This semester has gotten me all tangled up in time. The phantom of graduation lurks ever closer, and bright-eyed first-years remind me just how much time has passed since I first stepped foot on a college campus. I want to freeze these slippery days like an image to film — to create some barricade between me and the unrelenting watershed of change.
Tufts’ graduation requirements are a behemoth. Without previous credit or double-counting courses, they make up about half of the classes students take at Tufts. This means Tufts has some of the most extensive requirements among peer institutions, with more courses needed than schools like Wesleyan and Northeastern — not to mention Amherst, which doesn’t have any required courses beyond the major. Between college writing, language and culture, world civilizations and distribution requirements, students spend many semesters completing required courses that may draw them away from classes they find interesting or that would benefit their lives or careers.
After over a year of debate over a neutrality policy, Tufts has adopted a position of “institutional pluralism,” involving a plot in which the word “neutrality” has been swapped out for “pluralism,” to make it seem like Tufts is actually doing something productive. Spoiler alert: they’re not.
There’s a special kind of anxiety I feel sitting in a room full of students, suspended in the silence between a professor’s question and the first raised hand. As I’ve spent the past week preparing to teach a class as part of Tufts’ Explorations program — a part of our Experimental College in which upper-level students instruct incoming first-years about a topic of their choice and help them adjust to college — I’ve been thinking, and worrying, about that dreaded silence. Why, in so many classrooms full of skilled learners, is this such a familiar phenomenon?
When asked to describe her four years at Tufts in a single sentence, graduating senior Carmen Smoak was inspired by words often attributed to writer and professor Joseph Campbell: “Say yes to the whole catastrophe.” “It’s gonna be a mess, but it’s a beautiful mess,” Smoak said. “You might as well just say yes to the whole catastrophe and embrace it for all it’s worth.”
Jiao, a former managing editor, former executive copy editor and current columnist for the Daily, has had to make a huge change when it comes to her career path. An international relations major, she came into this semester with a concrete plan of taking the Foreign Service Officer Test and applying for federal jobs. These plans were dashed when, due to the current Trump administration, federal hiring was frozen, and a week before she planned to take it, the test was canceled indefinitely.
In the wake of the detainment of Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, we would like to emphasize our commitment to the safety of our writers and reaffirm our values as a publication.
Tinashe, Quinn XCII and Hot Chelle Rae will perform at Spring Fling, the Tufts University Social Collective announced on Wednesday. The concert will take place on April 26 at 12:30 p.m. on the Academic Quad. The headliner, Tinashe Jorgensen Kachingwe, who performs just under her first name, is known for hit songs “Nasty” and “2 On (feat. ScHoolboy Q).” She also recently appeared on the song “B2b featuring tinashe” from Charli XCX’s remix album “Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat.” Tinashe previously headlined Spring Fling in 2017, though she was originally set to be an opener. She stepped in after T-Pain cancelled due to the performance conflicting with his son’s birthday.
The 67th annual Grammy Awards are airing on Sunday, which means it’s time for a rundown of our predictions and our wishes for music’s biggest night. We’ll start by saying that — sorry, boys — 2024 was undoubtedly another year of girl pop, which means that Grammy hopefuls like Benson Boone and André 3000 likely will not be going home with gold in any of the top categories. Also, be on the lookout for mentions of disaster relief efforts as the broadcast airs from wildfire-stricken Los Angeles.
I vividly remember last semester’s protests. I remember the encampment first appearing on the Academic Quad in early April just as I remember the messy aftermath of the Tufts Community Union Senate resolution votes. But most of all, I remember the chill in the air that came after Tufts’ administration first threatened to send in police to arrest the protestors — that icy April night on the eve of finals, being filled in my bones with the fear that many of my classmates would be leaving our campus in the back of cop cars.
