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Annual EPIIC symposium kicks off

An activists journey: former Jumbo Gregg Gonsalves leads in AIDS activism

As an ambitious high school graduate, Gregg Gonsalves applied to Tufts with medical school among his ultimate goals. Although he ultimately never graduated from Tufts, his time as a student on the Hill proved critical to his development as an activist fighting AIDS, a role he continues to play to this day. Recently, Gonsalves was featured in the Academy Award-nominated documentary How To Survive a Plague (2012), which tells the story of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and Treatment Action Group (TAG).I came to Tufts thinking maybe Ill be a physician and then go into medicine, but I fell in love with poetry, Gonsalves said.This love of literature was inspired by two of his professors Fletcher Professor of English Literature Lee Edelman and former Associate Professor of Russian David Sloane who later became his advisors after Gonsalves declared a double major in English and Russian language and literature.A lot of the stuff I read with Lee Edelman and [Professor Emeritus] Howard Solomon was very critical in how I viewed the world, he said. I remember once that Lee Edelman was describing to a poetry class about a generation of kids being rabid teenage pragmatists. I think he was talking about the 60s, and I thought, I dont want to be a rabid teenage pragmatist. I dont want to be ruthlessly pursuing some sort of career.Outside of the classroom, Gonsalves began to find himself involved in activist groups on campus. His activism at Tufts came to a head with the divestment protests in 1985.We took over Ballou Hall ... in an anti-apartheid protest, Gonsalves said. That act of political activism basically was a training point for me.He recalled the large number of students hundreds, by his count who occupied the building in a sit-in protest that lasted for three days and two nights. In the midst of the protest, Gonsalves left with the intention of going to the Tufts University School of Medicine, where he worked in a lab, but ultimately decided to turn around and return to the protest just before leaving campus.This ring of police surrounded me at the entrance to Ballou Hall, and I said, Im getting back in there no matter what, he said. I dove past the police into the crowd of students, many of them going back into Ballou Hall.Later on, Gonsalves said, the protests at Ballou drove him to continue pursuing politically motivated work.The anti-apartheid protest in Ballou was exciting, you know it felt like we were doing something that was important, Gonsalves said. With the anti-apartheid protests it was freedom or oppression, and with ACT UP it was life or death for the sake of my then-partner.The issue of AIDS was consistently present in Gonsalves life upon arriving at Tufts. As he explained, the year he matriculated, 1981, was the same year that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first reported on cases of the virus in the United States. By 1985, Gonsalves decided for personal reasons to take time off from Tufts. Upon returning in the summer of 1987 to finish his undergraduate degree, he met an HIV-positive person for the first time.I took a class over the summer [of 1987], thinking it was the last class I would take to finish my degree, and that summer I met the first HIV-positive person I ever knew, he said. This man, who became Gonsalves boyfriend, gave Gonsalves a new, personal perspective on the effects of the virus.It was a shock. I was a young guy, barely older than you are, and never met anybody HIV-positive in my life, Gonsalves said. All I could think of was that he was going to die, but we ended up dating each other for a while.Gonsalves initially became involved with ACT UP Boston while searching for treatment for his significant other. ACT UP is an international organization that uses direct action to fight AIDS, using both a legislative and medical approach.Back then, there were no drugs for HIV that really worked, so I went in search of information, he said. I ended up in ACT UP Boston and started learning everything fromolder gay men who were researching treatments and things to stave off sickness and death. That was how I got involved in activism after I left Tufts.Over time, the fight for AIDS education and treatment would hit even closer to home for Gonsalves and his family.I found out many years later that my cousin had HIV and he [then died] in 1996, he said.He would later be diagnosed with the virus in the mid-1990s himself.It became a sort of personal struggle, he said.Today, Gonsalves work with ACT UP is a central focus of How to Survive a Plague, which chronicles the work of AIDS activists during the late 1980s and early 1990s. He hopes the film will help people to learn more about the history of the disease.This weekend, I asked people if they knew what ACT UP is and they said no, he said. The history of the work we did was in danger of being wiped away. I think that How to Survive a Plague and its Oscar nomination helped put the history of AIDS activism into the mainstream, and I think thats very important.Gonsalves maintains that it is particularly important for college students to be aware of the history of AIDS activism, since it has largely included young people. Like Gonsalves, most of his colleagues at ACT UP were just out of college when they first became involved.Nobody had any credentials to argue with the National Institutes of Health and the [United States] Food and Drug Administration, but we taught ourselves, he said. You dont have to wait until you become a professional to get a job or work in global health.Today, global health activism has become Gonsalves area of work. After ACT UP achieved notable success toward the end of the 1990s, Gonsalves went to South Africa to help improve HIV awareness there.Since leaving Tufts, Gonsalves has gone on to receive his bachelors degree from Yale University through its Eli Whitney Students Program. Currently, he is co-director of the Global Health Justice Partnership between Yale Law School and the Yale School of Public Health, where he is also working toward a PhD.According to Gonsalves, returning to college made him aware that AIDS activism is alive and well in younger generations.I originally thought when I got back to university after 25 years that it was a more conservative generation, or radical teenage pragmatists as Lee Edelman said 25 years ago, but it turns out that this wasnt the case, he said. There were people like the people who stormed Ballou Hall in 1985.Gonsalves expressed hope that students will continue to engage in public health work. As his own non-traditional experience shows, not playing by the book can yield results.With your current resources, your talents and your own passion, you can spark a movement and make changes like we did, he said. All you need is a few people to change the world.

Brionna Jimerson | Respect Your Elders

Welcome to spring symposium season at Tufts. In the coming weeks, you will be flooded with scholars, panels, invites, experts and roving students in search of their next free lunch in the Cabot Auditorium lobby or catered reception in Alumnae Lounge. No judgment here: I will most likely be beside you, ...

As Occupy movement quiets, it finds new channels at Tufts, nationwide

A movement to define a generation, some called it. Yet after all the media buzz about Occupy Wall Street and its fight for social and economic justice last fall, the movement has a substantially lower profile now. This is also true in the Boston area, with the closure of Occupy Boston encampments and the crackdown on Occupy Harvard last winter.

Tufts environmental groups participate in Keystone XL Pipeline protest

Thirty Tufts students participated in the Forward on Climate Rally protest this weekend in Washington, D.C. against the installation of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Friends of Israel raises $1K for children's charity

Tufts Friends of Israel (FOI) last week held its annual Valentine's Day?themed fundraiser to raise money for Save a Child's Heart (SACH), an Israeli nonprofit that supports children with heart disease.

Student , faculty research made easier with Profiles database

The Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and Tufts University officially launched Profiles, a collaborative online database for scientists and researchers, to members of the Tufts community last Thursday.

Alexa Petersen | Jeminist: A Jumbo Feminist

A few hours after the Super Bowl, my mom called me and said she wanted to talk about ... the Super Bowl. This was quite odd - we're not a sports family. My dad used to change the channel to football when my friends walked by the living room, only to switch it right back to a History Channel special on the Founding Fathers as soon as my friends were out of sight. That was his version of being a cool dad. Anyway, rather than talking about the game itself, my mother only wanted to talk about Beyonc?©. Queen Beyonc?©. My mother said she can only describe Beyonc?©'s performance in one word: "fierce." This is funny if you know her because she's not really a cool mom who says fierce, she's more like a kind and smiley mom who loves poems, L.L. Bean and astronomy.

Misconduct prompts plan for administrative changes to Winter Bash

Impeachment papers retracted, funds allocated for Spring Fling opening act

Falcon Reese | Tongues Tied

I studied French for several years and, besides the language itself, there are three things that I learned in that time. (If we're including the language, the total still comes to three. Maybe fewer.) They are:

Neighborhood fund awards grants to community nonprofits

Senate, historically and now, falls short on gender diversity

This article is first in a series on gender-related issues on the Hill.

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Falcon Reese | Tounges tied

When you think Jews, you probably think Hebrew. I think of eating far too much food as a child and a marginally overbearing family, but you probably think Hebrew. It is, after all, the language of the Torah, the Jewish Bible. But the Hebrew spoken and written today is Modern Hebrew a revival and an evolution of Biblical Hebrew, yes, but a language that no Jew spoke as their mother tongue for nearly 2,000 years. They spoke Yiddish.Until its near-extinction during the Holocaust, Yiddish was the first language of millions of Ashkenazi Jews, these are ethnic Jews, mind you, not necessarily religious ones. Though initially a Germanic language, Yiddish grew to incorporate bits of Hebrew and other languages the Jews encountered over a thousand years, eventually giving birth to a distinct language that flourished in eastern Europe.Yiddish is never more expressive, creative and colorful than when youre using it to insult someone. The range of words that exist to execute a searing verbal smack -down is never ending. And a disproportionate amount of those words of the Yiddish lexicon in general, really begin with sch-. Theres schmuck, schmekel, schmegegge. My dads favorite for me growing up was schmendrick. I suppose sch- is just a satisfyingly vulgar phoneme.Oddly enough, a fair fraction of Yiddish insults literally just translate to penis. Seriously. Im guessing that the variety only exists to fairly represent the range of size, girth and inherent efficacy or lack thereof that a penis can have. Perhaps self-confidence was in short supply among European Jews. That, and Victorian sensibilities.There is a lovely pair of sch- words, though, that often work in tandem. They do not translate to penis, but can articulate just as well some peoples strong propensity to make you roll your eyes and sigh. They are schlemiel and schlimazel. The common joke used to illustrate the difference between the two is that a schlemiel is the fool who spills a cup of scalding hot coffee on his neighbor. A schlimazel is the one who gets spilled on.A schlemiel is a sort of equal-opportunity klutz. Theyll trip over themselves almost daily and most likely pull you down with them. Kind of like being caught in Shamus splash zone. The closest English approximation would be bungler, but no one who speaks English actually uses that word. Schlimazel literally means crooked luck, and as such, they are the walking epitome of Murphys Law if some misfortune can befall them, it will. A schlimazel would manage to get caught in the crossfire of a police shootout and then be sent to the hospital to have the bullet removed by a blind doctor.Neville Longbottom is a schlemiel or at least he was pre-Deathly Hallows, when he was upgraded to magical badass status. Eugene Horowitz is a schlimazel you know, that ginger dolt from Hey Arnold! (1996-2004) who attracted lightning bolts and bad juju like a magnet.Its a wonder that English can function without such admirably succinct words for such common afflictions. Then again, my perspective may be slightly skewed, as I am both a schlemiel and a schlimazel. Cracking my ribs after falling off a swing set built for five-year-olds was hardly the work of an Olympic gymnast. But doing it twice, and then proceeding to fall off my bike in the middle of College Ave., trip and fall over a crack in the sidewalk while running, ski into two trees, run straight through a screen door and both crash my car and get it towed within the same week is just bad luck.Right?Falcon Reese is a junior majoring in sociology. He can be reached at Falcon.Reese@tufts.edu.

Boundless offers free online textbook alternative

TTS gives access to cloud storage service

A Tufts Technology Services (TTS) initiative will allow all members of the Tufts community to access the file-sharing and storage site Box.com with their Tufts username and password for free.

Programming Board cancels Jumbo Jam due to budget restrictions

Facing budget restrictions from the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate, Tufts Concert Board canceled its annual spring Jumbo Jam concert, which traditionally features lesser-known artists than Spring Fling and Cage Rage, to prevent cuts to Spring Fling funding. Programming Board, the umbrella organization for Concert Board, did not have enough money to allocate to Concert Board events, Office for Campus Life Assistant Director David McGraw said. "Our budget is fixed on just Cage Rage, Battle of the Bands and Spring Fling," Concert Board co-chair Julia Stein said. "This year they cut funding for [all of Programming Board], and rather than cutting into Spring Fling, we decided to cut Jumbo Jam to focus on making Spring Fling as great as it possibly could be." To make up for the budget shortfalls, McGraw and Concert Board said they were hoping to recuperate funds from tickets to Cage Rage. "We were hoping this year to get enough revenue off of Cage Rage to go ahead and have a Jumbo Jam either way," McGraw said. "However that event didn't generate revenue beyond what we anticipated." McGraw said Jumbo Jam was the most obvious event to cancel due to its lower popularity in the past. "Senate came back and said 'You're requesting too much money, we have to figure out places to cut back,'" he added. "So looking at events to pull money from, sadly to say Jumbo Jam has not been as successful." Concert Board co-chair Mark Bernardo said he agreed that Jumbo Jam has not been one of the more popular events in the past. "Traditionally, Jumbo Jam is more of an indie-acoustic show, and not as many people are into that so it's hard in terms of publicity," he said. This is not the first time Jumbo Jam has been cut for budgetary reasons, with similar circumstances leading to its cancellation in spring 2011. It seemed like the best event to cut, according to McGraw. "A great example was last year when [Jumbo Jam] was in Cohen [Auditorium]," McGraw said. "The rough cost of the event was just under $20,000, but we had about 50 students show up." Concert Board's budget is mostly allocated toward acquiring musical acts for events. It usually spends roughly $30,000 on bands for Cage Rage, $15,000 for Jumbo Jam and $100,000 for talent at Spring Fling, according to McGraw. After a surplus last year allowed for a $150,000 Spring Fling budget, Stein felt that preserving a high budget for this year's event would be best. "Having that extra buffer is important for getting the artist," she said. Concert Board had initially planned on announcing this year's Spring Fling line-up at Jumbo Jam but is now reconsidering how to notify students. "It'll be some time in late March or early April, possibly at Battle of the Bands," Bernardo said.

Professor Souvaine to head research office as vice provost

Professor of Computer Science Diane Souvaine entered this semester in a new position as the Vice Provost for Research after being appointed in November. Her appointment followed a two-month internal search to replace outgoing Vice Provost Peggy Newell, who left Tufts to become Harvard University's first deputy provost in early November. Souvaine's appointment puts her at the head of what Provost and Senior Vice President David Harris called a crucial office for Tufts. "At a research university, it's a critically important role," Harris, who headed the search committee that chose Souvaine, said. "The Office of the Vice Provost for Research is responsible for all the infrastructure around research as well as promoting research." Souvaine's duties, which span all three of the university's campuses, include overseeing funding for research and ensuring that university researchers comply with federal laws, she explained. "It's a position that broadly tries to enable the fabulous researchers that we have here at the university to pursue the kinds of research that they'd like to pursue, whether it's disciplinary, interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, or translational," she said. Souvaine began teaching at Tufts in 1998 after serving as a faculty member at Rutgers University for 12 years. She became chair of the Department of Computer Science at Tufts in 2002. She is currently serving a six-year term on the National Science Board (NSB), a body that governs the National Science Foundation and advises the President and Congress on science policy issues. President George W. Bush appointed her to the board in 2008 for her work in computational geometry, and she now sits on the NSB's Executive Committee. After deciding to search within the university for a new Vice Provost for Research, Harris convened a committee of faculty and administrators to assess several candidates. He emphasized that the committee looked from within the university for a strong leader with extensive research experience. "I want someone in that position who is connected to larger conversations outside of Tufts… who can help us find ways to get information about opportunities early and think about how we mobilize," Harris said. "I want someone who's forward thinking, who isn't just happy with what we're doing now, but says we can be better, we can do better, and I have an idea and a vision of how to get there." Souvaine said she aims to encourage and facilitate collaboration among the university's researchers. "I think the first goal is to try to remove any impediments that are preventing people from doing the terrific work that they want to do," she said. Souvaine will continue to play a key role in the ten-year strategic planning process, which launched last fall as a university-wide effort to map out the future of Tufts, Harris said. "Moving forward as the vice provost for research, she's a part of my senior team and so is involved in a lot of conversations we're having here about how to prioritize and how to move forward," Harris said. Souvaine chaired the strategic plan's working group on Modes of Research before her appointment as vice provost. "It's fascinating and fantastic to have this opportunity to look strategically at where the university's going and where it can go," she said. Souvaine said she has spent the first weeks of her tenure visiting and talking with researchers on the Medford/Somerville, Boston and Grafton campuses. "I'm learning more and more about the exciting projects that are going on here, whether they're ones on a single campus or across campuses," she said. "So really it's a learning time for me. Once I know more, I'll have more opportunity to look at potential new projects that people could be doing and ways in which the Office of the Vice Provost for Research can help enhance the ability for people to go and achieve these new goals."

Tufts Christian Fellowship wavers in pursuit of exemption from non-discrimination policy

Nobody is sure what the Tufts Christian Fellowship's next move is - not even the group itself. Questions about the religious tenets and requirements for leadership of Tufts Christian Fellowship (TCF), a Tufts chapter of the national group InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, have kept the group in a state of limbo since the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Judiciary derecognized the group last semester. The Judiciary ruled that clauses in the group's governing documents requiring its leaders to strive to abide by a strict set of beliefs - called its Basis of Faith - excluded anyone whose beliefs fell outside these tenets from consideration for a leadership position and violated the nondiscrimination clause in the TCU Constitution. The debate in October then moved to the Committee on Student Life, whose resulting ruling created a new policy that shifted the responsibility of judging TCF's requirements for its leaders onto the Chaplaincy, a university department consisting of the chaplains for the four represented religious sects and currently headed by interim University Chaplain Patricia Budd Kepler. As a result of the CSL's ruling, the Chaplaincy now has the ability to issue permission for "justified departure" from the university's nondiscrimination policy on a religious basis - if the Chaplain, that is, decides such an exemption has a basis in religious doctrine. It remains to be seen whether TCF will take the opportunity granted by the CSL to apply for exemption from the university's nondiscrimination policy. If it does, the group will be required to provide more clarity in the coming weeks on how it interprets its own religious doctrine. In doing so the group would also become the guinea pigs of the CSL's policy, which asserts, in part, that "it is reasonable to expect that leaders within individual [student religious groups] be exemplars of that particular religion." TCF leaders say they have yet to decide if the group will apply for "justified exemption." Applying through the chaplaincy, for one, they will likely be faced with specific questions about leadership criteria that that the group says they simply don't feel comfortable answering. "We don't have a codified policy about leadership," TCF Vision and Planning Team member Jessica Laporte, a junior, said. "It is a discernment process, and that's an important part of what we desire to maintain as a group, that it's individualized, that it's not a one-size-fits-all policy." If TCF does decide to go forward with the process of requesting religious exemption from the Chaplaincy, they may find an ally in Tufts' Interim Chaplain, Reverend Patricia Kepler. Under the CSL's new policy, she would head a team tasked with ensuring that any student religious group's deviation from the Tufts anti-discrimination policy is accurately based on the doctrine of that group's religion. "I think that it's common sense that the leaders of a religious group be in adherence of that faith tradition, if that's what the group wants," Kepler said from her office in Goddard Chapel last week. Kepler, whose term as interim chaplain began in early 2012 after longtime chaplain David O'Leary left the Hill to lead a local Catholic parish, added that it is critical for any religious group to be upfront about what values it believes in. She praised TCF for its decision to hold firm against the Judiciary request that it remove the constitutional clause that potential leaders "support and advocate for the letter and spirit" of the group's Basis of Faith. "The reason they didn't [remove the Basis of Faith], as far as I understand it, is because they have integrity. They said 'we cannot honestly do that, this is who we are, this is what we believe'," she said. The Basis of Faith - initially authored by InterVarsity - includes a belief in the "entire trustworthiness and authority of the Bible," and "justification by God's grace to all who repent and put their faith in Jesus Christ alone for salvation," among others. Kepler said that she does not plan to press any student religious group seeking an exemption to specify its religious doctrine to the utmost detail. The Chaplaincy would not bring up issues of sexual ethical behavior, for example, unless students initiated specific concerns about that. The Chaplaincy, she said, would consider leadership requirements for faith-based positions at "face value." "I am not in a position, and I don't think our other Chaplains are in a position, to require people to defend, expand on or interpret their faith tradition to somebody within the Chaplaincy," she said. "For instance, if the Protestant group says 'our leaders need to be Christian', I'm not going to come back at them and say, 'What do you mean by Christian?'…That could mean a lot of different things." The Judiciary, on the other hand, has more specific expectations for any religious group that might decide to apply for TCU recognition for a justified exemption. The Judiciary would expect TCF or any other group to be entirely transparent about what each component of its leadership guidelines entails. This includes any requirement of a certain behavior component, such as sexual chastity, according to Judiciary chair Adam Sax, a senior. "This whole policy is about transparency," Sax said. "For me, saying that we believe in chastity - I want to know what that means. That's going to have to be spelled out." Circling the bureaucratic legalese that has characterized the recent debate over TCF's leadership selection has been the issue of sexuality. TCF was reprimanded over a decade ago for allegedly denying a TCF member in 2001 a leadership position because she was openly gay. TCF in that case lost - and then regained through a CSL ruling - its TCU recognition. While the debate this time has almost never explicitly referenced how TCF's Basis of Faith and leadership requirements restrict on the basis of sexuality, it remains a sticking point for those who accuse TCF of discrimination. Senior Brandon Archambault, who has been active in the TCF controversy as a former TCF member, the complainant in a Judiciary case involving TCF, an advocate for the group's defunding and a current leader in the Coalition Against Religious Exclusion, said the CSL policy has backed TCF into a corner on that issue. If TCF leadership were to spell out exactly what its rules for sexual chastity were, he said, the group would be forced to admit to that its religious doctrine with regards to chastity holds a double standard that bars non-heterosexual relationships. "Heterosexual sex is okay [for TCF] within certain limitations, like marriage," Archambault said. "It's not in and of itself wrong, it's only contextually wrong. Homosexual acts are in of themselves wrong all the time, no exceptions." Five TCF leaders - Laporte, senior Elaine Kim, senior Emmanuel Runes, senior EzichiEdnahNwafor and junior Ji-Sun Ham - declined to comment on whether the Vision and Planning Team has a consensus on how the Basis of Faith applies to sexual behavior or orientation. TCF leaders in 2011 confirmed to the Daily that, based on their value system, they saw any homosexual act as "unchaste." "You can date," former TCF Vision and Planning Team member Wai Cheng (LA '11), told the Daily in a Dec.7, 2011 article, "but, according to our beliefs, [only] in a heterosexual relationship." "If there's a student who is actively engaged in a homosexual relationship, that's also not sexually chaste," former TCF leader and current Intervarsity Christian Fellowship Team Leader Alexandra Nesbesda (LA '06) added in the article. According to the student leaders handbook produced by IVCF, it is unacceptable for a Christian to engage in a homosexual encounter. On page 87 of the section "Understanding Your Campus Culture, the handbook reads: "Is it okay…to have a homosexual encounter? ... A Christian says 'no,' because immorality as defined in the Bible offends God and brings harm to the individuals involved." In analyzing TCF's constitutional leadership requirements, an important distinction lies in the difference between sexual orientation and action, Archambault said. If TCF or InterVarsity discriminated based solely on sexual orientation, Laporte said, she would not have chosen to be a leader in TCF. Laporte wrote last semester in an op-ed in the Daily that she is attracted to both men and women, but would not act on her attraction unless she was married to a man. "I am not a leader inTCFbecause 'I chose to be straight' but because I have chosen to deny myself in all things and take up my cross daily in order to follow Christ," Laporte wrote in the the Dec. 10 op-ed. "My sexuality is only one part of my identity that is being transformed by God's will." Moving forward, leaders in TCF said that they are unsure if they want to go down the murky road that the CSL's route for a justified departure from Tufts' anti-discrimination policy presents. The group will have to make a decision soon if it intends to reapply for recognition by the Judiciary in time to apply for Senate funding from the TCU Treasury, a process that happens annually each March. TCF's leaders are concerned with the potential negative perception the process could create, and remain doubtful that they can explain TCF's leadership criteria in a way that satisfies the CSL, the Judiciary, and the student body at large. "Part of this issue has been perception," Nwafor said. "How do we explain in almost two different languages the concepts of our belief to this campus, and how are we being understood when we do try to explain that? ... I think this policy tried to help us be better understood, but I think it's leading to even more misconception of our goals and our desires on this campus."