The Committee on Student Life (CSL) policy allowing religious groups to apply through the Chaplaincy for exemption from the university's nondiscrimination policy confuses and repels the people it is meant to help, baffles the administrators charged with enforcing it, frustrates the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Judiciary asked to comply with it and doesn't even seem to be entirely clear to the people who were in the room while it was being written. The problem the CSL was asked to solve was complex and nuanced. The ideological struggles and age-old contradictions between religious freedom and the prevention of bigotry are not unique to Tufts, nor are they likely to be resolved here by any university policy or TCU Senate resolution. But the CSL's solution has only served to make the problem harder to solve. It has taken Tufts a step back on the path to an inclusive community where all students can devote their time years here to their faith - or lack thereof - without fear, and where no student must worry that their Student Activities Fee dollars are going to organizations that claim faith as a basis for discrimination.
No university rulemaking body should exist without some reasonable system of checks on its ability to make rules. The Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate asked the faculty to take on that role of arbiter by holding a vote on the policy. But that was impossible, according to AS&E Faculty Executive Committee Co-Chair Steven Hirsch, because there exists "no legal basis or precedent" for the faculty to overturn a CSL decision. University President Anthony Monaco has declined to take on that role in his own capacity, protesting that this is an issue "the community should decide." The university chaplain - or at least its temporary incarnation in Rev. Patricia Budd Kepler - has in turn declined to keep the CSL in check, having already approved a student group's application for religious exemption without any critical analysis of the group's claims of doctrinal basis for discrimination in leadership.
This leaves, by process of elimination, the student body. In this case, we are represented by the TCU Senate and Judiciary, essentially powerless in that the policy applies to these two bodies and leaves them unable to fight the policy except in their capacity to construct their own interpretation of the policy. Students standing against the policy are also represented by the Coalition Against Religious Exclusion (CARE), which has emerged from obscurity as the loudest and most adamant voice against the decision but whose cries that it is unfair to students have fallen on deaf ears. Equally regrettably, no clear advocate has emerged for the student members and leaders of Tufts' religious groups, as they struggle to navigate the waters of "religious exemption" and to come away from the decision with a way of staying true to the tenets of their faiths while retaining officially recognized status as a Tufts student group. Since the CSL announced its "religious exemption" solution, it has been very clear that, while this is certainly an issue that the Tufts community as a whole is affected by, it is not something "the community should decide." The community - the Senate, the Judiciary, CARE, campus religious groups - have been given its chance to decide, and their decision is already clear: This policy does not belong in its current state at Tufts. It is up to the CSL - the body that wrongly decided for Tufts that our nondiscrimination policy can have exceptions - to reevaluate that choice and work harder and come up with a better solution. It is up to incoming University Chaplain Rev. Gregory McGonigle to educate himself to his full ability on the scope of the situation and cast the critical eye his impressive resume suggests on any application for religious exemption that comes his way.
The CSL, by creating a roundabout, uninformed solution to a sensitive dilemma and refusing to accept responsibility when it proved almost universally unpopular, has left its job incomplete. The Daily urges next year's members of the CSL, in the absence of any obvious check on the body's power to speak for Tufts, to take its responsibility and impact seriously, act as a check on itself and reconsider who this solution is good for. If it does so in earnest, it may find that the answer is "no one."
