Every Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., I lead groups of prospective students around Tufts as a tour guide. Last week, I was asked “If you ran Tufts, what would you change?” At the time, I responded with a surface-level answer: streamlining class schedules. Yet this question sat with me throughout the rest of the week.
At Tufts, an emphasis is put on the “broader context.” How does this philosophy apply on a global scale? What does this change mean in the international sphere? Instead of missing the forest for the trees, I realized that we are missing the trees for the forest, and the trees may prove to be the most important part of all.
There is beauty in localization. Just as one has a special degree of familiarity with a childhood hometown, we have an opportunity to spend four years forming an intimate bond with our home in Medford and Somerville. I want to look back 10 years from now and smile as I recall the way the dew stuck to the leaves of a sugar maple on the banks of Mystic Lake or the story of how the Medford house nearest Tufts once served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
This form of connection can only be achieved through an active desire to learn about the land and the local community — the type of education that Tufts is missing. How many environmental sustainability courses at Tufts teach that Medford has been recognized as a “Tree City USA,” a national recognition for commitment to trees and forests? How many students know about the Somerville TreeKeeper database that logs every single public tree in Somerville?
This is not merely an environmental struggle — how many history courses teach about how 63 Tufts graduates served in the Union Army during the Civil War, or that Andrew Carnegie paid $100,000 for Eaton Hall, a new Tufts library?
While there are courses at Tufts that incorporate local knowledge into the curriculum, these classes are few and far between. For example, Professor Benjamin Davies’ “The Deep History of Climate Adaptation” taught me that the powderhouse that gives Powder House Boulevard its name once held the largest stockpile of gunpowder in Massachusetts.
Tufts does not exist in a void. There is a rich history embedded in the land it resides on, the people who once lived here and the local environment. While it is important to have a broader understanding of history, having intimate knowledge of the local area not only broadens one’s connection to the land, it also creates a level of commitment that is unmatched. Only once we understand what makes Tufts special can we understand why it is so important to ensure its protection.
The way courses are currently structured have forced us to look at the forest as a whole, leaving us unable to appreciate the simple, subtle beauty of a single tree. Tufts will always and should always emphasize a global perspective — I am merely insisting that our knowledge should be expanded to include local perspectives. Who has more appreciation for nature, someone who can only see the whole forest, or someone who can also appreciate every single tree that composes it? Tufts has only been teaching about the whole forest. Let’s start teaching students about the trees.
