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The Setonian
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Harvard professor discusses civil service motives

October 23

Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School Nava Ashraf delivered a presentation titled “Do Gooders and Doctors: Evidence on Selection and Performance of Health Workers in Zambia” yesterday afternoon in Braker Hall.

The Setonian
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Tufts professor given award for research on tuberculosis

October 23

Bree Aldridge, assistant professor of molecular biology and microbiology and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award this September.

The Setonian
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Spotlight: Professor Gregory Crane

October 22

The disciplines of classics and computer science might seem mutually exclusive. Many people don’t typically see how one informs the other. For Gregory Crane, however, making the two work in harmony has been a lifelong passion.Crane, adjunct professor of classics and former chair of the department, is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science at Tufts and holds a doctorate in Philology from Harvard University. He directed a grant from the Digital Library Initiative from 1998 to 2006, and has also published a number of books about Thucydides, including “The Blinded Eye: Thucydides and the New Written Word” in 1996 and soon after “The Ancient Simplicity: Thucydides and the Limits of Political Realism” in 1998.Crane is currently in Leipzig, Germany, where he is doing research as part of his Alexander von Humboldt Professorship.He began working at Tufts in 1992, where he started as an assistant professor of classics, and has worked as a tenured professor here since 1998. Crane described himself as a firm proponent of enriching humanities education through the use of computer science and research.“Undergraduates are able to collaborate in a much more substantive way than was possible when I was an undergraduate,” he said. “[Research is] not just an assignment ... in this space, where everything is potentially public, the meaning of the contribution can be quite different.”Of the courses he has taught, Crane said that his favorite was a class on the maintenance of Greek and Latin works by Arabic translators.“An immense amount of Greek science and philosophy was translated into Arabic roughly between 800 and 1000 CE,” he explained. “It was a huge statement of cosmopolitan interest in the Arabic world at the time. Euclid and Aristotle reentered Western tradition through the Arabic translations of Greek or Latin.”An enduring venture of his, the Perseus Digital Library Project has been dedicated to the digitization of linguistic and physical artifacts since 1985. Crane is the project’s current editor-in-chief. In general, the project researches anything associated with the applications of technology in the enhancement of the study of the humanities.“[Perseus is] an open-ended experiment in what you can do if you integrate digital technology with sources like Greek and Latin,” he said.According to Crane, due to the nature of conversation about the classics and the eventual decline of print media, digitization — not only of ancient texts, but also of printed literary criticism whether a few decades or a few centuries old — is vital for their survival.“The conversations about these texts go on over generations. ... You’ve got a book in your hand that was written a hundred and twenty years ago about a text that’s over two thousand years old,” he said. “You’re thinking in terms of a conversation that goes on for generations and centuries, and the world of print is clearly on its way out. ... I couldn’t imagine not thinking about how to deal with a digital space and what that would mean for us.”The idea of Perseus originated back in 1982 while Crane was studying at Harvard and was fully underway by 1985, when Crane helped compile a mass of digital textual information on the Greek world — one of the first full text digital databases ever.His interests in computers, he explained, began for practical reasons.“I needed to type my [classics] dissertation with something other than a typewriter,” he said.Crane noted how living in the digital age now is a far cry from the time during which the Perseus project was formed.“Hard disks ... looked like washing machines,” he said.Crane explained that a 670-megabyte hard drive used by the database cost $34,000 with a service contract of $4,000 per year. Even then, he believed in the eventual superiority of the digital format.“[Artifacts can be] more valuable in a digital world than they are in print,” Crane said. “You can have these crazily high-resolution, digitized versions, where you can see the manuscript better than you can if you were sitting in a library with bad light.”Perseus has over 160 million words — in languages from Greek and Latin, to Germanic, to Arabic, to more recent 19th century American sources — archived in the project. Thanks to grants from his Humboldt professorship, Crane plans to increase that number through a new project called Open Greek and Latin Project, which, in part, aims to take the number of Greek words readily available from 15 million to 150 million.Crane is also currently working on adapting a Greek and Latin-learning course whose framework is generalizable to other languages. One of its major components, he said, will be international collaboration through Skype or other online means.“[There are] people collaborating on analyzing a text ... one student in Tehran, a student at Tufts, a student in Zagreb,” he explained.12

The Setonian
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University considers online courses

October 20

The Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences is currently analyzing a report, issued over the summer by the Arts and Sciences Online Learning and Education Working Group, to address topics related to integrating online technologies into academics. Most notable is the possibility of introducing massive open online courses (MOOCs) to the university’s curricula.

The Setonian
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New and improved Senior Night is deemed success

October 20

The Class of 2014 has taken on its new role as the senior class, settling into leadership positions and thinking about questions related to post-Tufts life. Following a tradition that works to unite the class, the Senior Class Council sponsored the first Senior Night of the year on Thursday, Sept. 26 at Tequila Rain in Boston. Although the events, formerly known as Senior Pub Nights, have received criticism in past years, the event has persisted in popularity.Logistically, Senior Night events require planning in part from the Senior Class Council in conjunction with the Office for Campus Life (OCL) to execute contracts and organize transportation.“It’s really pretty simple,” Senior Class Vice President Nick Cutsumpas said. “The key is making sure you do this all ahead of time and scout out the venue.”When it came to deciding on the venue, considerations were made based on both size and location, according to Senior Class President Patrick Kazley.“Tequila Rain is near Fenway so we had to make sure there was no Boston game,” Kazley said. “Since there wasn’t, that made it a very attractive option. It had a very easy drive in and out, so that [we] could drop the students off the buses right near the front door. All of that fed into our decision.”Chris Bruno, the general manager of Tequila Rain as well as both Gypsy Bar and Liquor Store on Boylston Street, all venues of past Senior Night events, is exceptionally accommodating, Cutsumpas said. Although the Senior Class Council must plan many of the logistics of the event, Cutsumpas credited Bruno with a significant degree of the planning.“From a logistics standpoint, when you’re working with someone like Chris Bruno, who has done things like this before, he takes care of a lot of it,” Cutsumpas said.As part of the contract, Tequila Rain ensures that the bar is open to only Tufts students for the night, which Kazley said achieves the type of atmosphere a Senior Night should have.“It serves the purpose of the event, which is to bring us together and not have other people there,” Kazley said.As a venue, Tequila Rain offers an optimal environment for the unification of the senior class that the event aims to achieve, according to Kazley.“The primary difference between a successful venue and a not-as-successful venue is that we like an open venue where you don’t get partitioned off into different groups,” he said. “That’s why Tequila Rain is great. ... You can walk from one side to the other and probably run into everybody who is there in one fell swoop.”Sarah Solomon, a senior who attended September’s Senior Night event, believed the venue was a great fit for the Class of 2014.“[Tequila Rain] felt like a true Boston club,” she said. “It had a dance floor, and what else do you really need?”In addition to signing a contract with the venue, the Senior Class Council must also have a contract with a bus company to ensure transportation to and from the event. Ten buses drove a continuous loop from the Tufts campus to the venue and back, according to Kazley.In past years, Senior Night transportation has had difficulty in relation to time spent waiting in lines, a problem that finds its roots in later arrivals. This year, however, Kazley said that the Senior Class Council tried something different to streamline the process.“Historically one of the biggest roadblocks to having a really successful Senior Night is having a long line outside of the venue,” Kazley said. “This time, we sold the tickets via bus times. If you bought the 9 p.m. bus ticket, the next Senior Night would be free. What that did was incentivize people to come earlier.”The Senior Class Council, however, still hopes to make the night more efficient.“We were happy with it overall,” Kazley said. “There are small adjustments we will make in terms of trying to get even more students to come earlier. We could potentially have a night without any lines.”Another potential difficulty that the event could have had, Kazley noted, was with the legal drinking age. Because the senior class is composed of students who are not necessarily 21 yet, the inclusivity of the event is restricted by nature of it taking place at a bar or club. According to Kazley, however, negativity surrounding this challenge may distract from the larger objective of Senior Night.“Even though [Senior Night] is at a bar, it’s not a drinking event: It’s a social event,” Kazley said.Cutsumpas said that, accordingly, the official event name has also been changed from Senior Pub Night to simply Senior Night.Legal age restrictions, however, are not among the only limiting factors of Senior Night. Kazley pointed out that regardless of the ages of the senior class members, attendance is still limited due to size restrictions of many venues.“We wish the whole senior body could participate, but the hard truth is that even if everybody was able to participate, we could not fit the whole class in a single venue anywhere in Boston,” he said.12

The Setonian
News

Tufts hosts regional Islamic conference

October 20

The Islamic Council of New England hosted its 28th annual conference in the Cabot Intercultural Center yesterday. The event featured presentations by several public speakers who addressed pertinent issues facing the Muslim communities within contemporary American society.Maha Mian, president of the Muslim Students Association of Tufts (MSAT), said that while the conference had in the past been held at many nearby institutions such as Harvard Univeristy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this was the first year that the conference was located at Tufts. Mian added that the conference was an ideal forum to host discussion and debate on topics of Islam, and she was pleased that the event was successful following several months of preparation. “We’ve never held anything to this extent before,” Mian, a senior, said. “We’re really glad that we were able to pull it together.”The conference was divided into several thematic panels. The final keynote panel of the day was titled “Assimilation, Isolation or Integration?” and analyzed ways that American Muslims can become more accepted and included throughout the nation.Hussein Dayib, the panel moderator, emphasized the importance of retaining religious and cultural identity even while striving to achieve this goal of acceptance.“We have to find a way we can relate to the American culture so that Islam is seen as part of it,” Dayib said. “There’s a difference between integration and assimilation. Losing your identity is not what we are here for as Muslims.” Kiarash Jahed, a physician at the University of Louisville Hospital, began the panel by addressing the Muslim people’s long history of dealing with isolation and Islamophobia. Jahed expressed that the Islamic experience ought to be perceived as a “normal” American lifestyle. He outlined ways in which this could be achieved, such as by encouraging Islamic Americans to turn out to vote, improving relationships with the Muslim convert community, being patriotic while not nationalistic and producing indigenous learning institutions around the country.“We have to be contributors to culture, not just consumers of goods,” Jahed said. “The Quran says, ‘that which benefits people stays in the earth.’ We have a lot which we do for ourselves, but we should also be asking what are we doing for America, for the broader society.”Susan Akram, professor of law at Boston University, spoke next about the consequences of American laws that have singled out Muslims in a discriminatory fashion.“I’m speaking from the perspective of a lawyer who’s been representing Islamic immigrants for 30 years,” she said. “The bottom line is that we do not have very optimistic news.”Citing reports by organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Akram addressed a wide range of anti-Islamic activities throughout America. These include unwarranted discrimination based on appearance as well as infiltration and surveillance of mosques and Muslim community centers. She said that many Muslims have continued to be prosecuted as terrorists when they pose no actual threat, a trend that has harmed and antagonized America’s Islamic communities.“Terorrism is not a Muslim phenomenon,” Akram said. “[Understanding this] is meaningful if we are going to have successful Muslim integration in the United States.”Imam Talal Eid, the Muslim chaplain at Brandeis University, spoke about the general standing of the Islamic community within the United States. He said that American Muslims are among the most highly-educated and most prosperous in the world and serve their country with a sense of honor and duty.Eid expressed his concern that contemporary Muslims oftentimes disregard the importance of religious faith and are being forced to assimilate within American society in ways that are contrarary to Islamic values.“Many young Muslims are running away from their religion, and I don’t want to see that,” he said. “We don’t want to give up our religion, but we need to learn how to integrate in this society without hurting [ourselves] or hurting [our] religion.”12

The Setonian
News

Sexual assault taskforce to change misconduct policies at Tufts

October 17

Tufts reported 48 sexual assaults to the U.S. Department of Justice in accordance with a grant program for New England universities run by the department, according to a Boston Globe article published in 2010. The university had been receiving $1.3 million in grant funding since 1999 to put toward efforts to improve resources for victims.Last year, a university-wide Sexual Violence Working Group formed to replace Tufts’ Sexual Assault Policy with the current Sexual Misconduct Policy.But when former Sexual Violence Resource Coordinator Elaine Theodore left her position at Tufts a few years ago, no one was hired to replace her. During the 2012-2013 year, there were 63 reported cases of sexual assault in a broad number of categories, according to the data from the Office of Equal Opportunity.In light of these ongoing issues, a sexual assault taskforce has been formed in an attempt to streamline the way that Tufts deals with sexual assault on campus. President Anthony Monaco acts as chair of the taskforce, along with Mary Jeka, senior vice president for university relations and general counsel. Students are involved in the group’s operations as well.“The Task Force on Sexual Misconduct Prevention is designed to ensure that Tufts is doing all it can to effectively combat all forms of sexual misconduct,” Jeka told the Daily in an email. “This includes addressing sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, sex or gender discrimination, stalking and relationship violence as well as sexual assault.”Part of what prompted the taskforce’s formation is that the problems with sexual misconduct and the policies surrounding it have frustrated and angered many Tufts students. Various groups have been developed in order to address these issues, among them Prevention, Awareness and Community at Tufts, Action for Sexual Assault Prevention and the Consent Culture Network, which is an educational offshoot of ASAP. While these groups have hosted many workshops about sexual misconduct, students are still unsatisfied with the sexual misconduct culture and policies at Tufts.On April 29, ASAP sent a letter to the Tufts administration, calling its attention to three key ways in which they failed to address sexual assault security policy for students, which included a lack of access to policies, processes and resources, as well as a lack of support infrastructure and a lack of education about sexual assault. The letter began with the shortcomings of the Tufts sexual assault policy, and then outlined the improvements that could be made to the policies.A response from Monaco expressed that there are insufficient resources at Tufts to accommodate those who lack education about sexual assault and those who are survivors searching for academic and emotional support. His response called for the new sexual assault taskforce.“Such misconduct has no place at Tufts,” Monaco told the Daily in an email. “My goal in convening and chairing the Sexual Misconduct Prevention Taskforce is to ensure that we address this important issue effectively ... to support our community needs.”Jeka noted that creating a group of people ready to tackle such sensitive problems can be difficult, but the taskforce is well on its way.“The taskforce is well-equipped to ensure that Tufts is continuously monitoring our efforts in all these areas, staying ahead of best practices, and making improvements [where necessary],” she said. “Our members include graduate and undergraduate students, faculty and administrators from the Boston, Medford and Somerville and Grafton campuses with a variety of professional expertise and knowledge of individual schools and campus cultures.”Junior Kumar Ramanathan, who was one of the core writers of the letter and is now a member of the taskforce, said that the new sexual assault taskforce has begun the first few of its meetings this semester. The first was to discuss preliminary logistics, he said.Director of the Office of Equal Opportunity Jill Zellmer explained that the group decided to break into working groups to split the workload and divide up the responsibilities. The subgroups, Ramanathan said, include awareness and prevention, resources and adjudication policy.Zellmer said that another focus that the prevention working group factored in was education.“Prevention and education [will] instill greater awareness, education and support programs and train and educate staff and administrators and students,” she said.The resources working group will focus on establishing a more extensive support infrastructure for victims and their friends and supporters, while the policy group will work on revising and publicizing policy as necessary, according to Zellmer.Although the first meeting did not lead to any policy changes, Ramanathan viewed it as a critical step forward, especially in that it gathered enough student representatives from the Group of Six who were interested in contributing.“No one had committed to ... changes at that point. It was just a planning meeting, but it seemed to go very well for us,” Ramanathan said.At the second meeting, the subgroups presented their information to Monaco and other administrators on the committee. The fundamental request was for a streamlined program on sexual assault.12

The Setonian
News

Homecoming Carnival considered success

October 16

Students and alumni on the Hill on Saturday had the opportunity to attend the university’s first Homecoming Carnival, held on the rugby field from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The Setonian
News

Students learn about civic involvement in new video game

By Jei-Jei Tan | October 14

Students were invited to play Civic Seed, a video game developed by the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service in conjunction with the Engagement Game Lab (EGL) at Emerson College, to provide feedback about the game’s effectiveness on Oct. 8 in the Lewis Hall lounge.According to ...

The Setonian
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Community discusses diversity report in open session

October 10

University President Anthony Monaco and Chair of the Undergraduate Student Experience on the Council on Diversity Adriana Zavala led an open discussion session on the Report of the Council on Diversity yesterday in the Interfaith Center.The report represents a year and half’s worth of research and discussion from a council of students, faculty, staff and alumni. Members of the Tufts community were invited to provide feedback on the report before the Council releases a final report later in the semester.To begin the conversation, Monaco said that, though many minority students reflect positively on their time at Tufts, they have often felt pressured to explain issues of diversity to their peers.“What I heard in those discussions [with students] is that the burden is too much for students to be constantly, on an every day basis, to be dealing with what we call ‘micro-aggressions,’” Monaco said. “It was that motivation that really got me to think about creating a diversity council.”Erica Satin-Hernanadez (LA ’13) said she was glad that the university did not see the fulfillment of one class as sufficient education on diversity but instead took the approach of an ongoing process, incorporating these issues into the curricula for all classes.“The move toward social justice underlying all things on the campus especially in course work as a requirement for all students [is extremely important],” she said.On the other hand, junior John Kelly voiced concern about the way that diversity learning is integrated into course work. Often times, he said, classes only address how people of color or of diverse sexual orientations are relevant in the class topic for about a week and then move on without mentioning these groups again.“I don’t see anything in this report that’s going to change that and that worries me because I don’t think that’s an effective way to teach things like social justice,” Kelly said.Zavala replied that these questions are to be examined in the university’s next step — determining how to best implement the new policies. She added that faculty members are the ones with the most control over their course curriculums.“We understand that students are eager to see this plan on the ground,” Zavala said. “What we’re saying is that this has to be multidisciplinary, multi-prong and you have to get the faculty on board with that.”Senior Grainne Griffiths spoke next about engaging not only underrepresented groups but also students in the majority about changing campus atmosphere. Griffiths explained that it was important to get these students to recognize their own identities and privileges.“There’s lots of talk about engaging historically marginalized students and underrepresented students but there’s very little about engaging the students in the majority, and I think that’s critical,” she said.Kelly said that he felt that the faculty members reviewing the report had not addressed many of the issues that he and other students had outlined during last semester’s meeting, such as its broad definition of “diversity.”“It’s time-consuming, it’s frustrating, it’s traumatizing and nothing seems to be getting done,” he said.Zavala said she stood by the report’s definition, which needed to be broad enough to include all facets of the student experience. She also assured Kelly that she had reviewed all the notes from previous meetings and had made all the changes she thought were necessary.“We are listening,” she said. “I will ultimately say that I stand by the report. It’s not a roadmap that tells you exactly when to turn right or left, but it’s a way of looking towards accountability and campus climate.”Regarding the report’s goal to extend awareness of diversity into all classes, Professor in the Department of Computer Science Lenore Cowen said there was not a real peace and justice component to mathematics.As a female graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she said she was often aware of being the only enrolled woman in certain classes. However, she didn’t want the professor to treat her any differently because of her gender.“Every now and then, people just want you to be gender-blind, color-blind, [blind to sexual orientation],” Cowen said. “Just treat them as people and understand that their experience is different.”Zavala argued that there were areas of math that should be examined with a gender context.“I recognize that there are certain departments that will find it challenging to engage with how to be true to the values of Tufts,” she said. “What I guess I want to say is nobody gets a pass.”In response to specific concerns like the falling retention rate of students of color at the university, Monaco said that part of the reason for his recent trips around the country was to generate the funds to fix these problems. Just this past week, after discussing this issue with alumni, an alumnus pledged $100,000 toward increasing financial aid, he said.“I’m not out there telling them only that Tufts is wonderful,” he said. “I’m out there telling them what the challenges are and how, as alumni, they can help us.”Several students, including Rae Axner, expressed concern about the role that students will play in the next steps of finalizing and implementing the report.12

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