Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) spoke about her life, the economy and higher education at Tufts yesterday for the Alan D. Solomont Lecture on Citizenship and Public Service.Structured as a question-and-answer session between Warren, students and Solomont (A ’70), the Pierre and Pamela Omidyar Dean ...
TUESDAYIsrael's Security ChallengeDetails: The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy's International Security Studies program presents Major General Yaakov Amidror as a speaker as part of its Luncheon Lecture Series. He will lead an "off the record" lecture with Fletcher faculty, staff ...
Tufts student groups and campus leaders are preparing for the U.S. general elections on Nov. 4 after states' primary elections by working to register voters and generate interest in political participation.Vote Everywhere Ambassadors for the Andrew Goodman Foundation have organized voter registration ...
Erik Halvorsen started in his new role as senior director of technology transfer and industry collaboration in the Office of the Vice Provost for Research on Aug. 4. Halvorsen comes to Tufts after serving as the executive director of the Boston Children’s Hospital Technology and Innovation Development ...
Booking ItOn Sept. 4 at 7:12 p.m. a person was spotted on the roof of Cousens Gym and was reported to Tufts University Police Department (TUPD). Officers located the person, who was a Tufts student, and removed him from the roof. The student claimed to have been reading on the roof and had a book with ...
Tufts has over the past several months implemented a number of changes to its sexual assault policy, hired two campus sexual assault specialists and increased mandatory student and faculty training since the Department of Education's (DOE) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) found it in violation of Title IX on April 28.
Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science Donna Slonim and Robinson Professor of Chemistry David Walt collaborated to teach a class this summer on bioinformatics, the intersection of genomic sequencing and computer science, to 18 high school juniors and seniors from across the country who are interested in biology.
As she dropped her son off at the Berklee College of Music for the Five-Week Summer Performance Program, Dr. Kathleen Camara was amazed at the sight in front of the Berklee Performance Center.
A group of 12 runners from Tufts, a number of whom are members of the Tufts Marathon Team, traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland to participate in the 2014 Islandsbanski Reykjavik Marathon through sponsorship by the Office of Alumni Relations' Tufts Travel-Learn Program from Aug. 20 to Aug. 24.
Tufts Dining Services will implement a number of updates to its dining operations at Tufts this year in response to feedback from faculty, staff and students. The updates include a renovation of the Commons Deli and Grill, which will be reopened as the Commons Marketplace later this fall.
Tufts installed a new solar panel system on the roof of Dowling Hall at the end of last April as part of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center's Solarize Massachusetts (Solarize Mass) Medford program, which aims to broaden the usage of small-scale solar electricity systems in cities across Massachusetts.
Tufts University Chaplaincy announced the establishment of a new part-time Humanist in Residence position this July as a resource for Tufts students who identify as nonreligious. Walker Bristol (A '14) will be the first to take on the role beginning this year.
A new bronze statue of Tufts University's elephant mascot, Jumbo, will replace the existing sculpture on the Academic Quad this fall, with the official unveiling set for Oct. 19. The former statue of Jumbo, which was located outside of Barnum Hall, has already been removed in preparation for the ...
Robert Cook was named the new dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) last May after serving as interim dean since the previous November. Cook replaced the former dean of GSAS, Lynne Pepall, who stepped down from the position in 2013 after serving as dean for seven years.Cook started ...
As summer comes to a close, so do several construction projects on Tufts campus, including two dormitories, an athletics facility and a number of science and technology buildings. Some construction will continue into the fall and beyond, despite the completion of work on most student-used facilities. ...
Last year, the Tufts community saw a number of changes and developments on the Hill, ranging from revisions of its sexual assault policy to the replacement of Fall Ball with Fall Gala. Below are some of the biggest stories from the 2013-2014 academic year.September The university revised its drug and ...
Echoes of students chanting "re-sign or resign, we need our Title IX" vibrated inside Ballou Hall as more than 100 students formed a human-circle around the administrative building, protesting the university “revoking” the agreement it signed with the Department of Education’s Office ...
Anne-Marie Slaughter will deliver the commencement address to Tufts' Class of 2014 today. The president and CEO of the New America Foundation, Slaughter was the first woman to serve as the Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State from 2009-2011. In 2012, she published "Why Women Still Can't Have it All" in The Atlantic, which sparked a national dialogue about gender equality in the 21st century. Slaughter is also an esteemed name in the field of education, holding titles at Harvard Law School and Princeton University, where she was the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She will receive an honorary doctorate of laws at the commencement ceremony.A lightly edited version of the conversation the Daily had with Slaughter follows.The Tufts Daily: Will the commencement ceremony on May 18 be your first visit to Tufts?Anne-Marie Slaughter: No, goodness, no. I taught at Harvard Law School for many years, so from 1994 to 2002 and before that, I was a student in Cambridge and visited Tufts often.TD: With the announcement of the commencement speaker, many students have been discussing your contribution to the ongoing dialogue on work culture and the potential changes it can have on family life. Is work-life balance a theme you wish to address during the Tufts commencement speech?AS: Yes. I will be talking about work life in, I hope, some new ways. I'm going to be talking about that much more than foreign policy.TD: It's been nearly two years since the publication of your article "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" in The Atlantic. What is the most memorable response you have received since then?AS: Oh my goodness, that's an impossible question to answer. I've gotten hundreds and hundreds of letters and emails, and I've spoken to ... thousands of people since in different speeches. I would say there's just been an extraordinarily rich tapestry of comments and writing and talking ... This turned into my life for the last few years, so the most astounding thing was that [the article] went up online on a Wednesday night, and a week later, a million people had read it, or at least a million people had gone on the website. You had a million unique visitors and in just one week that's an extraordinary response. One of the things that did surprise me was how many responses I got from men.TD: Many students are graduating with some job experience, typically through on-campus work study or internships. What are some of the ways that college students can address the problems of our modern work culture at the university level? Is it possible for Millennials to address these issues before fully entering the workforce?AS: I think that Millennials are addressing these issues by themselves [by] thinking about the kind of life they want. And many Millennials do, I think, place a healthier emphasis on things like having time to work out, and question why they always have to be sitting in an office when they can do that work just as well from home or at Starbucks ... So I think the best thing Millennials can do is ask questions ... [like] 'Why do we have to do it this way? Why can't it be done a more flexible way, a way that will fit my work and non-work life together?'TD: Your work is primarily in public policy and the nonprofit sector. Obviously, your expertise appeals to the vast number of students who are looking toward careers in government and public service. But how do these matters transcend these fields? Do you offer similar advice to aspiring doctors, artists, engineers, etc.?AS: Yes. I talk about work and life in terms of breadwinning and caregiving, but it touches everybody. For people who don't have kids, they have parents or siblings or spouses or friends. The need to balance connection to others and relationships with others and your professional identity with others that's pretty universal.TD: As a lawyer who has shifted into the nonprofit sector through the New America Foundation, what are the predominant policy issues you are focused on?AS: New America focuses on a wide range of issues. We have a whole set of foreign policy issues. We're mounting a big project on the future of war, which is, of course, quite far from work and life. We have a very active education policy program, everything from early education to pre-K through 12 to higher education, and we're thinking a lot about that. We do social policy and financial inclusion, [surrounding] how you can build assets for people in the population who don't have them. We are doing a bunch of policy issues around breadwinning and caregiving [and] things like the coming retirement crisis. I'm expecting a lot of parents to start moving back in with their kids.TD: Do you see more of the "sandwich" generation where people are taking care of kids while also taking care of their parents as something one particular generation identifies with, or is that something that will continue with Millennials?AS: I think that's going to continue. It's going to continue in part because everybody is going to live longer. You are going to find that you may not be sandwiched, but you are certainly going to have the experience of having to care for your parents and your children, should you have children. But again, this issue of taking care of your children, ... it could be your biological family, it could be a constructed family ... [but] it's the people in your life who have cared for you and ... you also will care for them.TD: In your article, you address this issue by suggesting that schools should adjust to fit their schedules around the work schedules of men and women. Is there any sort of tangible effort you have seen in that regard?12
Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Joanne Berger-Sweeney will leave Tufts this summer to become the 22nd President of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. Berger-Sweeney, who served as dean for four years, will be replaced by an interim dean who is expected to be named soon, Provost David Harris told the Daily in an email. Harris said the search for a permanent dean will follow. During her tenure, Berger-Sweeney's focus has been in supporting interdisciplinary programs, improving diversity and inclusion across the university and making changes to undergraduate admissions. Dean of Academic Affairs for Arts and Sciences James Glaser said Berger-Sweeney's support for both strategic hiring efforts, which have linked faculty across departments, and interdisciplinary programs was particularly noteworthy. "We have strengthened across departments, and I think it's allowing us to have a whole that's bigger than the parts," Glaser said. University President Anthony Monaco emphasized Berger-Sweeney's initiative to hire clusters of individuals in departments that share interdisciplinary studies. "Dean Berger-Sweeney was a strong supporter of interdisciplinary programs without ever forgetting that such programs must have, as their foundation, outstanding scholarship in each discipline," Monaco told the Daily in an email. "Exemplifying this were the school's cluster hires in areas such as environmental studies; race and ethnicity; food, science and society and digital humanities." Interdisciplinary programs started in the past four years include the Africana studies major and minor, the cognitive science Ph.D. program, music engineering and the finance minor, as well as a colonialism studies minor that the faculty approved on May 7, according to Berger-Sweeney. "It's not just that we've hired additional faculty," Glaser said. "It's that we're hoping that there will be some synergies that happen between these new members of our community, particularly with regard to pedagogy, and [from which] our students would benefit." Berger-Sweeney also left a legacy at Tufts based on the strides she has taken toward diversifying the faculty at Tufts, according to Glaser. "I care deeply about diversity and have tried to approach it from many different angles to make the school a more inclusive place," Berger-Sweeney said. Glaser said that faculty diversification has been a priority, and that much planning has been going into the hiring process, but the process itself does require time. "It has been something that has been an overall goal for the division," Glaser said. "For the faculty, it's required the participation of many people, but I think the tone was set at the very top and the goal was set at the very top and there's been demonstrable results." Berger-Sweeney said that the school has added 50 more full-time faculty members in the past 10 years, and that, in the past four years, the racial and ethnic diversity of the faculty has increased by 10 percent. "We really moved the needle," Berger-Sweeney said. "Not just brought people in while others left, but actually increased the overall diversity of our faculty." Berger-Sweeney said she worked with Dean of the School of Engineering Linda Abriola and Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs of the Engineering School Margery Davies to articulate policies that afforded faculty better support during parental leaves and time off for family and non-academic issues. Diversity also increased within the university's leadership, specifically in the Board of Advisors of the School of Arts and Sciences, who are ambassadors for the school and serve as philanthropists and advisors, Berger-Sweeney said. Berger-Sweeney also opened the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and served as vice chair of the Council on Diversity with Monaco, where she drafted a set of recommendations that defines the role diversity plays in the university's mission. Though the strength of enrolled students and the university's popularity has increased over the last four years, continued diversification will be important to ensure Tufts' relevancy, Berger-Sweeney said. In this regard, financial aid has also been a point of focus. "There is still not enough financial aid to go around to admit all of the incredible, strong students that we want to," Berger-Sweeney said. "We're giving a higher percentage of our money to financial aid and still trying to do some of these other really great things. But still, you want to do more." In terms of policies and procedures, Berger-Sweeney said, during her time at Tufts, there have been several positive changes, including revisions to the advising system for undergraduate students. "We're on a better trajectory," she said. "We still have a ways to go, but we're so much further than we were four years ago when I walked in the door." Glaser added that the Bridge to Liberal Arts Success at Tufts , an initiative that gives support to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, has been another major success Berger-Sweeney initiated. "It has been a very ambitious and already successful venture in supporting a cohort of students who the university was not supporting well before," Glaser said. "I know that's a very big accomplishment of hers, and I think she has taken great pride in that."12
