A subcommittee of the Alcohol Task Force met yesterday to discuss potential improvements to student safety at Spring Fling, amid rumors that originated from a senior's e-mail to hundreds of undergraduates in which he erroneously suggested the administration might cancel the annual event.
Nearly a decade of planning and construction have finally resulted in the completion of an ambitious, $68 million five-floor vertical expansion to the School of Dental Medicine, one of the most significant improvements to the school since its founding over 140 years ago.
Tufts' newest sports team is perhaps its most unorthodox.
The Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate says students are not aware enough of its impact on campus life.
As someone who is fine with letters but less than ecstatic about numbers, I was always on board with the replacement of numbers with letters in math class. I took to algebra pretty quickly and was thrilled about ninth-grade logic with its p's and q's, three dots and long, wordy proofs.
Last Wednesday's National Coming Out Day (NCOD) celebration, marked by particularly strong community involvement, capped what the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Center sees as an increasingly receptive environment at the university.
TD Garden. Gillette Stadium. Citi Field. The Izod Center. They are all victims of a phenomenon that draws groans from sports fans the country over: corporate branding. Now the Tufts Community Union Senate sees a pragmatic opportunity to do some branding of its own. Members of the Senate's Student Outreach Committee say they are not content with the amount of attention students pay to the body's work, complaining that Senate decisions often go unnoticed and elections go uncontested due to lack of student interest in the positions. So they are proposing to attach the Senate's name to events like Fall Ball and the Nighttime Quad Reception, also known as Naked Quad Run. This raises a very simple question: Is it really acceptable to re-appropriate our campus traditions for the purpose of advertising our student government? What's more, the Senate proposes to create an emblem that it can add to student organizations' materials, in order to drive home the fact that the body gives those organizations financial support. So is it worthwhile for the Senate to enforce such a homogenization of clubs' identities in the name of its own self-promotion? The Outreach Committee says that students are largely unaware of how the Senate spends its $1 million student activities budget, which is funded by undergraduates' tuition money. But it seems intuitive that students would assume that their student activities fees go toward funding student activities — just as they assume their payments for room and board go toward maintaining Tufts' dormitories and the money they spend on meal plans goes to Tufts Dining Services. If they care to find out exactly how money much each club receives, they can easily find that information on the Senate's Web site. Some argue that aggressive branding efforts will help to educate freshmen about the Senate's impact on campus. First of all, freshmen are less apathetic toward our student government than older students are, as evidenced by the disproportionately high number of first-years who run for Senate seats. And while the Daily agrees on the importance of informing freshmen about the Senate's role on campus during orientation, we do not feel that sticking a Senate label on events or other organizations will give first-years meaningful insight into why they should join Senate. Senators say they would like to avoid situations like the one that arose last year, when students who had not originally made their thoughts known came out heavily against the body's decision to allocate $230,000 for construction of the Tufts Mountain Club's Trips Cabin. But labeling Tufts Mountain Club ads with a Senate logo would not have prevented the Trips Cabin debacle. The major reason for students' surprise at the outcome of the funding decision lies in the fact that they were not accustomed to seeing the Senate handle such issues — and, more importantly, the Senate was not accustomed to handling them, or to advertising appropriately for them. Furthermore, similar situations are highly unlikely to arise in the foreseeable future. The Senate had hundreds of thousands of extra dollars to give away only because it had recently been reimbursed for losses in an extraordinary embezzlement scandal. Before the recovered money was allocated, few were demanding that the Senate highlight its own involvement in all the things it funds. And without similar opportunities to mishandle hundreds of thousands of dollars in the future, the Senate does not need to foist its "brand" on the titles of storied campus traditions or the materials of unique student organizations. Senate Fall Ball? Senate Spring Fling? To us, that sounds a whole lot like Microsoft Fenway Park.
When the Office of Residential Life and Learning (ResLife) implemented its now-infamous sex policy, it had people exactly like Arturo Gomez Toro in mind.
Even if someone doesn't say no, they're not necessarily saying yes.
Boston University's (BU) recently-constructed Biosafety Level-4 (BSL-4) laboratory has raised concerns among local residents and academics who question the new building's ability to facilitate the safe study of dangerous pathogens that have no known cure.
The activity that put Las Vegas and Atlantic City on the map is quickly spreading to universities across America. While gambling is discounted as a form of entertainment by profit-seeking casinos, many university officials are discovering that, for some students, placing bets is no longer just a game — it is a debilitating addiction.
The Curio House team traveled to Washington with high hopes, but they're coming home feeling a little under-appreciated.
Today's rough economic times have hit nonprofits hard, and contributions from Tufts student volunteers have recently proven particularly helpful to a variety of organizations in the university's neighboring communities.
As workers labored to restore power to Tufts' Medford/Somerville campus and parts of Medford on Friday and Saturday, university administrators relied on an improved emergency alert system to keep students, faculty and staff abreast of the situation.
When the power went out on Friday, the electricity-powered fob system went down after burning through about a half-hour's worth of backup battery.
This month's hacking attack on over 100 computers at Tufts' Medford/Somerville campus came about after hackers compromised a number of passwords which allowed them onto the network, according to Dawn Irish, director of communications and organizational effectiveness for University Information Technology (UIT).
Restaurants and stores that have opened recently in Davis Square have caused Tufts students to take note of the area's growth. But few people understand the evolution and the history of the Davis area as well as Lee Auspitz.
Students watching the Olympics in Beijing last summer may have been interested in more than sporting events. Although the Tufts language requirement has always stimulated high enrollment in language courses, current events seem to heavily impact which languages students choose to study. The past few years have seen a dramatic rise in the number of students enrolled in Chinese and Arabic, languages spoken in regions that have received high media coverage in recent years.
The news media have been abuzz for the past few weeks with articles, documentaries and other features about the unearthing of a very old set of bones. The bones belong to Ardipithecus ramidus or, as she is commonly referred to, "Ardi." Her remains are the earliest of any hominid ever discovered. This revelation has been most exciting to the anthropological and archaeological communities, giving them fresh insight into how humans have evolved. But to many scholars within these fields, Ardi is old news. "It isn't a new discovery," said Stephen Bailey, associate professor of anthropology at Tufts. "We've been getting bits of descriptions for a long time now. And people who work in the field pretty much knew most of what was going to happen." People knew what was going to happen because, despite the recent hype, Ardi herself was actually discovered almost 15 years ago in Ethiopia. But the researchers had reservations about heavily publicizing the story until further study had been conducted. And completing satisfactory research took a long time — 15 years, to be precise. "They wanted to do such a detailed study and have it all out there," said Lauren Sullivan, a lecturer in Tufts' anthropology and archaeology departments. "The initial findings were released in 1994, [and] they put out press releases, that kind of thing. In the Science Magazine that came out recently, there were [about] 50 different scientists looking at her and doing analysis, and it takes a while to get that done and turn it into a publication." Bailey cited an additional reason for the length of time between discovery and release of information. "The cleaning is excruciatingly painstaking," he said. "It may take a year to clean something like a femur," he said, referring to a particular bone in the leg. "[It is] very tedious work, and you can't rush it." But now that the scientific community has conducted the research to support Ardi's weighty discovery, she is changing some of the most widely held perceptions about how humans evolved. A prevailing theory within anthropology for years has been the idea that bipedalism, or walking on two legs, developed when early hominids moved from the forest to the savannah. The idea was that early humans were scavengers, so being able to move around and carry things at the same time was an evolutionary advantage — especially for males, who could carry the groceries back to their chosen mates. But Bailey explained that the discovery of Ardi has altered this view. "Ramidus takes us away from that model — from the savannah into the forest. Ramidus quite clearly lived in the forest. You also see the morphology — the curved phalanges, [and] a skeleton that is probably equally as adept at going up a tree fast as it is walking on the ground," he said. Ardi's sheer age is also a significant factor in her academic importance. "One of the big things is the fact that they have a detailed analysis of an ancestor that's a million years older than ‘Lucy,'" Sullivan said. Lucy, found in 1974, was the oldest and most complete skeleton of an early hominid until Ardi's discovery. "Lucy is 3.2 million years old. Ardi is 4.4 million years old. Up until now Lucy was the largest portion of an individual that they'd found. She had 45 percent of her skeleton. So, with Ardi, they are able to get information on an individual going back about a million years," Sullivan said. Fossils even older than Ardi have been found, but they are fragments, making it more difficult to get an accurate vision of how the species lived. With a lack of fossils to study, it has been common practice for anthropologists to use chimpanzees as models for how early human ancestors would have behaved. Since the discovery of Ardi, many researchers have been rethinking that approach. "Since Ardi, chimpanzees have evolved along their own track, and humans have evolved too. Scientists hadn't necessarily realized that modern apes have evolved a lot more than previously thought," Sullivan said. Bailey referred to studying modern chimpanzees for their similarity to common ancestors as dangerous, since chimpanzees are so specialized. "They're knuckle walkers, they live in an increasingly marginalized environment, they're in danger of extinction. It's not clear that their behavior even in the wild is anything like it would have been 6 million years ago," Bailey said. "A long time ago, there were so many more of them that they could have been the successful ones, and we were the weird, offshoot population." Studying Ardi has allowed paleontologists to make great headway in their understanding of why humans have evolved the way they have, but the discovery also adds insight to the archaeological record. Archaeology is often thought of as the study of ancient buildings and artifacts, but Ardi lived 2 million years before the earliest manmade tools in the archaeological record. "This is just another kind of [archaeological] site, and this provides information about our ancestors way before buildings and way before we had social inequality and pottery and all the stuff that comes with that, so it gives people on the street that are just reading about it another perspective of what life was like many, many years before you see Homo sapiens," Sullivan said. "Most of the sites that people think about when you think about temples or pyramids are associated with modern Homo sapiens. When you're looking at human evolution and early bipedalism, you're pushing the record back millions of years ago and bringing in other species," Sullivan added. In the case of Ardi, Bailey said looking at how she lived matters because of the place she holds in history. "The large majority of physical anthropologists and human paleontologists see Ramidus as a direct ancestor of ours. There's a minority opinion that all of that line goes its own interesting direction and at best are [our] cousins. But I would say that in general people feel that she's on the main line — she becomes us," Bailey said.
Tufts' religion and anthropology departments officially settled into their new homes in Eaton Hall yesterday, christening their offices with a celebration attended by professors, students and University President Lawrence Bacow. The departments will share the third floor in Eaton Hall, previously home to the political science department. Professors Kevin Dunn and David Guss, chairs of the religion and anthropology departments, respectively, expressed satisfaction with the new space and the opportunity to share the office. "This is not a ceremony for two different departments, but a celebration of sharing the land, sharing intellectual space," Dunn said. "It is a marriage made in heaven." The departments were previously housed at 126 Curtis Street, a location that is considerably removed from Tufts' main campus, Guss said. At their new Eaton Hall location, both centers have the capability to expand and become more active voices in the Tufts academic arena. Renovations to Eaton's third floor were completed over the summer to make the setting more hospitable for both students and professors. The space features open conference rooms, windowed offices, a coffee bar and a glass display case for antiquities donated by Religion Professor Emeritus Howard Hunter. Prior to the facelift, Guss said the third floor closely resembled a Motel 6. Eaton is by no means new to religion and anthropology faculty; the basement of the building once housed the departments for 20 years, according to Guss. But the previous Eaton Hall basement was not at all an ideal working environment, Guss said. The new space, however, offers a good fit for the relatively small departments. Political science faculty and staff moved to the newly refurbished Packard Hall over the summer after the department's considerable growth. Guss said the university was "doing an impressive job" figuring out how to effectively accommodate the growth of maturing academic departments in a tight economy. Prominent members of both departments and the broader Tufts community attended the celebration for the departments' move. Bacow read a brief statement from the Talmud, and Hunter read a favorite poem to celebrate the move. University Chaplain David O'Leary recounted dozens of noteworthy religious events, ending at "the ninth year of the reign of Lawrence Bacow," to commemorate this critical development for the departments. Dunn said the new space complemented the growing value of studying religion, which has become even more pertinent thanks to today's explosive religious conflicts. "The study of religion is increasingly important," Dunn said. As a housewarming gesture, the departments followed a Palestinian tradition of placing a wreath made of dough and flowers over the department entryway to bring good fortune to both departments in the future. Guss read a Spanish proverb by Saint John and placed a piece of parchment featuring the traditional Spanish verse behind a plaque on the department doorway to bring good fortune to all students. Later in the ceremony, Dunn, the religion department's chair, honored Hunter for his pioneering attitude and his role in encouraging the growth of Tufts' religion department. "When religion was not modish, he persevered single-handedly," Dunn said. Bacow emphasized the responsibility of students to "inspire their faculty." To celebrate the growth of student interest in the two departments, Bacow read a proverb from the Talmud: "I have learnt much from my teachers, more from my fellow students, and most from my students." The ceremony concluded with a musical march through the new department offices.
