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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Friday, February 14, 2025

In defense of Fletcher students

I have been saddened to see relations between Tufts and Fletcher become tense, especially over something as silly as a lunchtime caf?©.

My own opinion is that Fletcher students may not have accurately expressed the true reason why some are complaining about undergraduates: Simply put, we don't get to see our classmates at lunchtime so much anymore, and we don't see our professors at lunchtime at all anymore. I think that any undergraduate population would also regret such an unfortunate change in circumstances (though admittedly Fletcherites might be the only dorky ones who miss seeing professors at lunch).

I think that every student here at Tufts should be able to have a meal with friends, and wherever possible it should be conducive for professors to join the table as well. After Trios' renovation, the table layouts do not facilitate this, the lines are often prohibitively long, and many undergraduates are understandably responding to the Dining Services e-mails that recommend this caf?© to them. All these factors contribute to the feeling that the caf?© is no longer a social hub for Fletcher, and unfortunately no alternative venue has emerged.

If there are any Fletcher students, and I'm sure that there could not be many, who really do feel snobbishly towards the undergraduates, then I apologize for them and feel sorry for them that they are missing out on so much of what goes on around them.

In reality though, there are less-snobbish reasons why we don't interact much with undergraduates. Our coursework and living arrangements create a sort of pressure-cooker, in which outside interactions would require a special effort -- and with 35-page term papers being the norm, that extra effort can be difficult to come by. Besides, with so many of us serving as TAs, there are sometimes conflict of interest issues.

Also, you have to remember that there may be some element of jealousy among the slightly-older kids here at Fletcher. Undergraduates will get to do what we are doing someday, but we will never do what they are doing again.

Sometimes this jealousy is even about looks, and the very international population at Fletcher may not be familiar with current American fashion trends. So we get a little crotchety, and someone says that the belly-baring girls should cover up, someone else disagrees, and soon we are bantering back and forth over the listserv. It becomes a joke, and nothing more, mostly to make fun of ourselves for having morphed into the kind of people who might hold such uptight views. And then a reference to the joke goes onto The Fletcher Ledger, from which it is pulled out of context and quoted in a column. It wasn't the most diplomatic of comment, to be sure, but really, it wasn't meant in the way that the Adam Pulver surmised.

Some extreme comments by Fletcher students may have now shaped the undergraduate opinion of the whole group, and that is unfortunate. Truth be told, the same tactic could make the undergraduate population look very bad. Take for instance a statement directed at a Fletcher woman who wanted to use an empty seat at a table half-full of undergrads: when she seemed annoyed that they did not want to move their papers over for her, they said "Well at least we have sex!" -- implying that this explained her mood. Perhaps in order to prove this statement true, there was also an incident of two undergrads having sex in the bathroom outside the caf?©, while others waited outside to use the facilities for the purpose they were intended.

I know that these words and actions are not representative of the undergraduate population at large, and at the same time I hope that undergraduates read the Fletcher quotes with an equal degree of skepticism about their representative nature.

There is so much more to say, but I was serious about those 35-pageterm papers. I have one due tomorrow. So that ends my musings; back to the grindstone now.

Melissa Tritter is a first-year MALD candidate at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy.