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.
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 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.
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.
A celebration in honor of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was held on Jan. 30 by the Tisch College of Civic Life in collaboration with the Africana Center, the President’s Office, the University Chaplaincy and the Provost’s Office. The event, which was held in Breed Memorial Hall, featured keynote speaker Régine Jean-Charles, as well as student voices and a cappella groups.
Tufts announced on Jan. 17 that it received more than 34,000 applicationsfor the undergraduate class of 2027. The application pool is the university’s most diverse in history, according to Dean of Admissions JT Duck.
Executive Director of Public Safety Yolanda Smith wrote in an all-campus email Tuesday that only “credible” threats would trigger public safety alerts going forward, following a string of bomb threats that rocked campus in December and seemingly began anew earlier this week.
The bivalent COVID-19 booster vaccine is no longer required for all university personnel and students, Michael Jordan, university infection control director, announced in a Jan. 5 email to the Tufts community. In addition to dropping the omicron booster mandate, Jordan noted that the influenza vaccine would become optional for all students on the Medford/Somerville and SMFA campuses.
Evacuations, building sweeps and near-daily security alerts rattled a campus just beginning its finals period after Tufts’ diversity office received a bomb threat on Dec. 14. The threat, sent via email, quickly became the first of at least seven messages directed to Tufts in the week that followed.
Tufts received its seventh bomb threat in nine days at 7:01 a.m. In addition to naming seven buildings on the Medford/Somerville campus, one building on the Boston campus and the Boston Field Division of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the threat also targeted the Greater Boston Health Center branch of Planned Parenthood.
