Arielle Galinsky, the current Tufts Community Union president, sat down with the Daily to reflect on her fourth and final year on student government, highlighting accomplishments and responding to criticism.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tufts Daily (TD): Tell me about who you are, where you’re from and what else you do on campus.
Arielle Galinsky (AG): My name is Arielle Galinsky. I’m a current senior and soon to be Tufts grad, from Canton, Mass. — not too far from Tufts’ campus. Beyond the TCU Senate, I’m very involved in TEDxTufts and the Legacy Project, which is a club I helped to co-found during my sophomore year.
TD: Tell me about your senior year and your year as TCU president in review. What did you get done, and what are you most proud of?
AG: I’m very proud of a multitude of things that we were able to accomplish. First, we institutionalized a lot of different projects. We were able to do that with the menstrual product project and TCU Senator Anand Patil’s first-aid kit project. [With the Sustainable CORE Fellows and senior ShaSha Kingston], we were able to work with Generation Conscious to get [sustainable laundry products] in the Mayer Campus Center and [the] FIRST [Resource] Center. The Wellness Space has opened up in Stratton Hall, which is really exciting, now that it’s also in partnership with many other different campus partners. The Jumbo Spring Break trip was something that came out of the TCU Senate. We worked with the Dean of Students Office and other campus collaboratives to ensure that it could grow and continue in future years.
We really tried this year to build community. So for the first time, we had leadership lunches by reaching out to student leaders. We put on three Tufts Tables events, which ultimately sought to bridge differences. We did town halls — a continuation from last year — to build community. Our two caucuses, the Black senate caucus and the Jewish senate caucus, were pretty active this year. We also hosted the leadership gala, which sought to uplift student leaders and to award a few who really went above and beyond this year in their student organizations.
Lastly, I’m really proud of the heightened transparency of the TCU Senate. For the first time we started a campus-wide newsletter, highlighting what the Senate was doing and how to get in contact with members of the executive team. We also had a project to post all of our past resolutions and past minute notes, and more.
TD: How do you think your leadership style shaped this year for the student body and for the TCU Senate?
AG: I’ve always known the importance of making sure you’re entering diverse spaces to get diverse perspectives — not being in an echo chamber, if you will. I tried to expose myself to and enter myself into spaces where I knew there was a diversity of thought, so I could make sure I was getting a 360 degree view of campus perspectives so I could accurately uplift that. Being a listening ear, to not insert myself but rather to gather those kinds of perspectives and utilize that as a driving force behind the TCU Senate’s efforts.
TD: Now, a bigger question: Tell me about March 3, the 4 ½ hour-long TCU Senate meeting to vote on four resolutions to distance Tufts from Israel. Can you tell me about how you chose to run that meeting and how you handled its aftermath?
AG: I want to backtrack to the broader topic. We, as the TCU Senate body, never posted a positional statement about the issue of what’s happening in Israel and in Gaza. I don’t think that’s in line with what the TCU Senate has done in the past, and it was not necessarily well supported by everyone. As a representative body of students on this campus with such a diversity of perspectives, I felt very strongly that we could not encapsulate all of those perspectives in an Instagram post or in a statement. Instead, I recommended that we utilize our position as senators to be individual advocates for our communities, and instead advocate for a list of different things that we could support students on.
Some have said that the TCU Senate had no business in facilitating this conversation — I think that’s potentially true. Regardless, it is what happened. I will say that there were imperfections with how everything went down, but I will not say that we were unprepared or did not think through different scenarios. This was our main primary focus and our lives leading up to this meeting. There was significant conversation in preparation to ensure that physical safety was prioritized for all students in that room, so that no one felt like they couldn’t share their perspectives.
We had created a set of guidelines for respectful conversation. Transparently, we didn’t have a ton of enforcement mechanisms. I’m apologetic for the fact that a lot of students were hurt through that. We were very clear in the beginning through our guidelines that any form of hateful rhetoric or speech was something we would condemn, but a lot of that didn’t come to surface until after the meeting’s actual procedures.
There [were] a lot of [questions] as to why we didn’t stop people from saying certain things, but from my perspective, that wasn’t our place. We were facilitating a conversation. By nature of the topic, it was going to be uncomfortable, it was going to be tense and we wanted to provide a physically safe environment for that.
In the aftermath of the meeting and the university president’s email, no one was particularly happy. [We, as the Senate Executive Board, and the TCU parliamentarian] tried to reach out to the different communities that felt most impacted — the resolutions’ authors as well as students against the resolutions — and speak with them to see how we could support them. I think a lot of people lost faith in the Senate that evening, and for understandable reasons. We tried to maintain and build up that trust again.
TD: University leadership put out a statement just 12 hours later disavowing the three resolutions passed by the TCU Senate. What does this reveal about the nature of the relationship between the student body, the TCU Senate and the administration?
AG: Largely, the TCU Senate and the administration have a very good relationship. This was potentially an outlier.
We were not aware that they were going to respond so quickly, one way or the other. I spoke to President Kumar and asked exactly about this, because I think a lot of senators were more upset by the rapid nature of the email. He noted that the email’s quickness was because they had already known their decision and did not feel it fair to students to delay their response. I think it caused a mistrust of the administration — and as an extension, the Senate — as a result of the rightful feeling that some of the processes we went through were futile.
TD: That segues well into my next question. What misconceptions do you think students typically have about both your role and the TCU Senate as a whole?
AG: I can think of a few. There’s the misconception that senators don’t do anything, and that nothing comes out of the Senate. In part, that’s potentially something we need to continue working on — uplifting the work that we do. I think senators are consistently working very hard and are often disheartened by this common misconception.
Another misconception is that the Senate is a full-time job. A lot of students aren’t super forgiving that [senators] are also students, while balancing this massive role. That leaves a bad taste when things take longer than students want, but it’s because we are also balancing the same academics as everyone else.
That is also reflected in the budgeting process. We try to make everything as accessible as possible, but we have a limited budget that we’re allocating. Not every single group can get everything that they’re requesting, and that often leaves mistrust in the Senate. We’re trying to disperse it in a way that’s equitable and fair among the over 300 student groups.
There’s another misconception among some students that we’re against them or that we’re friends with the administration instead of supporting students. I want to dispel that myth: We have this partnership with administration for the purpose of uplifting students’ voices.
Lastly, I think a lot of people view our organization as a monolith, which is not true. We are purposely a body of students that are semirepresentative of the larger student body with a multitude of different perspectives, projects and things we care about. You might think one way or another, but you can still be a part of our body because that’s the beauty of having diversity.
TD: Going forward, what needs to change about the TCU Senate?
AG: The TCU Senate has made a change over the past few years toward more events and programs over policy changes. There’s some beauty to that in that the Senate is more student facing, but we’re also spending less time on creating long term institutionalized change. I will really promote this switch to my successor, Joel [Omolade] — not to say we’ll get rid of all our programs.
TD: Do you have any fun anecdotes from the year?
AG: At every meeting of the Allocations Board, we ask students a goofy question, where we sought to create a less intimidating environment. We would start with [something like], “If you were in a vending machine, what would you be?” in order to break the ice.
TD: Well, if you were in a vending machine, what would you be?
AG: A Celsius.
TD: What are your plans postgraduation, and what will you take with you from your time as TCU Senate president?
AG: Right after graduation, I’ll be going to D.C. to work for a U.S. Senate committee. In the fall, I’ll come back to Cambridge and attend the Harvard Kennedy School for a master’s degree in public policy. Beyond that, I hope to pursue a career in healthcare policy.
I keep telling people that this year has been a leadership crash course, especially as it relates to the importance of putting yourself in a position where you can hear opposite perspectives and then form a path forward. It’s something that I’ll carry with me for quite some time into my future.
Editor's note: The article has been updated with clarification from Galinsky.
