On Aug. 26, junior Alex Levin published an op-ed in the Boston Globe’s “College Town” newsletter, criticizing the Tufts Community Union Senate’s practice of holding seats for various cultural and affinity group representatives on campus.
Levin, who writes for the Tufts Tribune, argues in his article, titled “The setup of my university’s student government is unusual — and legally questionable,” that the eleven seats reserved for community senators violate federal nondiscrimination laws.
“Having seats in the student government meant for students of particular races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations may be in accordance with the orthodoxies of DEI doctrine, but it violates the spirit of equal-protection and nondiscrimination principles established in the US Constitution and federal law,” Levin wrote.
The TCU Senate Executive Board, while respecting Levin’s right to raise concerns about TCU, argued that community senators represent all communities, not just the ones they are elected to shed light on. They issued a statement to the Daily saying that the article describes a nomination process that is no longer in use.
“The article critiques an outdated nomination process for community senators that has not been used during elections for at least five years,” they wrote. “Just like all senators, community senators serve and represent the entire undergraduate student body while also bringing greater awareness to the experiences and concerns of campus communities.”
They further asserted the non-discriminatory nature of the community senate seats, noting that there are no restrictions on who can run for them.
“Any member of the Tufts Community Union may run for any community senator seat, just as any eligible student may run for a class senator seat,” the Executive Board wrote. “Consistent with university policy, the TCU Senate bylaws and organizational structure endeavor to be inclusive and adhere to the university’s non-discrimination policies.”
In a statement to the Daily, Patrick Collins, Tufts’s executive director of media relations, offered a similar argument for the validity of the election system, referencing a 2023 Supreme Court decision ruling on the unconstitutionality of race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
“We respect the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and are committed to ensuring compliance with the law,” he wrote. “It has always been and continues to be the case that any full-time undergraduate student can run for any open TCU Community Senator position regardless of how that person self-identifies.”
Despite what’s stated in the senate’s bylaws, Levin argues that the legality of these seats rests on an interpretation of whether the seats are open to all students or implicitly restricted to specific identity groups.
“I think whether you call it a quota, whether you call it reserve seats, or, whatever you want to call it, the fact is that there are 11 seats that are set up,” Levin said to the Daily. “Tufts maintains, Patrick Collins maintains, that anyone can run for these seats, but … as Will Jacobson said in the piece, that doesn’t happen in practice.”
William Jacobson, Cornell Law School professor and president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, is cited in the Globe article arguing that race and ethnicity-specific community positions are illegal because they discourage members of other groups from applying, even if technically anyone is eligible.
The D.O.E.’s Office for Civil Rights published a letter on Feb. 14, 2025, directing academic institutions against consideration of race in a range of decisions including admissions, hiring and all other aspects of academic or campus life. Though the letter does not have the force of law, it clarified the Trump administration’s interpretation of current legal standards, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Levin referenced the thoroughness of his research, mentioning the multiple legal experts he reached out to while researching his piece in order to verify his beliefs about the structure of the TCU Senate.
“Because I’m doing my own interpretation of this, I wanted to cross-check that with legal experts who I reached out to, including Randall Kennedy at Harvard, as well as Will Jacobson, who is at Cornell, and they both gave statements in the article agreeing with my thesis,” Levin said.
“Just the way [the seats are] advertised constitutes blocking other people, and constitutes a reserved section in the Senate … I personally would say that it is a quota,” he added.
In his article, Levin wrote that he had used archived Daily articles to verify that the community seats have been held exclusively by members of the communities they represented since the inception of the system in 2010.
Speaking with the Daily, he acknowledged that community senators were not explicitly required to belong to specific demographic categories, maintaining that this identity-based quote was an implicit assumption.
“There’s no statement in the bylaws actually saying this, and I explain that in the article,” he said. “The crux of the issue is really that in practice, it’s excluding people, but there’s [nothing] explicit in writing, which is I think what Patrick Collins alluded to in his statement.”
