Yesterday, the Sustainable Endowments Institute released the College Sustainability Report Card, an evaluation of campus and endowment activities at colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.
Walking around the streets of Santa Marta, my rural host village in El Salvador, it was hard to miss the big groups of kids playing around the street. Packs of five-to-13-year-olds walk around, mess with each other's clothes, play with empty bottles and not-quite-inflated soccer balls, laugh and shout like they're having the time of their lives. It is not until you have spent more time getting to know their names, where they live and who their parents are that it eventually occurs to you: Those two are sisters and cousins with that one, whose aunt is the godmother of the one with long hair whose one brother is the compañero (similar to a husband but without the marriage ceremony) of the curly-haired one's half-sister because they both eat lunch at the same grandmother's house down the street, who lives with his aunt because his mother doesn't live here anymore. Slowly, more facts come out about who is related to whom until you figure out an enormous web of family relations. Your cousin isn't just your relative … he's also your best friend. After all, you have been hanging out with each other every day since, well, forever.
Following the examples of 10 other states, North Carolina's State Board of Community Colleges voted last week to allow undocumented immigrants to attend all 58 of the state's community colleges. Such prospective students must prove that they graduated from a U.S. high school, and they must pay the $7,700 out-of-state tuition. They will also receive no financial aid. North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue opposed the decision, saying she found it hard to understand why the state should educate these people "when they can't work legally in the state after they're educated."
My name is Becky A. I am a senior majoring in architectural studies.
Every Tufts student has some form of health insurance. It's a requirement for enrollment in a Massachusetts university. Though there are plenty of exceptions, the typical Tufts student knows that her parents take care of her health care — and that when she is very ill she can go to the hospital, sign some papers, direct the bill to her "permanent address," receive treatment and hopefully go home happy. Beyond that, how health care works and even what it costs probably remains a mystery to her.
As members of the Tufts community mourn the dreadful passing of a beloved alum, we have the opportunity to reflect on and grow from his remarkable achievements and his outstanding embodiment of the active-citizenship values this university hopes to promote.
Every so often, the seriousness of a bias incident reaches seemingly unprecedented levels. This is to discourage future behavior that could further upset the balance of Tufts' social environment, in which people from all walks of life can come together freely and openly to share experiences, knowledge and ideas. After all, Tufts' social environment is certainly one of its selling points and is only made possible by the student body's compliance.
The efforts of Tufts Community Union President Brandon Rattiner and the student members of the newly formed Alcohol Task Force to open dialogue with university administrators on the new alcohol policy have already been unnecessarily complicated by yet another instance of excessive alcohol consumption by underage students.
The public editor seeks to be the liaison between campus media and their readers. As Public Editor, I hope to advance a campus conversation on Tufts media, bringing forward important issues we often take for granted and putting issues in new contexts that challenge the way we get our news.
Every time you leave the bathroom, you hit the lever and watch the water swish away another gallon and a half of wastewater. Your relationship with trash is probably similar: put it in the bin, haul it to the street (or let OneSource do it for you if you live at Tufts), and rest peacefully knowing that some truck has taken it somewhere far away. Indeed, our purchasing patterns show that consumers respond to marketing through bulked-up packaging. We buy excessively knowing that if we dislike something, we can just throw it out and, within a few days, have it carted off to some landfill. Waste isn't something that Americans are accustomed to thinking about, and when we do, we know it will be down a pipe or in a truck on the way to someplace else very shortly.
The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, The New Yorker, US News and World Report, CNN, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News and countless other national news sources have all taken on an issue of grave importance that they feel they must cover — despite the fact that it only affects a small group of a few thousand young adults in the Boston area.
Last semester, I took a course on international negotiations in which my class learned what was described as the preeminent strategy taught to all negotiators. The book from which this theory stemmed, "Getting to Yes," by Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project, challenges conventional negotiation strategy by putting forth a new, principled form of negotiation. The authors' call to reexamine traditional approaches to negotiation has direct and critical relevance to the current debate about the university's alcohol policy.
On Tuesday, those members of our government who are truly passionate about reforming the country's health care system suffered yet another major setback in their attempts to pass the bill proposed in early August. Moderate Democrats and Republicans came together in vetoing an amendment to the bill called "The Community Choice Plan," which provided for a so-called public option. This plan would have allowed people to buy health care funded by the government rather than from private companies. The plan also would have instituted a standardized "coverage label" for all health insurance plans, a label that would clearly spell out plans' terms and costs.
I'm writing in response to the Sept. 29 article "This is your brain on drugs: Not so bad after all?" If health outcomes determined drug laws instead of cultural norms, marijuana would be legal. Unlike alcohol, marijuana has never been shown to cause an overdose death, nor does it share the addictive properties of tobacco. Marijuana can be harmful if abused, but jail cells are inappropriate as health interventions and ineffective as deterrents.
Since word of genocidal conflict first broke out in 2003, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and the entire country's identity have become inextricably tied to one conflict-embroiled region: Darfur. While organizations such as STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition and the Enough Project have been calling for foreign intervention, the leaders of the developed world have, for the most part, remained silent.
As any good politician would, Tufts Community Union (TCU) President Brandon Rattiner used his State of the TCU speech last week to address one of the principal concerns facing students this semester: the dramatic shift in the university's alcohol policy. The change means that a student's first alcohol offense now sends him or her straight to level-one probation, or pro-one.
On the evening of Sept. 16, a student in Hill Hall discovered a series of posters put up next to those of a candidate running for a Class of 2013 Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate seat. The posters, belonging to a student [who] was not running for Senate, closely mimicked the ones of the actual candidate. The messages that each took, however, sharply diverged. Where the candidate's posters carried an ordinary-looking endorsement for the coming Thursday's election, the other set of posters opened with the phrase "Squinty Eyes, Big Vision" and, phoneticizing the stereotypical Asian immigrant accent, called on students to "Prease vote me! I work rearry hard!"
Dear Editor, In Mr. Helms' editorial ["End of the invocations of Tea Party," printed Sept. 21], he never reveals what he thinks the "finite purposes and agendas" of the alleged phony Tea Partiers are, and one wonders if he knows anything more about today's Tea Party movement beyond the grotesque caricatures that dominate the left's echo chamber.
So here we are back on the Hill. Like many of us — it is Tufts after all — I had an opportunity this past summer to go abroad and try to see the application of all of the IR coursework I do at Tufts. For all of the due diligence we give to solving problems of global poverty and health, I figured I should see it firsthand.
Hooking up on Tufts' campus is often impossible. By that, we mean hooking up to the Internet. Tufts lags behind most of its peer institutions when it comes to providing wireless Internet to students. In 2006, the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate Services Committee found that Bowdoin College, MIT, Cornell, Dartmouth, Emory, Harvard and Northeastern Universities already had campus-wide wireless access. Three years later, the Internet remains inaccessible in many common rooms and classrooms at Tufts, and it is only sporadically available in campus dining halls. The university has finally set a target date for solving this problem, as reported in yesterday's front-page article, "Tufts hopes to put wireless access in all buildings within 3 years."
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