In the weeks following a deadly earthquake in Turkey, the Tufts Students of Turkey club has organized several fundraising events, including a bake sale and a supply drive, to support victims of the disaster. So far, the club has raised more than $16,000 for survivors.
Somerville’s Zoning Board of Appeals voted unanimously on Feb. 1 to approve permit requests for a new Winter Hill building complex, representing a major step towards the area’s long-desired revitalization. Located at 299 Broadway, the site of a closed Star Market, the development would consist of two mixed-use buildings, multiple retail spaces and a civic plaza, in addition to a pocket park along Seawall Street.
Chris Campbell began work in January after he was appointed the new director of the FIRST Resource Center. Campbell comes to Tufts from the College of the Holy Cross, where he served as the director of student inclusion and belonging.
Tisch College’s Susan and Alan Solomont Distinguished Speaker Series began on Feb. 9 with a Civic Life Lunch with writer, activist and Tufts alumna Sabrina Cartan (A'15). Titled “Activists, Assemble!,” the talk focused on how pop culture fandoms can integrate into spaces for activism and social change.
Hodgdon Food-On-The-Run, commonly known as “Hodge,” will close for renovations after March 9, according to Patti Klos, director of dining and business services at Tufts. The popular dining location is set to be revitalized with a new layout designed to minimize overcrowding and streamline the grab-and-go system.
A surge of new artificial intelligence tools is stirring concern among some faculty while others embrace it as university administrators move to address the new reality marked by chatbots capable of spitting out code and writing assignments in mere minutes.
Students and community members gathered outside of the Gantcher Center on Feb. 10 to protest student recruitment at the career fair by military-industrial organizations. Sponsored by the Tufts Career Center, the fair featured booths from defense organizations like The MITRE Corporation, MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the U.S. Army New England, among other non-military organizations.
The Tufts University Prison Initiative of Tisch College celebrated the release of the ReSentencing Journal, Vol. 1, a compilation of creative submissions from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals, at an exhibition in Barnum Hall on Feb. 7.
Massachusetts state lawmakers have introduced a proposal called “School Meals For All,” a continuation of a program that fed students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Representative Andres Vargas, who represents Haverhill, and Senator Sal DiDomenico, who represents Everett, filed the legislation.
Sasha Sabherwal, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, delivered a talk entitled “Collective Fictions of Caste: Unsettling Caste, Gender, and Religion in the Sikh Diaspora of the Transnational Pacific Northwest” on Feb. 8. The talk drew from Sabherwal’s research project studying Sikh communities in the Canadian and Pacific Northwestern diaspora.
The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism raised $5,000 in three weeks to keep running the Somerville Wire, Editor Jason Pramas announced in a Feb. 2 editorial. The donations of 40 Somervillians allowed the Wire, an online, independent news service, to avoid a long-term spring hiatus.
The Tufts Community Union Senate held a school-wide town hall regarding the diversity, equity, inclusion and justice efforts at Tufts on Feb. 3. The event featured University President Anthony Monaco, Provost ad interim Caroline Genco and other senior administration members.
The Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies hosted the “Dystopia Now!” symposium, focused on representations of dystopia in media and popular culture, on Friday. Dr. Cornel West opened the event with a keynote address.
Three Tufts students were presented with the MLK Student Voices Award at this year’s annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration. Andrew Harris, who submitted photography; Marsha Germain, who submitted poetry; and Ayomide Oloyede, who submitted a spoken poem, received this year’s award.
Volodymyr Dubovyk, visiting professor at The Fletcher School, spoke about academia in war-stricken Ukraine in a conversation titled “Ukrainian Scholarship in Times of War.” Dubovyk is an associate professor of international relations and director of the Center for International Studies at the Odesa I. Mechnikov National University in Ukraine.
Tufts juniors Thomas Hershewe and Asher Smith won the Best Student Paper Award, given out yearly by the New England Chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, for their political research. Along with the award, they received $100 in personal funding each and a free trip to Philadelphia in May, where they will have the chance to present their research at the annual AAPOR conference.
Tufts will close its testing centers at the Medford/Somerville and SMFA campuses on Mar. 17, it announced on Feb. 6.
Tufts conducted its first ever Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Campus Climate Survey in the spring of 2022, with 4,717 respondents completing the survey. The results were published in a report released in December 2022 and were announced on Jan. 23.
Robert Terrell, a Tufts faculty member, has been appointed the new executive director of Boston’s Office of Fair Housing and Equity. Terrell, a part-time lecturer in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, officially began his role on Jan. 3.
The Tufts Community Union Elections Commission finalized the results of a special TCU Senate election on Thursday, Feb. 2. Nine senators were elected and a majority of students voted yes on the new TCU constitution referendum.
