced this year, especially cutting funds for student organizations.
“In my opinion, for both me and the Senate, making informed decisions for clubs with less money was definitely the biggest challenge,” Talla said. “Having to meet the demand with not necessarily the same amount of money was definitely challenging.”
Sampat mentioned issues with consistent engagement as one of the biggest challenges with the Senate.
“It’s consistently a challenge for the TCU to keep the entire body engaged through the full year,” Sampat said. “We had a record number of senators that were suspended and then brought back based on their attendance, and that is something, unfortunately, we had to go through to reinforce the fact that every senator has a duty to the people that voted them in.”
