Students worried about having to walk to Medford Square to mail their boxes and letters can breathe a sigh of relief: Tufts' United States Postal Service (USPS) branch, which was under review for possible closure, will stay open for the time being, USPS announced last week.
This article is the second in a two-part series examining student health insurance. The first section looked at student insurance programs statewide. This article focuses on health insurance at Tufts. The Student Health Organizing Coalition (SHOC), a Tufts-based organization that seeks to bring a student voice to discussions on student health insurance, is taking a magnifying glass to Tufts' student health insurance plan, as group members work with legislators to push for statewide reform.
Often referred to as the ultimate college town, Boston is impressively home to over 250,000 students. With such a young population, the city offers an accessible setting to meet students from other schools. And yet a trip into Boston can sometimes seem as daunting as climbing Mount Everest. Comfortable on the Hill, many students tend to stray no farther than Davis Square.
A report by state officials planning the Green Line extension into Somerville and Medford may have paved the way for a professional soccer stadium just four miles from Tufts' campus.
Junior Eliza Walters didn't waste much time deciding what she should and should not eat prior to this year. At the dining hall, Walters glided from station to station filling her plate with whatever looked appetizing that evening. At restaurants, she ordered the dish that most appealed to her, and during trips to the grocery store Walters filled her cart with items that were sure to satisfy her. This carefree approach to food selection came to an end in late August, however, when Walters was diagnosed with celiac disease, an inherited autoimmune disease in which the small intestine is damaged by eating gluten and other proteins found in wheat, barley and rye.
In honor of Thanksgiving, I'd like to address the fundamental American value that is at the very core of this holiday: eating. I mean, who are we kidding? Once you get past the genocidal history of the thing, Turkey Day is a pretty one-track celebration. Sure, it's a little about family and a little about thankfulness, but it is a lot about eating. Like, almost entirely.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) intends to increase student enrollment by roughly 300 undergraduates with hopes of returning the size of its student body to what it was a decade ago.
There is plenty of athletic rivalry on the Hill with the winter sports season starting up and fall championships underway. But off the playing fields, there are a number of student groups that are also representing Tufts in competitions.
A new policy employed through Tufts' Student Information Systems (SIS) to enforce prerequisites in biology, psychology and economics classes has raised a number of student concerns.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has had a troubling last two weeks, mourning the death of graduate student Kabelo Zwane. Another graduate student, Guangtau Cong, went missing last Monday but has since been found.
The current vacancy in the position of director of fraternity and sorority affairs, unfilled since the previous director resigned in August, may lead to possible changes to the position itself.
An independent report released earlier this month found that the Red Line train that runs between Alewife and Harvard, the extension of the T used most often by Tufts students, is in danger of derailment.
While techno-phobic students often forgo forwarding their college e-mail to a personal account, soon they may have to learn. Many universities across the country are contemplating getting rid of the college-based e-mail address that most students receive upon enrollment to communicate with teachers and other students.
Student activities in the campus center have become especially heated in recent weeks — not due to emotions, but because an outdated heating system is in need of replacement.
Members of the Tufts Dance Collective (TDC) broke into song and dance in Dewick-MacPhie Dining Hall shortly after 7 p.m. yesterday, performing a choreographed routine to Katy Perry's song "Hot N Cold" as diners looked on. The flash mob of performers entertained students at the downhill eatery to promote TDC's two Dec. 5 shows.
Lee Gelernt (A '84) is the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Immigrants' Rights Project. He will speak tonight at 7 p.m. on his role as a public defender in his talk on Guantanamo, immigration and civil liberties. The Daily sat down with Gelernt to discuss his job defending immigrants. Mick B. Krever: How does the ACLU — and maybe even more broadly, how does U.S. law in general — view immigrants' rights? People who aren't American citizens, how are they treated by the Constitution, by U.S. law? Lee Gelernt: Right, that's a very good question and there's no simple answer. Immigrants are a particularly tricky issue. They are protected by almost all of the major provisions of the Constitution and the reason is that the Constitution uses the word "persons." It says "equal protection of the law for all persons," due process for all persons, and what the Supreme Court has said is that the use of the word persons rather than citizens means that those protections apply to non-citizens. On the other hand, what the courts have said for hundreds of years is though the Constitution may technically apply to non-citizens, it may not apply in the exact same way. So they have diminished constitutional rights. What we do at the ACLU is fight to ensure that [immigrants] have basic constitutional protections. It may be that in certain cases they don't have every right that a citizen has, but we try to ensure that the basic protections of our system apply to non-citizens. As you can imagine, it's very, very controversial. Particularly in times of economic downturn or national security crises, immigrants often become the scapegoat. MBK: It sounds like there's a pretty foggy middle ground. So when you as a lawyer for the ACLU are defending these people, are you trying to get them as full rights as possible, or are you also drawing a line? LG: That's a very good question, and that's one of the things that we are constantly grappling with. We are, generally speaking, trying to get them as full rights as we possibly can. But there are places where we know that they, under the law, will not get full rights. For example, if you're in the country illegally, there's no way we could go into court and demand that you're entitled to all of the health benefits and various other types of benefits that the state and government give out. On the other hand, if someone who was here illegally were pulled off the street and tortured and made to wrongly confess to a burglary he didn't do, we would certainly say that that person has the right to an attorney and a right to a fair trial and cannot be tortured. So those are two ends of a spectrum, but we constantly have to draw lines and the courts constantly have to draw lines. I don't think we've ever taken a position that every immigrant in the country, no matter what their immigration status, is entitled to every right. But we do believe that they're entitled to more rights under the Constitution and federal law than they sometimes receive. And so we are trying to push that to one end of the spectrum. MBK: One of your more high-profile cases was a suit that you filed against former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. LG: Right. That's a case called al-Kidd v. Gonzales, the former attorney general, and also v. Ashcroft, the former attorney general. That is actually on behalf of a ... native-born U.S. citizen, Abdullah al-Kidd, who got caught up in a post-9/11, what we sometimes call a "dragnet," and was erroneously arrested and detained … What we are alleging is that after Sept. 11, a policy was instituted by the government to arrest Muslim and Arab men, who the government were suspicious of but actually had no hard evidence to arrest them on criminal charges. So what the government did, we allege, is that they would say that they need them as witnesses in someone else's case and have them arrested as witnesses, claiming that they wouldn't voluntarily testify, hold them under the guise of needing them as witnesses, but really what the government wanted to do is investigate them. The government knew they couldn't arrest them on criminal charges because they knew they hadn't done anything wrong. So our client was arrested, held under really draconian conditions for a long time, ultimately was never called to testify — even though that was supposedly the reason he was arrested — but never charged with a crime, just so that they could investigate. They held him as a kind of terrorism suspect, but never admitted that's what they were doing. So we have challenged this whole policy and we believe that the former Attorney General, John Ashcroft, is responsible for creating and implementing the policy.
When Anthropology Lecturer Cathy Stanton proposed that students could "tweet" their first paper assignment, she wasn't talking about ornithology. Twitter.com, blogs and wikis are all forms of new media that no longer pertain solely to the realm of social networking — many of these formats, especially at Tufts, are now considered commonplace in an academic setting.
The descendant of German-Jewish parents and Eastern European grandparents, I'm still a bit hazy on a few parts of the Thanksgiving narrative. I can't really tell the difference between a Puritan and a Pilgrim, and I'm not sure when Native Americans and Pilgrims went from hating each other to spending the holidays together.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor … delivery people?
As employment options continue to shrink for recent college graduates, two Tufts alums are among nine recent graduates this year taking advantage of the Compton Mentor Fellowship program.
