The Tufts Daily

There’s a housing crisis at Tufts. This is, of course, nothing new; however, the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened this problem, forcing first-year students to live over a mile drive from campus, exacerbating unpredictabilities for sophomores preparing to lose guaranteed housing as juniors and creating uncertainties for those stuck with leases and planning to go abroad. […]

The Tufts School of Arts and Sciences recently announced the decision to end the Portuguese minor, placing the ability to learn the Portuguese language at Tufts in jeopardy. Current students who have already begun the minor sequence will be able to finish, and the department will continue to offer Portuguese language classes through the 2022–23 […]

This illness policy is fundamentally flawed, and leaves students without sure alternatives or recourse to continue their education in isolation. The Tufts short-term illness form does not excuse students’ absences, missed coursework or exams they may be too sick to take, and without a convenient way to request medical excuse notes, students are now reliant on professors to understand and judge their situations despite largely lacking health care training.

Building more housing on campus is an issue of economic justice, as the current shortage leaves few options for low-income students at Tufts and for low-income renters who are being priced out of our surrounding communities. These problems risk getting worse in the years ahead with the Green Line’s imminent arrival to Medford, something that could contribute to further surges in housing prices. 

As members of the Class of 2021 enter their final days at Tufts, now is an appropriate time to reflect on what its members have accomplished in their time here. Finishing college in circumstances that no one could have even imagined four years ago, Tufts’ graduating seniors have shown respectable resilience in the face of […]

Two reprehensible incidents of hate occurred on our campus in the past week. In the first, several Asian students were verbally assaulted with hateful anti-Asian rhetoric by the occupants of a passing vehicle while walking on Professors Row. In the second, a large swastika was painted on the Bello Field shed, and was found by members of a Tufts athletic team. The Daily stands in solidarity with the communities impacted by these despicable acts. When confronting this tide of hate, it is imperative that we do not become desensitized to these attacks, and instead that we act with urgency to promptly deliver justice

At Tufts, like many other predominantly white institutions, curricula often center around the Eurocentric perspectives of Westerners — particularly white men — narrowing the worldview to which students are exposed. Not only does this reality undermine Tufts’ liberal arts foundation of exposing students to a wide array of subjects, it also fails to prepare students for civic stewardship in which they directly engage with the effects of patriarchy, colonialism and racism.

When the three-year window of the test-optional policy elapses, the university will have a critical decision to make: Tufts can either bring back its standardized testing requirement, making future generations go through the same process that current Tufts students endured, or it can repeat the process used to admit the Class of 2025, which saw the most diverse applicant pool in the university’s history.

One way for professors to support overwhelmed students is to create their own wellness days. Though some professors already took this commendable step ahead of Tufts’ “spring break,” these instances were the exceptions, not the norm. If similar gestures became more common, students would have room to breathe during a semester that has offered little.

One common struggle, among the myriad that RAs have faced this year, has been social isolation. In the fall, RAs were unique among students on campus in that they were typically considered "cohorts of one" rather than members of larger residential cohorts like most students; the end of the cohort system before the spring semester, however, did not spell the end of the social toll that comes with being an RA during a pandemic.