2010-02-23

Wintry Mix 38/35

THE TUFTS DAILY

TUFTSDAILY.COM

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2010

VOLUME LIX, NUMBER 17

Senate endorses a raise in on-campus housing commitment fee BY

Committee aims to select new dean by semester’s end

BRENT YARNELL

Daily Editorial Board

The Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate on Sunday endorsed a raise in the on-campus housing commitment fee from $500 to $750 in response to increasing abuse of the housing system.

The Office of the Dean of Student Affairs and the Office of Residential Life and Learning will consider the endorsement, which Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman has indicated he will honor.

The fee is the portion of the housing bill that is not refunded if a student chooses to move out of a room before his or her contract expires. Increasing the fee does not mean that the overall housing bill increases, because it refers only to the portion of the bill that will not be refunded in the event of a violation of the housing contract.

The Senate’s resolution endorsing the increase, which passed 20-3-2, followed Reitman’s visit to the Senate last week, during which he suggested that the effectiveness of the current fee be reconsidered.

According to Reitman, the number of students rescinding on their housing arrangements early has been steadily increasing over the past five

BY

ELLEN KAN

Daily Editorial Board

TCU Senator Wyatt Cadley said that the change in the commitment fee is meant to increase protection against students abusing the housing lottery.

Provost and Senior Vice President Jamshed Bharucha on Friday announced the members of the search committee for the new dean of arts and sciences and expects the committee to have successfully selected a candidate by the end of the semester.

In an e-mail to the Tufts community, Bharucha revealed the structure of the committee, which consists of himself as chair, five faculty representatives, three staff members, one graduate student and one undergraduate student.

The committee is tasked with finding a replacement for Robert Sternberg, the current dean, who in December announced his decision to step down this June following the completion of his five-year term.

Bharucha explained that the committee will solicit both nominations and applications with the assistance of a search firm. Upon review of these applications, the committee will select candidates to interview and continue whittling down candidates through an extensive interview process.

Professor of English Jonathan Wilson,

see HOUSING, page 2

see SEARCH, page 2

JODI BOSIN/TUFTS DAILY

Students living in on-campus housing may have to pay a higher fee if they renege on their housing agreements. years. Over 100 students paid the fee last year.

“There has been no modification in that fee since a decade ago,” he said. “At some point you decide something needs to be addressed.”

UMass postgraduate researchers aim to unionize and improve working conditions BY

Where You Read It First Est. 1980

Tufts co-sponsors Haiti benefit concert

MICHAEL DEL MORO Daily Editorial Board

The University of Massachusetts (UMass) will soon become the fourth public institution in the country to have a union protecting its postgraduate researchers, if the university’s postdoctoral fellows succeed in their unionization endeavor in the coming weeks.

The unionization effort, which began last spring, is a product of what fellows claim is the inadequacy of benefits usually awarded to public university employees.

The fellows at UMass have teamed up with the United Auto Workers (UAW ) to organize a union through the state’s certification process, which sources say will be legally recognized in the next few weeks.

Caleb Rounds, a UMass postdoctoral research associate, said that his primary reason for joining the effort was to procure better health care benefits for his fellow workers, who currently are required by law to purchase prohibitively expensive insurance packages.

“I want to be clear: Most of us are offered some form of health insurance, and health insurance is required by law, but it’s just that it is financially impossible,” Rounds told the Daily.

According to Rounds, postdoctoral researchers with fami-

COURTESY RYAN SCOTT, CC

The University of Massachusetts is facing a unionization movement by its postdoctoral fellows. lies are required by state law to purchase insurance packages at rates of $1,400 a month, which is equivalent to about half of the average fellow’s annual salary.

Rounds noted that before becoming postgraduate fellows, graduate students could obtain health care insurance for just $400 a year.

While Rounds himself is fortunate enough to be able to rely on his spouse’s health care insurance plan, he said this difference in insurance costs is significant for some of his colleagues.

“That’s quite a jump,” he said.

“Health care is a big issue. I think that for the most part a lot of us are in [the unionization effort] for that.”

The postgraduate researchers are also looking to improve their working conditions in general, according to Rounds, who said that researchers’ principal investigators can currently make an arbitrary decision to fire them “at the drop of a hat.”

Protection from this sort of capricious dismissal, provisions

Inside this issue

JAMES CHOCA/TUFTS DAILY

Franklin Dalembert, executive director of the Haitian Coalition of Somerville, called for continued support for victims of the quake at Thursday’s benefit concert “Somerville Sings for Haiti.” The concert was sponsored by the City of Somerville, Tufts and the Somerville Chamber of Commerce.

Visit tuftsdaily.com to see an audio slideshow of Tufts’ Haiti relief efforts.

see UNIONS, page 2

Today’s Sections

Lyric Stage Company’s “Legacy of Light” bores audiences with poor acting and disjointed plot.

Men’s squash team closes out season on high note at Summers Cup.

see ARTS, page 5

see SPORTS, back

News Features Arts & Living Editorial | Letters

1 3 5 8

Op-Ed Comics Classifieds Sports

9 10 13 Back

THE TUFTS DAILY

2

ing the building, students report that they were alerted by the fire alarm and evacuated at approximately 6:15 a.m.

Police Briefs LAUNDRY FAIL Tufts University Police Department (TUPD) at 5:50 a.m. on Feb. 17 received a call from a Hodgdon Good-to-Go employee who smelled smoke in the kitchen area.

Upon arrival, TUPD officers found a dryer that was emitting smoke from an item that had caught on fire. Somerville Fire Department responded to the call and removed the dryer from the building.

TUPD Sgt. Robert McCarthy said that the worker called before the smoke became an issue and the dryer did not pose a threat to the building. Although McCarthy’s records do not show a report of students evacuat-

THEY WEREN’T THERE FOR THE FREE PRINTING A staff member at the Women’s Center on 55 Talbot Ave. called TUPD at 8:43 a.m. on Feb. 17 to report an attempted break-in.

The intruder had tried to break into the Women’s Center through a porch door.

An examination of the door showed that the screen of the door had been cut open and glass on the interior side of the door seemed to be broken.

“It looked as if someone tried to get through that door but couldn’t,” McCarthy said. TUPD does not have any leads on the case.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

NEWS

DON’T TALK STRANGERS

TO

SKETCHY

TUPD received a call at 10:30 a.m. on Feb. 21 from a female student who reported that at 9:30 a.m. she had been walking along College Avenue next to Ellis Oval when a vehicle pulled up beside her.

A man inside the vehicle offered to give the student a ride if she wanted one.

The student ignored him and after the vehicle, which she described as a white or silver SUV, drove away, she took down its license plate number, which matched a number from a vehicle that had recently been reported as stolen.

McCarthy said that TUPD worked with the Medford Police Department and Cambridge Police Department on the investigation and that their officers think they have identified the driver of

the vehicle.

He said that although the female student described the man as “creepy,” he could only be arrested for possession of a stolen vehicle and not for speaking to the student.

“He didn’t commit a crime,” McCarthy said. “So there’s really not much we can do. We will be looking for the vehicle, though, if it’s around campus.”

McCarthy also praised the student for her appropriate response. “She did the right thing,” he said. “She ignored him and kept going.”

— Compiled by Corinne Segal

An interactive map is available at tuftsdaily.com

UMass fellows unionize to seek better benefits

Senate supports commitment fee raise to deter housing system abuse

UNIONS

HOUSING

continued from page 1

for regular promotions and some sort of retirement plan will all be part of the new union’s goals if all goes according to plan, Rounds said.

Researchers should be able to realize their plans, considering both the lack of resistance from the UMass administration and the painless union certification process — which requires a simple majority of written authorization cards — according to Nick Velluzzi, an international representative of the UAW. Velluzzi said that the process has been quite smooth thus far and should continue that way, barring any unexpected objections from the university.

“We hope they don’t do that,” Velluzzi told the Daily.

“Pending no objections, we anticipate the union to be certified probably within a few weeks.”

UMass Executive Director of News and Media Relations Edward Blaguszewski also expects the process to be expeditious.

“The state is reviewing the documentation provided to them and we’ll certainly work with the state to do whatever is required,” Blaguszewski told the Daily. “[Postdoctoral fellows] do important work here at the university and they are valued.”

Blaguszewski could not

detail what sort of health care benefits would be afforded the newly unionized fellows, except to say that such speculation may be premature.

“We really don’t discuss the details of potential contracts in public with them either,” he said. “We work with the unions to reach good agreements.”

At Tufts, current federal law prohibits faculty and graduate employees from organizing into unions, according to Blaguszewski.

Regardless of this, movements toward unionization at private institutions have been rare and are not expected at Tufts, according to Vice Provost Peggy Newell.

Newell said in an e-mail that whereas the state is the employer of the fellows at UMass, private university postdoctoral workers would be incapable of petitioning the state to form a union, even though there is no law prohibiting organization.

“For postdoctoral fellows, the university follows guidelines from the National Institutes of Health in setting a minimum salary,” Newell said.

“In our surveys of other institutions, the salary and benefits available to Tufts post-docs are comparable to that offered by other universities.”

Newell added that unionization movements would not be in the best interests of the university or the postdoctoral workers.

continued from page 1

“You have students that are taking advantage of the system, and the Senate needed to send a message,” Cadley, a freshman, said.

According to Senator Xavier Malina, a senior, the $750 took inflation into account. He explained that had the fee, which has remained unchanged over the past 10 years, increased relative to inflation, it would be about $630 today.

An increase to $1,000 was also proposed, but was rejected in favor of the $750 number.

An accompanying resolution, passed by an overwhelming majority, clarified that the Senate’s support for the fee increase depended on the inclusion of exceptions for students who experience financial aid changes, and for students who move into fraternity or sorority housing.

Reitman stressed that the fee does not apply to those who are unable to continue living in university housing, and noted the existence of an appeals process for students who feel that they should not have to pay the fee.

“We’re always going to listen to those arguments for exceptions,” he said.

Senator Chas Morrison, a junior, pointed out that fraternities and sororities are often forced to pay their members’ commitment fee when they bring in members to fill spaces in houses left by residents going

JODI BOSIN/TUFTS DAILY

The university is considering raising the housing commitment fee due to increasing instances of student abuse of the lottery system. abroad in the spring semester.

“The Greek houses only have so much money, so we’re saying there should be an exception,” he said.

Morrison, the former president of the Tufts chapter of Delta Tau Delta, feels that Greek organizations’ actions in those cases do not constitute an abuse of the housing system.

Reitman before the decision had said he would go along with the Senate’s recommendation, and said that he came to the Senate because it was the body that originally pushed for the creation of a fee.

“About 12 years ago there was no fee at all, and the Senate came to me and asked me to consider putting in some kind of commitment fee,” he said. “They felt that too many students were capriciously entering the lottery.”

According to Reitman, the Senate asked him to implement a $250 commitment fee. A year later, his data showed that the fee had had no impact, so the Senate asked that it be doubled to $500, where it has remained for the past decade.

Reitman will present the Senate’s recommendation to the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering (SOE) for consideration.

Scott G. Sahagian, executive assistant dean for the SOE, said the question would be considered in a series of discussions between the deans and the trustees, in which Reitman’s opinion would carry considerable weight.

“The dean is responsible for that particular area,” he said.

“Whatever my answer will be is whatever Dean Reitman has said.”

Committee members confident about success of upcoming search SEARCH continued from page 1

a member of the committee, emphasized the importance of the search process.

“It’s many hours, it usually involves a very careful and thoughtful selection process,” he said. “This is a very important decision for the university. You’re talking about someone who’s going to be here for hopefully a very long time and who can have a very large impact on the university, so one has to be extremely diligent and careful.”

According to Bharucha, candidates both internal and external to the institution will be considered, and there is no preference either way at the moment.

He outlined three important issues to consider when evaluating candidates.

“I would say quite a few qualities, but let me just mention three: a proven record of promoting firstly academic excellence, secondly collaboration and thirdly diversity,” Bharucha told the Daily. “I’ll go on to say that the candidate should have significant experience in academic administration.”

Associate Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy Nancy Bauer, who is also on the committee, highlighted the qualities that were critical to faculty.

“I think all faculty members want somebody who’s open, intelligent [and]

thoughtful,” she said. “I think the hardest thing about having any kind of leadership position is making sure that you listen carefully to what other people have to say. At the same time, you need to know when enough listening has happened and you need to make a decision.”

Bauer also noted the importance of the interview stage in assessing these qualities.

“It’s critical that you ask the right kinds of questions because you’re trying to elicit not just the candidates’ answers, but their style of answering questions and their way of interacting with people,” she said.

Bharucha expressed his confidence in the committee’s ability to successfully select a candidate.

“It is an excellent committee, obviously you can’t put everybody on the committee but I think it’s a good committee,” he said.

Likewise, Bauer expressed her belief that the committee would be well equipped to do its work.

“I have every confidence that the provost will do a very good job of guiding this process,” she said. “He’s really experienced at doing this, and I’m looking forward to working with him and the other members of the committee.”

Bauer also noted, however, that the search process would have to be accelerated due to the timing of Sternberg’s announcement and the desire to have a candidate in place for the next academic year.

“Because of when the dean resigned and how quickly we want to get a new person in place, this process is going to be more compressed than it would have been if we had known in September,” she said.

Bauer also stressed the added importance of the selection process given University President Lawrence Bacow’s recent decision to resign.

“I think people are taking it very, very seriously, there’s no doubt about that,” she said. “Especially in light of the fact that President Bacow is stepping down, it’s critical that we find the right person.”

The other members of the committee are Professor of History Peniel Joseph, Professor and Chair of Biomedical Engineering David Kaplan, Professor of Mathematics Misha Kilmer, Senior Director of Development of the School of Arts and Sciences Brigette Bryant, Dean of Admissions and Enrollment Management Lee Coffin, Executive Administrative Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Leah McIntosh, President

of the Graduate Student Council for Arts, Sciences and Engineering Jason Heustis and Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senator sophomore Nunu Luo. Bharucha explained that candidates were selected through a combination of nominations by bodies like the Faculty Executive Committee of Arts, Sciences and Engineering and the TCU Senate as well as his own decisions.

As noted in his e-mail, the committee is currently at the stage of soliciting nominations and applications on the national stage. Nominations or comments about the selection process are being collected at deansearchAS@ tufts.edu, while applications are being accepted with an accompanying cover letter and résumé at s.storbeck@storbeckpimentel.com.

Bharucha expressed his appreciation for Sternberg’s service to the university.

“I’d like to thank Dean Sternberg for his important contribution as dean,” he said.

Sternberg is currently one of the three finalists for the position of provost and executive vice president at Colorado State University. He interviewed for the position on Jan. 21.

Corinne Segal contributed reporting to this article.

Features

3

tuftsdaily.com

Questions of library security raise discussions about current safety system BY

DEREK SCHLOM

ROMY OLTUSKI | WORD UP

Tough ... tttsssss

Daily Editorial Board

In light of the Feb. 15 arrest of a local man in Tisch Library for “open and gross lewdness” — as stated in the Tufts University Police Department’s (TUPD) report — and at least four accounts of laptop theft from Tisch between Dec. 4 and Dec. 6, the security and accessibility of the library is under scrutiny.

Tisch Library is entirely open for on-site public access, though only current or retired faculty and staff, current Tufts students, alumni, visiting scholars and researchers and Boston Library Consortium card holders have borrowing privileges, according to the library Web site. Still, the library maintains a walk-in policy, with no procedure for monitoring who is in the building at any given time.

After a series of reports of a non-student publicly masturbating in Tisch from April 2007 through February 2008, library security measures were significantly increased according to Tisch Library Director Jo-Ann Michalak.

“We installed four blue-light phones in the area of the stacks so that people could directly call TUPD,” Michalak said.

As of now, Michalak said there are no plans to decrease the accessibility of the library to the public. “It’s a tradition that we’ve been open to the Medford and Somerville community, and we work very closely with [Director of Community Relations] Barbara Rubel to determine our policies,” Michalak said. “Occasionally the issue of whether we should be open comes up, but it’s never been a sustained issue. I’m not saying that it won’t be in the future. If we feel there is a need, we will discuss changing our policies.”

According to Michalak, Tisch Library simply doesn’t fit the criteria of a building that requires security beyond what is currently employed. “Libraries that have check-in systems, I’ve noticed, either have a collection that is extremely val-

I

DANAI MACRIDI /TUFTS DAILY

Tisch Library is staying open to the outside community for the time being. ued, like Harvard’s, or are in a very urban area,” she said. “That’s where libraries have a less open attitude.”

Harvard University’s Widener Library, in particular, has a markedly more stringent security system in place than does Tisch. Widener Library is closed to individuals not affiliated with the university, but researchers and students from other universities can apply for access privileges. Even then, those with access privileges can only visit the library six times in a 12-month period.

Other libraries at Harvard vary in their degree of accessibility. Some require members of the public not affiliated with the university to provide photo identification and to sign in at a security desk, and most require that all users’ bags be inspected as they exit the respective buildings, according to the

Harvard Web site.

In addition to the blue-light phones in Tisch, a security officer is employed to patrol the stacks after 6 p.m., and the library staff conducts a close-down procedure prior to the beginning of latenight study hours in the Hirsch Reading Room that includes a sweep of the library by staff members. Since the laptop thefts, Michalak has instituted what she calls “library security alerts,” or signs that remind students “that they need to be focusing on their own security,” Michalak said. “There’s always something else you can try, but I think [the security in Tisch] is adequate.”

According to Michalak, two potential changes that have been proposed over the years are the installation of see TISCH, page 4

Radical historian Zinn leaves significant legacy BY

ALEXA SASANOW

Daily Editorial Board

Howard Zinn died on Jan. 27, 2010 — the same day as author J.D. Salinger. Due to Salinger’s more eye-catching legacy, Zinn’s obituary was pushed back in The New York Times — all the way to the Business section. For a man who spent most of his adult life criticizing capitalism and forcing people to rethink their beliefs about the way the country runs, it was ironic to see his obituary next to news of big business, but not surprising to those who knew anything about Zinn.

Zinn was a historian, a teacher and an activist, best known for his book “A People’s History of the United States,” (1980), which told the story of the United States through the eyes of the disenfranchised.

“What Zinn did was create a purposeful deliberate shift in emphasis,” Ian Greaves (LA ’08), a Tufts graduate student and teaching assistant in history, said. “Previously, it was as if there was a right way of doing history — to tell the main story and then accompany and criticize the main story with alternative perspectives. He made the alternative perspectives the main story.”

Zinn’s book caused generations of students to re-think the figures they knew so well, changing a history full of great men to a story of struggle — a history in which people like Theodore Roosevelt are heroes was rewritten to show their racist and sexist sides.

“You feel radical and even a little naughty [reading it],” Leah Knobler (LA ’05), who taught “A People’s History” as a textbook to high school students in

New York City, said. “Really, he’s saying this about the founding fathers? It goes against the whole program and that’s what makes it so engaging. You feel a little subversive at first but then you see that this is the story. This is what they’re trying to keep from us and that’s what keeps the status quo.”

While best known for “A People’s History,” Zinn wrote many other works, including plays about Karl Marx and Emma Goldman and a landmark history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The greatest criticisms of Zinn’s work attack his alleged bias, calling his works radical revisionist liberal propaganda.

However, Zinn never pretended to be neutral and constantly assured audiences of his biases. He titled his 1994 autobiography “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,” emphasizing that there is no such thing as neutrality in a world that is always changing and always asking people to choose sides.

“What Zinn was doing was simply complicating the story,” Greaves said. “[He made] it more difficult to say, ‘This is what happened.’ There’s no way to dismiss Zinn wholesale. He says it right up front: If you don’t like this history that I’m writing, then you are essentially saying that the stories of black Americans, women, native Americans, immigrants, migrant workers, anyone who has been systematically shut out of the halls of power, if you dismiss me, you’re saying that those groups of people deserve their status.”

Zinn’s writings stemmed from his own experiences: serving in World War II and going to New York University on the

Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 and later teaching at the historically black Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga. until he was fired for his radical leanings. He then held an extended tenure at Boston University. One of his great emphases was on education and the power of a motivated student body.

“I think he was always so aware that he was a white man and had privilege too and wanted to use his basic privilege to educate,” Knobler said.

“Zinn talked a lot about the distinct power of students,” said Hannah Forrester, a student at Barnard College and member of the International Socialist Organization, with which Zinn sometimes collaborated. “It largely depends on the school, but students are generally quicker to organize. It’s less scary than, for example, [it is for] a mom and dad to organize; there’s less danger.”

No matter the danger that lay ahead of him, Zinn was known until the end as the premier activist historian, and he encouraged activism in every realm of American life and in every group of people. Joshua Savala, a Tufts graduate student in history, presented an oral history of American labor to a union of University of California workers, drawing largely on Zinn’s writings.

“I used Zinn to show the connections between immigration and labor, a connection that’s complicated things for a long time,” he said. “I think placing what [union laborers] are doing today in a broader historical context, saying this is where we’re situated historically, socially, economically, is part of a broad process see ZINN, page 4

t all began the other night at a dinner party full of strangers. The questions consisted of the usual trifecta: Where are you from?

What major are you? What school do you go to? And, as always, I got flak for attending a university whose name no normal person can pronounce on the first try.

Everyone else in attendance at the dinner went to schools like Hamilton, Queen Mary, Warwick and even the occasional easy-todyslexicize three-letter acronym school. But nothing that quite measured up to the good old light-on-the-hill with its “F” and “T” and “S” packed in so tightly together, it’s begging you to develop a speech impediment.

(Go Jumbos.)

To return to my point, though, as people were pretending to know what the difficultto-pronounce word they finally got right was — we got “the one in Boston” (seriously, London?) and the “the place that Raft is based on” (Raft being the fictional university that Daria applies to in the MTV series “Daria,” circa Y2K) — I was complaining about how we get too much flack for it. Or was it flak?

And therein lay my dilemma. The rest of the conversation was lost on me as I spaced out, trying to figure out when I had last seen that strange word on paper. “Flak” turned into “flack” and back into “flak” in my mind, as I tried to reconcile either discarding or holding onto that mystifying “c” (I think at one point, my dinner companions searched for Medford, Mass. on Google Maps while I continued to ponder). But upon my return home, I was left not with the long-awaited answer to my troubles, but one of those moments that, after spending too much brain energy not to be wholly invested in even the simplest of quandaries, resulted in an all-too-dreaded “oh.”

“Flak” and “Flack” are both words. Different words. Most dictionaries today list the two as alternate spellings of one another, but the two arrived in the Oxford English Dictionary from opposite sides of the world and have, not surprisingly, distinct meanings.

We’ll start with Flack. Flack — meaning a publicist, publicity, to publicize or to act as a publicist for — pays homage to one particular publicist, Gene Flack, a successful 1930s movie agent. The word was intentionally popularized by Variety Magazine, the same people who brought you “corny” and who were known for their penchant for disseminating slang phrases. “Flack” is what publicity agents seek for their clients.

Around the same time in Germany during World War II, the German army was shooting down American planes with fliegerabwehrkanone. No, I didn’t spell that wrong. In their usual manner of taking a sentence worth of words and getting rid of the spaces in the name of efficiency and grammar rules that I don’t understand, the German language took three words, meaning individually, “airplane,” “defense” and “canon” to get the one monster compound fliegerabwehrkanone, German for the anti-aircraft guns Germany used during the war.

American GIs shortened the word to “flak” and used it describe the gun’s fire, later bastardized to mean criticism.

The two words definitely have their overlap, especially when publicity turns sour, but the GIs that first used “flak” to mean something incidentally kind-of-similar-but-not-really as “flack” most likely had never even heard of the Variety Magazine editorial board’s strange pastime, as they were busy fighting the Germans’ plan for world domination and just generally not being in America.

The fine line between “flack” and “flak” comes down to the difference between the publicity that we aim for versus the kind of public embarrassment we ward off.

So I was probably complaining about my dinner companions giving me flak, which would make a lot of sense. Really, they should have been giving me flack instead.

(Go Jumbos.)

Romy Oltuski is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Romy.

Oltuski@tufts.edu.

THE TUFTS DAILY

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Tuesday, February 23, 2010

FEATURES

Zinn’s legacy as an activist historian evident in his final writings

TUPD main contact for library security concerns

ZINN

TISCH

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of changing things.”

Although Zinn explored a highly complicated history of the United States, one that might seem impossible to overcome, he always spoke of hope, of the possibilities of activism and the knowledge that in solidarity and action comes change.

While he was highly critical of President Barack Obama, he saw promise in the grassroots organizing that elected him.

“Really for the first time, a lot of people were seeing their political convictions align with official mainstream politics,” Forrester said. “That was a really big moment, but now people are realizing everything they’ve invested in Obama, he’s been tossing it away. By and large, it is really frustrating and demoralizing. But as Zinn said, it’s not who’s sitting in office but who’s sitting in — it’s not coming from one great individual in the Oval Office but by who’s radicalizing.”

“Zinn was an example of an academic that lived his politics, which is the way it should be,” Savala said. “In that sense it’s also something to look to today, of actively organizing and of attempting to create radically different relationships with the people around you.”

This belief was exemplified in Zinn’s last published writing for The Nation, in which he appraised Obama’s achievements after one year.

He used his contribution as a call to arms to encourage people to remember the fierce urgency they felt in electing Obama and to use it to hold his

cameras throughout the library and the addition of a full-time door guard to preside over some form of a check-in system, in which students would present their Tufts identification cards and members of the public hand in photo ID. “We, periodically, have talked to TUPD about [adding cameras],” Michalak said. “My position is that I would want it to be in conjunction with a campus policy — not just in the library, and not everywhere but the library.

That’s important because we are a part of the Tufts community.”

The security officer currently stationed in Tisch is part of the Department of Public and Environmental Safety’s Supplemental Security Force and is not a member of TUPD, according to TUPD Sgt. Robert McCarthy. There are currently no plans to add to the Tisch security force.

Sophomore Gabrielle Horton said that she feels the need for a round-the-clock security presence. “If laptops are stolen and the guards are only seen during late hours, that’s some kind of security,” she said. “I never see security until late-night study begins. What’s the point?”

Freshman Emma Goldstein, on the other hand, said that the benefits of an open library outweigh the potential costs to the safety of her belongings. “Obviously it’s unfortunate that laptops are stolen, but I don’t know if having a security guard, someone standing there, does anything or not, and I like that people from the community can use the library for legitimate purposes,” she

MCT

Howard Zinn was an activist as well administration accountable.

“I think people are dazzled

by Obama’s rhetoric,” he wrote, “and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.”

“The movement that got Obama into office is a reason for excitement because it’s a genuine expanding movement

as a scholar. among young voters to get some modicum of political consciousness,” Greaves said. “If you’re just going put the right dude in the system, you’re saying the system is good enough.

It’s not about putting the right people in office, but about that consciousness, the viral spread of ideas about what’s wrong, what’s inadequate. Not everyone needs to be angry, but you do need to be critical, because that’s the wellspring of revolution.”

said. “I don’t think we need to turn it into a completely different thing where you have to swipe your ID.” “When I got here in 1991 we had a guard at the door, and you were supposed to sign in, but we eliminated that in 1996 when Tisch Library opened,” Michalak said. “I’m not sure what the best, secure way of doing it is, and I’m not sure that the library would be the decider of that anyway. There have been discussions [since the door guard system was abolished in 1996], but there have been no decisions.”

Michalak was not previously aware of the Feb. 15 indecent exposure incident until informed during an interview for this article.

“Even with [the public masturbation events], we didn’t have a complete report of what the students were reporting. It’s not our role to be in the middle or to have TUPD report it back to us,” she said. “We heard about the nature and the details of [the public masturbation events] through the Daily.”

With security incidents such as the laptop thefts, students are encouraged to either approach a library staff member or the security guard, who are instructed to contact TUPD immediately, or to call TUPD directly. “Anything that comes to us goes to them,” Michalak said.

For now, Michalak is focusing on reminding students to monitor their belongings and to not leave items unattended.

“That’s something we have to fight against,” she said. “Students feel very safe in the library; they leave for a second and something happens.”

Tufts Dance Program Department of Drama and Dance

presents Acclaimed Guest Artist

GERMAUL BARNES

All Events in

Jackson Dance Lab

MASTER CLASSES Advanced Technique: Tue, Feb 23 4:30-5:45 Beginning Technique: Wed, Feb 24 1:30-2:45

Lecture Demonstration: "The Evolution of Black Dance through the Eyes of Germaul Barnes" Tue Feb 23, 8pm

This residency is funded by The Dance Program, The Office of Institutional Diversity, the Arts, Sciences, and Engineering Diversity Fund, and American Studies.

Space is VERY Limited, Reservations Required for ALL Events: email dance@tufts.edu, or call 617-627-2556

Arts & Living

5

tuftsdaily.com

THEATER REVIEW

‘Legacy of Light’ will be a dark smear on theater company’s record BY

CARYN HOROWITZ | THE CULTURAL CULINARIAN

Another one?

Really?

NAOMI BRYANT

Senior Staff Writer

I

Take a low-budget sitcom about a childless couple. Subtract the canned laughter. Splice in segments of a Lifetime

Legacy of Light Written by Karen Zacarias Directed by Lois Roach At the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through March 13 Tickets from $37 to $40 original movie set in Enlightenment-era Europe, and watch for two hours.

If this sounds like a recipe for boredom, that’s because it is.

Lyric Stage Company’s New England premiere of “Legacy of Light” fails on virtually all fronts. Its plot — if something so nebulous and disjointed can be called that — is a poor attempt at fantasy, split between characters in 18th-century Europe and a couple living in modernday America.

The play alternates between two storylines. During the Enlightenment, female scientist and noblewoman Emilie du Châtelet (Sarah Newhouse) gets pregnant after having an affair with a young poet played by Jonathan Popp. Emilie is 42 years old, and she’s sure she’ll die in childbirth. Unlike Emilie, modern scientist Olivia (Susanne Nitter) can’t

COURTESY LYRIC STAGE COMPANY OF BOSTON

“Legacy of Light” follows characters from the age of the Enlightenment (complete with sword fights). conceive. She and her husband (Allan Mayo Jr.) choose a surrogate mother, Millie (Rosalie Norris), to carry a child for them.

These developments take up the entire first hour of the play. When the show finally breaks for intermission, it’s difficult to identify anything that connects the two storylines. Each plot might have been interesting on its own, but thrown together, they both turn into a boring

CONCERT REVIEW

George Clinton band brings the funk BY

MATTHEW WELCH Daily Staff Writer

Every kind of music translates to live performance in its own way.

Classical music fosters introspection; the best performers lure each listener into him- or herself as the emotions become increasingly subject to the nuances of the piece. Rock and roll, on the other hand, thrives on the unity of the audience as it rises and falls to the whims of the band.

While classical music can drive its enthusiasts to the distilled heights of introversion, and rock can turn a mass of computer programmers into a raging mosh pit, neither can hope to compete with the sheer joy of a dance-fest. Nowhere were the delights of such an event more undeniable than last Friday at the House of Blues, when George Clinton and ParliamentFunkadelic brought the funk back to Boston.

The crowd’s eagerness to dance was evident before the band even took the stage, as members of every imaginable scene, age and race grooved to the pre-show PA music with surprising zeal. Even the wimpiest bass line would send a ripple of impatient pivots and bobs through the audience.

The stage, littered with a massive array of microphones, amps and keyboards, only heightened the fervency of the mood.

When the numerous musicians who compose Parliament finally took the stage, they barely had to play a note for the crowd to explode. Clinton himself was surprisingly absent until the third song of the set. Thankfully, a diaper-clad Garry Shider more than compensated for Clinton’s eccentric stage presence. In the first song, the band revealed how well-rehearsed it was. Long, instrumental jams segued

into ecstatic vocals with an improvisatory energy that projected past the careful arrangement of each passage.

When Clinton triumphantly took the stage during “Undisco Kidd,” the crowd was already dancing too hard to give him its fullest applause. Though Clinton hardly sang during the song, his mere presence on the stage galvanized the group. His skills as a bandleader work in an almost sublime manner; one flick of his wrist was enough to drive a bassist to unprecedented levels of funkiness or coax a renewed intensity from a backup singer. As soon as he arrived, P-Funk’s bandleader spurred the band into a more focused, unified energy that was immediately noticeable as the crowd dug deeper into its jovial boogie.

The intensity of P-Funk’s performance was only matched by its eccentricity. For the uninitiated, the band’s overriding bizarreness was confirmed numerous times throughout the show.

The neon rainbow of Clinton’s hair

mess. One story distracts from the other, and any tension or sense of climax is lost as audience members are constantly forced to reorient themselves.

Those masochistic enough to sit through the show’s last half will discover how these two incongruous plots are ultimately related, but viewers will be more likely to roll their eyes than see LEGACY, page 6

GALLERY REVIEW

Exhibition explores Buddhist, Shinto religious beliefs BY

ANNA MAJESKI

Daily Staff Writer

Japan’s Shinto belief system is not an organized religion, but rather a collection of beliefs and practices cen-

The Way of the Gods: Shinto Shrines and their Art At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through Aug. 1 465 Huntington Ave., Boston 617-267-9300

HOUSEOFBLUES.COM

tered around the natural world and ancestry. Though it was originally not an image-based religion, the Shinto system appropriated Buddhist imagery when this newer belief system first came to Japan in the sixth century and started to communicate visually to its followers. Over time, Shinto and Buddhist beliefs became intertwined; Shinto deities were believed to be manifestations of Buddhist gods. Most Shinto shrines had a sister Buddhist temple, and though the two religions stayed separate, they started to form a symbiotic relationship.

This interconnectedness is explored in an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) titled “The Way of the Gods: Shinto Shrines and Their Art,” which displays a number of beautiful panel paintings highlighting the unique and delicate relationship between Shinto and Buddhism. The panel paintings, all dating from the 14th century, are displayed in a room with large statues of Buddha and Bodhisattva.

Although this combination creates an atmosphere that is truer to the paintings’ original surroundings, it does chop up the flow of the exhibition.

George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic are almost too funky.

see SHINTO, page 7

see PARLIAMENT, page 6

promised myself when I started writing this column two years ago that I would limit how much I talk about the Food Network. I decided that this would not be a forum for me to ramble on about my likes (Ina Garten) and dislikes (Rachael freaking Ray) on a regular basis. When I wrote a column two weeks ago about my devastation over the Food Network not airing on Cablevision in January, I told myself that I had reached my quota for the semester.

If the Food Network was not getting on my nerves so much, maybe I would be able to keep my promise.

Scripps Networks, the Food Network’s parent company, will be launching the Cooking Network, aka Food Network 2.0, on May 31. You would think that the prospect of a second 24-hour food channel would have me jumping for joy, but let me assure you that my feet are firmly planted on the ground.

I found out about FN 2.0 during my usual weekend routine of perusing various blogs and Web sites instead of doing work.

As I surfed from The Huffington Post to The New York Times, I grew more and more annoyed with each click as I read about the new network.

Scripps originally announced plans to launch a second food channel last fall to replace its failing Fine Living Network. The company originally said that the network would focus entirely on kitchen-based programming, meaning the moniker the Cooking Channel would actually make sense. Now, however, Scripps is singing a completely different tune. The Cooking Channel will have actual cooking shows during the day and more competition and narrative shows at night.

Sound familiar? It is pretty much an exact copy of the Food Network’s lineup.

I think that Scripps has seriously missed the mark with its Cooking Network programming by making it FN 2.0 and not a distinct channel. The lineup for the Cooking Network features more shows from Food Network personalities like Bobby Flay and Emeril Lagasse, but their shows are just rehashed versions of their FN 1.0 programs.

Flay, for example, will star in “Bobby Flay Brunch” on FN 2.0 — I really don’t want to spend 30 minutes watching him make blue corn waffles or chili eggs benedict. I used to love watching Flay when “Boy Meets Grill” first started to air, but now, with his five shows on Food Network, his food is not exciting to me anymore. There will also be a host of new shows that are more specialized than any of the shows on Food Network, such as “French Food at Home” and “Chinese Food Made Easy.”

Many of the new shows seem to feature more advanced, complicated recipes.

This is what I think the essential problem with FN 2.0 will be: None of the shows are actually teaching people how to cook. I love the Food Network show “How to Boil Water,” because it actually teaches people the basics of how to prepare a great meal in the kitchen, and host Tyler Florence starts from square one when explaining his recipes.

I hate to say it, but Rachael Ray is the only person who seems to be taking the Cooking Channel idea to heart. Her new hour-long show, “Rachael Ray’s Week in a Day,” will teach viewers how to cook a week’s worth of meals by spending just one weekend day in the kitchen. The show is practical and educational, and will even feature Ray in the grocery store giving shopping tips.

Of course, I will undoubtedly tune in to the new network, and I will most likely find a way to rant and rave about it, but for right now, my feet are still going to remain firmly planted.

Caryn Horowitz is a senior majoring in history. She can be reached at Caryn.

Horowitz@tufts.edu.

THE TUFTS DAILY

6

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

ARTS & LIVING

Script, acting and set bring down ‘Legacy of Light’ LEGACY continued from page 5

applaud this connection.

The show’s heavy-handed statements about science and motherhood, the themes common to both plots, only make it more tedious. The show may as well have a neon sign reading “rationality versus emotion.” It’s like a dentist punching someone in the jaw to remove a tooth.

There’s a cleaner, less invasive, less painful way to go about it.

There are many things that could have saved “Legacy of Light” — a better script being one of them. The play’s best joke is that it is billed as a comedy. There are a few humorous moments, especially between Emilie and her lover Voltaire (Diego Arciniegas), but these gems are buried beneath a desert of trite, relentlessly uncreative dialogue.

The only respite theater-goers have from the awkward and predictable conversations are the alternatively dry and melodramatic monologues. At times, they are addressed to the audience in a kind of pitiful mimicry of something avant-garde. The show demands that viewers suspend disbelief and accept what is presented as Enlightenmentera France as well as the strange fantasy through which both plots are connected, yet it still insists on going all meta-theater on its audience. “Legacy of Light” tries to have its cake and eat it too.

Decent acting could perhaps have salvaged this junk-heap of a show, but unfortunately, only half of the cast is engaging. Newhouse and Arciniegas are truly talented actors; their scenes are by far the most captivating. They imbue the dead script with life, and the wraith they create is far more interesting than the corpse that is the rest of the show. The quality of their performances is closely followed by that of Jonathan Popp, who is truly enthusiastic and has a strong stage presence.

Newhouse, Arciniegas and Popp are the lifeboats on this theatrical Titanic.

But Nitter and Norris drag down the show’s acting. It is difficult to connect with Nitter’s character, who is reminiscent

of a less personable, less savvy, altogether less noticeable Hillary Clinton. Perhaps Nitter was modeling her character on the distant scientist type. If so, she succeeds too well. Olivia’s monologues are about as entertaining as listening to a lecture by a research scientist who hasn’t talked to anyone but the rats he experiments on in over a decade.

Norris’ acting is worse than Nitter’s, only because her character is annoying instead of distant. She simpers around the stage with a half smile that she probably intends to be mysterious. Snapping out of this expression is something of a challenge, though. Her character changes emotions suddenly and jarringly. Norris never completely becomes her character in “Legacy of Light” — she’s always an actress first.

The nail in this play’s coffin is its uninspired set, and the hammer that drives the nail home is its awkward direction.

The show transitions between scenes in epileptic fits, and the set construction, consisting of a chaise lounge, apple tree and sometimes a desk, only makes it more difficult for the audience to follow the changes between storylines. The apple tree is an interesting touch, as it hints at both science and feminine sexuality, but it looks straight-up moldy. This doesn’t keep Voltaire from eating the tree’s fruit. He averages one apple every 30 minutes, getting some serious vitamin C. The most disconcerting part of the set is the very modern door in the center of the stage that looks as if it belongs in a bedroom. Stars and swirling clouds are projected onto the door. This set element is profoundly disconcerting because it looks too modern for the Enlightenmentera plot and too fanciful for the modern-day storyline.

The only saving grace of “Legacy of Light” is that it is more boring than painful. Lyric Stage Company, usually a solid venue for local Boston theater, deviated from its standard method, handing over the stage to a new director. The risk, unfortunately, did not pay off.

COURTESY LYRIC STAGE COMPANY OF BOSTON

“Legacy of Light” drowns in melodramatic acting.

DANCE PREVIEW

Contemporary dancer Germaul Barnes brings African-American dance lecture to Tufts

George Clinton and ParliamentFunkadelic performs favorites at concert PARLIAMENT continued from page 5

was vibrant enough to make a peacock jealous.

Monologues on funk spiritualism were scattered arbitrarily throughout the set, often preceding the appearance of Sir Nose (Carlos McMurray), the pimp-like antithesis of funk who serves as the protagonist in Clinton’s strange story. With the aid of funky grooves and the “bop gun,” Sir Nose turns from a funk-hating square to a dancing fiend.

Even though the act did not add much to the concert musically, it gave the

COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF DRAMA AND DANCE

From today until Wednesday, Feb. 24, Germaul Barnes, a contemporary dance pioneer will be taking up residence at Tufts.

Although Barnes will be at Tufts for only a short amount of time, the famous dancer will be speaking about and demonstrating his plethora of skills for dance students and aficionados.

His lecture-demonstration will focus on not only Barnes’ rise to fame and contributions to dance, but also the history of African-American dance and those who came before him.

Barnes, a winner of the Bessie Award (an award given to the dance performer of the year), has performed in Boston numerous times, most recently at the Institute of Contemporary Art last year.

His lecture will be in the Jackson Dance Lab on Talbot Avenue. Titled “The Evolution of Black Dance through the Eyes of Germaul Barnes,” the lecture starts at 8 p.m. tomorrow. The event is free, but due to limited seating, one must e-mail dance@tufts.edu or call 617-6272556 to make a reservation in order to attend.

MYSPACE.COM

George Clinton can’t hear you; his hair is too loud.

musicians a chance to show off their own personalities and add a humorous element to the show.

One of the highlights of the show was “Aqua Boogie,” a more down-tempo song with an infectious bass line and suitably liquid vocals. This song featured a catchy horn passage, which saxophonist Greg Thomas and trumpeter Bennie Cowan played with impressive athleticism. In the middle, the song broke down into an extended scat solo

by Thomas, who then proceeded to demonstrate his incendiary saxophone licks over the oscillating “wahs” of the rhythm section.

By the second half of the set, P-Funk began to show off its rock-band side.

Clinton left the stage for the performance of “Maggot Brain,” one of Funkadelic’s most popular tracks. While the beginning of Michael Hampton’s solo over the melancholy arpeggios was dynamic and punctual, it quickly devolved into a series of flaccid technical exercises.

After the cohesion of the group’s previous songs, Hampton’s overindulgent solo ruptured the flow of the show.

Thankfully, the next song, a raw, edgy blues burner, was a return to form.

P-Funk rapidly regained its momentum, playing a few more songs with the same level of energy. By the concert’s conclusion, P-Funk was nearly outpacing the audience as it struggled to dance as hard as the band played.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

THE TUFTS DAILY

7

ARTS & LIVING

Exhibition’s works compelling, if sometimes confusing SHINTO continued from page 5

Nonetheless, the lyricism of the painted figures speaks to the similar lines found in the sculptures, and gives a better idea of the overall visual vocabulary of the culture that produced the panel paintings.

The painting entitled “Jizo, the Bodhisattva of the Earth Matrix” illustrates the fusion of Shinto and Buddhist systems.

This painting is composed of panel, ink, color and gold on silk. This image uses a very simple composition: Jizo, the Bodhisattva, is portrayed in full length, floating down on a cloud from his mountaintop paradise to rescue sinners from hell. Around his head is a halo with rays emanating from it, forming a shape reminiscent of the sun. His robes flow behind him, and the sense of movement in the picture is emphasized by the trailing tail of the cloud that is behind him.

The fact that Jizo is a Buddhist deity further underlines the connection between Shinto and Buddhism and the appropriation of elements of Buddhism into the Shinto belief system.

Another work in the exhibition, “Mandala of the Deer of Kasuga Shrine,” also furthers this sense of cooperation between the two religions. Also done with panel, ink, color and gold on silk, it includes a large depiction of the messenger of the gods — a deer. The deer, delicately painted in brown with strong lines and a bright red saddle, takes up most of the panel space, and a tree grows on its back. This tree, a sacred sakaki tree, supports a round mirror, in which various deities important to the Kasuga Grand Shrine, a Shinto temple, are portrayed.

The strong, clear lines of the image emphasize the serenity of the composition. Though the mirror with the deities shown in it is badly damaged, the delicate figures can still be made out. Shinto has obviously taken the idea of religious imagery and used it to its full advantage in a work that delicately proclaims the connection between the deities and the natural surroundings from which they emerge.

One of the most beautiful panel paintings in the exhibition is the “Mandala of

Kasuga Shrine and Kofuku-ji.” The painting is done on silk as well and illuminated with ink, color and gold. The outside of the image is framed in a rich silk fabric, which is then hung on the wall. The painting portrays a Shinto shrine in its topmost portion, surrounded by a rich landscape filled with foliage. The shrine’s associated Buddhist deities are placed above it, and, in the bottom portion, the buildings of the Buddhist temple are not depicted, but instead represented by the important Buddhist sculpture that was housed in them.

The placement of the shrine in a landscape

is important to Shinto belief, since originally, deities were believed to come out of the land they inhabited, be it mountaintop or forest, and briefly occupy places of worship. Likewise, the Buddhist deities associated with the temple are shown in the landscape as opposed to in the temple. The placement of the image of the shrine with the Buddhist sculpture, a metaphor for the Buddhist temple, shows the harmony between the two religions, manifested in a single image.

“The Way of the Gods: Shinto Shrines and Their Art” explores the dynamic

between Buddhism and Shinto in Japan.

The beautiful, though unfortunately damaged, paintings illustrate the connection between two separate religions that share similar values.

Though perhaps a bit lacking in much needed background information, the exhibition still explores an interesting religious dynamic, particularly since, in the Western tradition, different religions could rarely find such a balance. Though the entire story is not told simply through these paintings, they effectively communicate the dynamic of this religious world.

DILYS ONG/TUFTS DAILY

“The Way of the Gods: Shinto Shrines and Their Art” explores interaction between Buddhist and Shinto beliefs and imagery.

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Thurs, Fri, Sat Feb. 18-20 & 25-27, 2010 8:00 PM $7 Tufts ID/Seniors $12 General Public $7 on February 18th $1 on February 25th

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THE TUFTS DAILY KERIANNE M. OKIE Editor-in-Chief

EDITORIAL Caryn Horowitz Grace Lamb-Atkinson Managing Editors Ellen Kan Executive News Editor Michael Del Moro News Editors Harrison Jacobs Katherine Sawyer Saumya Vaishampayan Marissa Gallerani Assistant News Editors Corinne Segal Martha Shanahan Amelie White Jenny White Brent Yarnell Carter Rogers Executive Features Editor Marissa Carberry Features Editors Robin Carol Emily Maretsky Mary Beth Griggs Assistant Features Editors Emilia Luna Alexa Sasanow Derek Schlom Catherine Scott Executive Arts Editor Jessica Bal Arts Editors Adam Kulewicz Charissa Ng Josh Zeidel Michelle Beehler Assistant Arts Editors Zachary Drucker Rebecca Goldberg Niki Krieg Crystal Bui Nina Grossman Laura Moreno Andrew Rohrberger Devon Colmer Erin Marshall Alex Miller Louie Zong Vittoria Elliot Rebekah Liebermann Marian Swain

Executive Op-Ed Editor Op-Ed Editors

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

EDITORIAL | LETTERS

EDITORIAL

Unchecked editing of digital textbooks risky This August, major publishing house Macmillan will introduce new software that allows individual professors to edit digital textbooks. With the software, called DynamicBooks, professors will be able to upload syllabi, notes, videos and related materials to the digital file, but they will also be able to edit specific paragraph content, equations and diagrams. The textbooks will be completely customizable, and Macmillan will not require that professors’ changes and additions be approved by the publishers or the textbook authors.

There are definite advantages to this new model of e-books. The digital textbooks available through DynamicBooks sell for much less than traditional print textbooks, sometimes by differences nearing $100, which is clearly beneficial to students who traditionally face the burden of paying exorbitant amounts for textbooks.

Additionally, the e-books are all stored online, so students can read them from any computer and some mobile devices.

Macmillan also plans take advantage of social media to allow students and professors to collaborate and communicate about the textbook through mediums like Facebook.com and Twitter.com.

These are all advantages related to the switch from print to digital media.

DynamicBooks, however, is going beyond what other publishers, like Pearson

Learning Solutions, have done with e-books. Professors using DynamicBooks will have direct editorial control over the content of the textbook and are not required to cite the sources for the changes they make. Neither the publisher nor the author of the textbook will view or approve the changes individual professors make to the content of the textbook.

Macmillan praises DynamicBooks for being completely customizable and for enabling specific tailoring to students’ courses. However, there are also risks involved in giving such editorial control to individual professors. Many of the textbooks that will be available through DynamicBooks are used in large survey courses in the sciences. The idea of a survey course is to give students a general overview of and foundation in the subject.

Naturally, different universities and different professors already choose to emphasize and teach different material.

However, there is definite value in using textbooks as a standard reference material for all students to confirm what they learn in lecture, especially when different professors teach the same course, because at the very least, all of the students share the information and perspective from the same textbook. Textbooks are carefully written and edited to be as clear, concise and direct as possible in their presentation of mate-

rial. It is helpful for confused students to be able to reference the textbook as a different means of explaining the lecture material.

There is the additional risk that professors may change the text with biased or even false information. Additionally, a professor could accidentally miswrite a definition or make an error in a formula or equation. According to a representative for Macmillan, DynamicBooks rely solely on students, parents and other professors to monitor the changes, so students would suffer the consequences of these errors or biases. Despite professors’ knowledge in the field they teach, they should not be allowed to edit textbook content without review by the publisher or the textbook author.

The field of digital textbooks opens up a huge range of possibilities for ease of use and accessibility, lowering textbook costs and supplementing course material. But given that professors already have numerous other means to reach their students and supplement the textbook material, the benefits of allowing these textbook edits do not outweigh the potential problems that it could cause. Giving individual professors unchecked editorial control over the textbook content jeopardizes the reliability of course material for students.

Professors should be allowed to upload supplemental material, but not to change the actual content of the text.

they’re paid. Clearly she has a biased and uninformed opinion based mostly on her own experience.

Her article articulates a lack of understanding of both the current health care system and the congressional proposals.

While there are certainly some doctors who make more than they should, I don’t think the legislation is suggesting a significant pay cut for doctors. As it now stands, health insurance companies typically have arrangements in which they pay doctors and hospitals less than they would like to charge. For better or for worse, I don’t see how universal health care would change this. The plan isn’t for a complete government takeover of all health care; instead it is to mandate that everyone receive some form of health care plan, in some cases subsidized or sponsored by the government.

This doesn’t mean that doctors would be paid substantially less — health care would still involve the same hospitals, practitioners and insurance companies

operating in a very similar fashion, just serving more customers and with slightly different regulations.

To answer Ms. White’s first question, under the universal health care system doctors will continue to be trained just as they are now. And to respond to her other question, development of “new medicines, vaccines, and cures” is almost completely unrelated to health care reform. In fact, reform of the pharmaceutical industry is another issue that should be addressed, but is beyond the scope of this article. There are plenty of issues affecting doctors that Ms. White should be concerned about, but universal health care is not one of them. If anything, she should be in support of it so that everyone in this country that she so loves can have access to the quality of care that she received.

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ALEX MILLER Editorialists

Alex Prewitt Executive Sports Editor Sapna Bansil Sports Editors Evan Cooper Jeremy Greenhouse David Heck Ethan Landy Daniel Rathman Michael Spera Lauren Flament Assistant Sports Editors Claire Kemp Ben Kochman James Choca Executive Photo Editor Josh Berlinger Photo Editors Kristen Collins Danai Macridi Tien Tien Virginia Bledsoe Assistant Photo Editors Jodi Bosin Alex Dennett Dilys Ong Scott Tingley Anne Wermiel Mick B. Krever Executive New Media Editor

PRODUCTION Jennifer Iassogna Production Director Leanne Brotsky Executive Layout Editor Dana Berube Layout Editors Karen Blevins Adam Gardner Andrew Petrone Steven Smith Menglu Wang Sarah Davis Assistant Layout Editors Emily Friedman Jason Huang Alyssa Kutner Samantha Connell Executive Copy Editor Sara Eisemann Copy Editors Lucy Nunn Ben Smith Ammar Khaku Assistant Copy Editors Katrina Knisely Isabel Leon Vivien Lim Ben Schwalb Executive Online Editor Audrey Kuan Online Editors Emily Wyner Muhammad Qadri Executive Technical Manager Michael Vastola Technical Manager

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR Dear Editor, Upon reading the off the hill published in the Tufts Daily’s Op-Ed section on Feb. 11, 2010 titled, “For the love of doctors and capitalism” (originally from Marshall University’s “The Parthenon”), I was disturbed by what I see as the author’s almost complete ignorance on this topic and the fact that the Daily published it.

Amanda White, the article’s author, expresses her love for the United States and the capitalist system, which leads her to oppose the health care plan. She then explains how much debt doctors generally incur in education (“thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars”) and how hard they typically work. In addition, she makes it known that she has a relative who is a very successful, hard-working doctor and that she recently underwent successful surgery, two experiences she thinks are evidence that doctors deserve what

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Sincerely, Cliff Bargar Class of 2012

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Tuesday, February 23, 2010

9

OP-ED

Take notice! The time is ours!

BY

AMIT PAZ

Neil Young, after the Kent State shootings in 1970, penned the lyrics: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/ We're finally on our own/ This summer I hear the drumming/ Four dead in Ohio.”

At Kent State, four college students were killed by the Ohio National Guard during an anti-war protest. The raw emotion expressed in the song contributed to the growing discontent already bubbling over in the country. Soon, hundreds of thousands of people spilled onto the streets demanding an end to the war. College students nationwide vented their anger by paralyzing universities and marching on Washington.

That was 40 years ago. Neil Young isn’t so young anymore.

The era of spirited engagement which so vividly characterized the ’60s and early ’70s came and went. Which got me wondering: What will we be able to say about our own contributions?

Our generation has been called too complacent and too selfabsorbed to act forcefully. While I am not going to bad-mouth our generation or our way of doing things, I do think that as informed and energetic college students we have largely failed to make ourselves heard when it counts most.

I was motivated to write this piece following Howard Zinn’s passing on Jan. 27. When I heard the news, I decided to read his acclaimed book “A People’s History of the United States” (1980) from cover to cover. As Matt Damon so eloquently puts it in the film “Good Will Hunting” (1997), the book will surely “knock you off your ass.”

Zinn tells the reader that, in his view, the study of history should be used as a kind of protective shield against those who would try to persuade us to fall victim to the great follies of our age — violent racism, colonial paternalism, blind nationalism and unjustified warfare, to name a few. As such, the book is widely different from the average history textbooks we receive during our schooling in that it recounts, in stupendous and unrelenting detail, American history from the eyes of the common man — not, as we are used to, from the perches of government and state views. History seen by the common man is, to use a phrase borrowed by Zinn, catalogued as the mere “natural selection of accidents.”

The point of the book that Zinn unyieldingly reminds us of is that the rights and freedoms which we enjoy today are almost solely the result of rebellious activism. Everything from the Bill of Rights, the gradual right for landless white men to vote, the nominal inclusion of blacks, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, the right to organize, the end of child labor and the 40-hour-long work week have all been products of tireless pushing back against a conservative government prone to preserving the status quo. Government is rarely prompted into action by its own will. It must be brought to the edge of a cliff before it realizes it must choose between its own survival and a degree of compromise. At various times, the ones responsible for presenting the government with this stark option have been the dispossessed, the oppressed, the poor and those who were acting by conviction — agitated farmers, abolitionists, free blacks, women, anti-rent rioters, socialists, teenagers, anti-war protesters, students and the like.

The only thing they have in common is that they were fighting for a better tomorrow.

Today, we have been lulled into believing that significant change can only come through the system while we remain politely unobtrusive. True, legislative change often comes about when the aggrieved party has the chance to sit down with government officials and create a new reality. But the two

MCT

parties rarely ever get the chance to engage without serious provocation from a turbulent public. Though we might not always like to admit it, it is beyond the cries of conspiracy theorists and cynics to say that government is largely made up of and serves the interests of the financial elite, of industry, of business and of commerce above the interests of the masses.

Legislative reform is usually passed when a certain part of the system is on the verge of collapse or when the people simply won’t take it anymore. If the people are not shaking things up, government has no reason to be on the edge of its seat.

Here at Tufts, we pride ourselves on being an institution dedicated to academic learning and active citizenship, but we often miss the mark. Many of us are prone to indulge in deadend debates over partisan differences instead of choosing to assist the neediest people on the home front. Some of us have dedicated time to travel to third-world countries that have been devastated, among other factors, by serial exploitation from thuggish capitalist corporations. Yet when we come back home, we find that our houses are full, our fridges stocked and our backs clothed with the products which these same companies produce. It’s sort of like coming back from a lecture about human rights abuses in an auditorium where the beverage menu included an array of Nestlé products, a company which has a long history of unsavory, inhumane policies.

And while this doesn’t always translate into hypocrisy, it does reflect a certain lack of vigor and commitment. Again, I don’t mean to disparage or criticize and I certainly don’t want to give the impression that the wonderful things we do as a community are somehow irrelevant. Tufts students are, thankfully, more involved than the average college student. But we have lost the nerve to do what it takes to effect real change. We

have forgotten that we even have the power to do so.

Where are our protests? Where is our dedication? Why, for example, at a time of unrestrained greed and irresponsibility, are we not demanding to see where our endowment funds are invested, let alone demanding real answers and swift action from government officials who have barely lifted a finger to try and help millions of Americans? Why do we automatically make excuses and rationalize government decisions such as fighting two wars on a bankrupt economy as millions are losing jobs at home? Why are we more likely to become civically involved by campaigning for, as Helen Keller said, “Tweedledum or Tweedledee” instead of fighting to prevent more house foreclosures or protesting against the unbelievably out-of-touch decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to grant corporations the right to give unlimited funding to political candidates?

Where is our voice?

It is a dangerous time indeed; trust in government is laughably low while at the same time, civic involvement to counteract its appalling unresponsiveness is sluggish as well. Real hope, real change, does not come through one man or one party. It comes from a unity of purpose combined with a dedication to see it through. And we should not be discouraged by starting small, for, as Zinn famously said, “small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

The people, you and I together, must speak! The people must take action! The time is ours.

Amit Paz is a junior majoring in International Relations and political science.

The light on the Hill: A beacon for immigration and education

BY SUZANNE

LIS

The future Class of 2014 is currently doing one of two things: either eagerly perusing the Tufts Class of 2014 group on Facebook.com or anxiously awaiting May 1 and filling out financial aid paperwork. We all went through the infuriating maze of fees, tests and supplementary essays that eventually landed us at Tufts.

However, imagine this: Somewhere in the tangled process, you realize that you weren’t actually born in the United States. Your parents brought you over as a child, and there is no independent method for undocumented children of immigrants to become citizens. Thus, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) papers in your hand are useless, and the prospect of a college education has disappeared.

It sounds ridiculous, but it is the reality that approximately 65,000 undocumented students graduating from high school face every year. Although they have done well in school, contributed to their communities and lived in this country for all of their aware lives, they are being denied funding for a higher education.

These students are undocumented immigrants; if you want to manipulate rhetoric, then the term is “illegal aliens.” They arrived in the United States as the children of immigrants. They grew up feeling American, attending American schools, even forgetting the language of their homeland. When it came time to apply to college and federal financial aid, these students were blocked out of the system.

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, first presented in 2001, was re-introduced in March 2009 by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) to Congress.

The bill would give graduates from U.S. high schools

the opportunity for a conditional path to citizenship.

During a six-year period of temporary residency, they would complete at least two years toward a college degree or two years of military service. They would be eligible for student loans and work study, alleviating much of the financial burden. After meeting the requirements during the six-year period, legal permanent residency could be applied, which, if granted, would eventual grant a faster path to citizenship.

This bill has been introduced in various forms since 2001. Every time, it has spurned controversial dialogue about immigration. As of now, 105 representatives and 32 senators have co-sponsored the bill. However, the attacks on the bill are still substantial.

State universities vehemently oppose the DREAM Act, stating that if undocumented citizens don’t pay taxes, they should not be attending a taxpayer-funded school and paying in-state tuition. There is also concern that the undocumented immigrants would take the spots of legal citizens at these schools. However, few of these claims are well-supported. There are 10 states that allow undocumented immigrants to qualify for in-state tuition, and the provisions of the DREAM Act grant states the authority to determine whether they want to offer in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants. As of now, none of the 10 states have found that legal citizens are disadvantaged by this measure.

On the other hand, undocumented immigrants are disadvantaged by the blatant gap in their educational rights. While they are guaranteed primary and secondary education under the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe, they are abandoned when they seek higher education. Some pay taxes, some don’t; regardless, these students and their families have been working, buying goods and supporting the economy just like the citizens around

them. After their six-year period, they would get jobs, get married, increase their wealth and have American children. Education is a long-term investment; a safeguard against poverty and ignorance.

Unfortunately, the outpouring of support for the DREAM Act has not come from the more pertinent state universities, but from a couple stops down the Red Line: Harvard University. Last year, Harvard President Drew Faust expressed her support for the DREAM Act after a lengthy campaign by Harvard students. In a letter to Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-Mass.), she wrote, “I believe it is in our best interest to educate all students to their full potential — it vastly improves their lives and grows our communities and economy.”

As a school that values its international focus and motto of active citizenship, Tufts University would benefit greatly from its endorsement of the DREAM Act. Tufts does not carry the stigma of a state university, but it should live up to its reputation of tolerance and diversity in supporting the bill. In his 1989 Farewell Address, Ronald Reagan cited John Winthrop’s words of a “city upon a hill,” where, Reagan imagined, “if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” When Charles Tufts picked the property for the university, he dubbed the school a “light on the hill.” These two men echo each other in their words of progress and ascension.

Let us merge their respective visions of immigration and education by supporting the DREAM Act. Suzanne Lis is a freshman who has not yet declared a major. She is the student and academic outreach coordinator for Students at Tufts Acting for Immigrant Rights.

OP-ED POLICY The Op-Ed Op-ed section of the Tufts Daily, an open forum for campus editorial commentary, is printed Monday through Thursday. Op-Ed Op-ed welcomes submissions from all members of the Tufts community. Opinion articles on campus, national and international issues should be 600 to 1,200 words in length. All material is subject to editorial discretion, and is not guaranteed to appear in The Tufts Daily. All material should be submitted by no later than 1 p.m. on the day prior to the desired day of publication. Material must be submitted via e-mail (oped@tuftsdaily.com) attached in .doc or .docx format. Questions and concerns should be directed to the Op-Ed Op-ed editors. The opinions expressed in the Op-ed Op-Ed section do not necessarily represent the opinions of the Tufts Daily itself.

THE TUFTS DAILY

10

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

COMICS

DOONESBURY

CROSSWORD

BY

NON SEQUITUR

BY

MONDAY’S SOLUTION

MARRIED TO THE SEA

www.marriedtothesea.com

SUDOKU Level: Shedding tears while paying your heating bill

LATE NIGHT AT THE DAILY Monday’s Solution

Kerianne: “I found that the banana had the right contour for my face.”

Please recycle this Daily

GARRY TRUDEAU

WILEY

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

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11

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TUFTS HILLEL PRESENTS:

ERIN GRUWELL inspirational and innovative teacher whose story was told in the movie,

Freedom Writers.

When the education system wrote off a class of students, Erin Gruwell inspired them to forego teenage pregnancy, drugs, and violence to become aspiring college students, published writers, and citizens for change. Come hear about her inspirational story and current work with implementing change in classrooms all over the country through the Freedom Writers Foundation.

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FEBRUARY 24, 2010 AT 8PM IN COHEN AUDITORIUM Tickets available at the Cohen Box Office on Tuesday, February 16 at 10AM. Tickets are free but Tufts ID is required for pick up.

Up to 2 IDs per person.

For questions, call 617-627-3242 or visit www.tuftshillel.org.

Erin Gruwell's appearance arranged through Gotham Artists, LLC

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Tuesday, February 23, 2010

THE TUFTS DAILY

Tuesday, February 23, 2010 Around Campus Noontime Concert Noontime Concert at Goddard Chapel February 25, 2010 - Thursday 12:30 PM Tanya Bartevyan, piano A Look at Religions Chaplain`s Table - “A Look at Religions” - February 25, 2010 - MacPhie Conference Room - 5-7PM. Naila Baloch, Muslim Chaplain. “Women in Islam”

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CLASSIFIEDS POLICY All Tufts students must submit classifieds in person, prepaid with check, money order, or exact cash only. All classifieds submitted by mail must be accompanied by a check. Classifieds are $10 per week with Tufts ID or $20 per week without. The Tufts Daily is not liable for any damages due to typographical errors or misprintings except the cost of the insertion, which is fully refundable. We reserve the right to refuse to print any classifieds which contain obscenity, are of an overly sexual nature, or are used expressly to denigrate a person or group. Questions? Email business@tuftsdaily.com.

Gross will advance to CSA individuals

Top swimmers qualify for NCAAs

MEN’S SQUASH

WOMEN’S SWIMMING

continued from page 16

time. It’s a tough loss but I think we all played good squash.”

In the Summers Cup opener against Hamilton on Friday, the third-seeded Jumbos won a tightly contested match, using a strong effort throughout the ladder to come out with a 9-0 victory, though the individual victories were not without drama.

At No. 7, for instance, Leighton went down by two games to freshman Ronald German before winning three straight, including a dominating fourth-game victory by an 11-0 margin. Sophomore Henry Miller additionally went down 2-0 and had to win three straight, while junior Andrew Kim battled back from two straight losses in games three and four to win in five games.

Gross, once again, won in three games, as did Bradley at No. 3 and Taylor at No. 6.

Subranni and Dalury each took their respective matches in four games. The overall team shutout set the tone for what proved to be the Jumbos’ best weekend of squash all year.

“It really came down to fitness,” Dalury said. “The guys put in a lot of work to make sure we were in good physical condition

going into the weekend. We were really able to focus, and at the same time we knew we had to relax because we could do it and just be confident and trust our abilities as a team.”

Tufts also made drastic strides at the individual level, improving on technical aspects that aided the team’s strong showing at Yale.

“Earlier in the season we made a lot of unforced errors, and that really killed us,” Bradley said. “Especially against those two teams, we were just playing our games and making them make the mistakes. At every spot in the lineup we did a great job of that.”

With the regular season finished, the 12-12 Jumbos will now turn their attention to helping Gross prepare for the CSA Individual Championships, to be held on the first weekend in March at Trinity College.

But the pride felt after going 2-1 on the year’s biggest stage will stay with the Jumbos until the start of next year.

“In the last match of the season, everyone realized that if there was ever a time to turn it on that little extra level, now is the time,” Leighton said. “I think everyone understood that and saw it and gave it that little extra effort. It’s great to finish with a win.”

UNC a long shot to make tournament INSIDE NCAA BASKETBALL continued from page 15

now could be cutting down the nets i n March. The only thing one can definitively count on is that there are many peaks and valleys in any team’s quest for a championship.

There is no clear favorite going into this year’s tournament. Last year, people were picking UNC in September to win it all, and the Heels did not disappoint. But this year’s big dance feels wide open.

The Big East is stacked with quality teams, such as AP-ranked No. 4 Syracuse, No. 7 Villanova, No.12 Pittsburgh, No. 11 Georgetown and No. 8 West Virginia. The University of Kansas currently holds the No. 1 ranking, and the Purdue Boilermakers, with their methodical Big-10 style, are flying under the radar at No. 3. UNC’s archrival Duke is sitting at No. 5 and is looking to make a deep run after returning

many of its key players from last year.

There are certain teams that are consistently associated with greatness in college basketball. UCLA, Kentucky and UNC are examples of squads on a level above all other college programs in the country. However, the days in which it was possible for a team to win seven straight championships, as UCLA did from 1967-1973, are over.

Contemporary college basketball is far more competitive across the board.

The unpredictable highs and lows that college basketball programs go through in search of a national title are what make the game compelling year after year. Nobody would have guessed a year ago that Kentucky and UNC would be in their respective positions today.

And no one can predict what surprises the 2011 season will bring. But before we even begin to think about next year, March is almost here, and it is time to let the madness begin.

2010 Winter Olympics Medal Count Tallies accurate as of Feb. 22

Country

Gold

Silver

Bronze

Total

1) United States of America

7

8

10

25

2) Germany

7

9

5

21

3) Norway

6

3

5

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continued from page 16

will have a very successful four years here.

I’m exceptionally proud; I couldn’t have asked for a better meet.”

In the 400-medley relay, the Tufts team of senior tri-captain Meredith Cronin, sophomore Paulina Ziolek, Eacret and sophomore Courtney Adams finished 0.8 seconds off the national “B” cut time.

Cronin also set a new Tufts record in the 100 backstroke, breaking Adams’ school record set last year and placing ninth in the event in a packed pool house.

The Jumbos added NCAA qualifying times in the 200-yard freestyle, with Adams taking seventh place, and in the 800 yard freestyle relay in which the Tufts foursome, comprised of Garvey, Eacret, Adams and Russell, placed sixth.

Russell also took fourth in the 1,000yard freestyle.

On the final day of the competition in the distance events, junior Megan Kono

finished fifth in the 1,650-yard swim, while Russell finished seventh in the same event.

With NESCACs marking the end of the team season, the top Tufts performers will await word to find out if they qualified for the NCAA Championship Meet, which will be held in Minneapolis in March. For those who will not be swimming in NCAAs, the results in Middlebury were a perfect end to the year.

“A lot of school records were set, so everyone came away with a really positive feel for the season,” Drinane said. “Tufts is known for performing really well at NESCACs. We train really hard to have a really successful end of the season at this meet, so I think that the freshmen were a little skeptical going in, but everyone knows that people do well at NESCACs — we have a reputation for always stepping it up at the right time.”

Alex Prewitt contributed reporting to this article.

Americans refuse to play like underdogs OLYMPIC HOCKEY continued from page 16

both in terms of the outcome of these Olympic games and the reputation of international hockey. The round-robin style of the Olympic hockey tournament divides the 12 competing nations into three pools, with the teams competing for one of the top four spots that earn a bye into the next round. The remaining eight teams each must play an additional game to advance to the next round of play for a shot at competing for a medal. While half the teams completed their final game of the first round on Saturday, it was Sunday’s slate that featured all the real gold-medal contenders.

All three of Sunday’s victors — the United States, Sweden and Russia — now occupy the top three spots in the standings, respectively. The other team to earn a bye, Finland, was also featured in action on Sunday, losing 3-0 to the defending-champion Swedes.

But do you notice something a little strange? Conspicuously missing from the top-qualifying teams is none other than the Canadians, the gold-medal favorite heading into the Olympics.

Moreover, the United States, touted as a major underdog prior to the start of the games, is sitting pretty at No. 1. Something is amiss in the hockey world, and there are a whole lot of nervous Canadians right now.

The United States and Sweden were the only two nations to earn the maximum nine points by winning all three of their games in regulation. But with 14 total goals scored compared to Sweden’s nine, the United States grabbed the No. 1 spot, rocking the hockey world.

The real shocker, though, is whom they had to beat to get there.

Few people expected the United States to put up much of a fight on Sunday when they stepped onto the ice against a proud and star-studded Canadian squad. But from the moment the puck was dropped, all of those watching could tell they were in for the game of a lifetime.

Just 41 seconds into the contest, defenseman Brian Rafalski — the oldest player on the American team — fired a shot from the blue line that deflected off Canadian superstar Sidney Crosby and in past goaltender Martin Brodeur.

It took eight minutes, but Canada finally got even on a tip-in from Eric Staal. The tie didn’t last long, though, and just 22 seconds later Rafalski struck once again, taking advantage of a failed clear by Brodeur, his former New Jersey Devils teammate, and potting his fourth goal for the Americans.

An exciting second period saw the

Canadians tie the game up once more, only to see the United States regain the lead at 3-2 going into the second intermission. The stage was set for an epic final period.

In the final stanza, Team USA lived up to its reputation as a young but hard-nosed and fiery squad. At 7:09 of the third period, captain Jamie Langenbrunner deflected a shot from the blue line in past Brodeur on the power play to make the score 4-2 — the assist going to none other than Rafalski.

The Canadians, scrambling to get even, bombarded American goaltender Ryan Miller with shots and non-stop pressure.

Crosby finally broke through with just three minutes remaining, pulling Canada to within one, but Ryan Miller stood tall for the red, white and blue the rest of the way, finishing with 42 saves to Brodeur’s 18.

It was a frantic final few minutes, as the Americans struggled to get the puck out of their zone even before Canada pulled Brodeur with just over a minute to go.

Normally an advantage, this move only hurt the Canadians, as Ryan Kessler displayed incredible hustle and grit, chasing down a loose puck past Canada’s Corey Perry to bat the puck into the empty net for some insurance. With the score now 5-3, the outcome was no longer in doubt. The stadium was silenced. The nation was stunned.

With their remarkable feat, the Americans earned an extra day off, and they now await the result of tonight’s playoff qualifier between Switzerland and Belarus to find out their opponent for tomorrow’s quarterfinal.

As for Canada, it must beat Germany tonight in order to advance. If it does, Russia will be waiting — the matchup that most pundits predicted for the gold medal match.

In Sunday’s other showdowns, Russia triumphed 4-2 over the Czech Republic thanks to a two-goal performance by Evgeni Malkin.

In a repeat of the 2006 gold-medal match, Sweden glided past Finland 3-0, riding the stellar goaltending of Henrik Lundqvist, whose meager two goals against are by far the best of any starting goaltender so far in these Olympics.

Tonight will also pit the Czech Republic and Latvia against each other in a playoff qualifier for the right to face Finland in the next round, while Slovakia and Norway vie for a chance to take on Sweden.

It’s hard to imagine any more drama than we were already privileged to on Sunday, but from the looks of it, things are just getting started. It would be the upset of a century if Canada does not make it past tonight’s playin game, but crazier things have happened.

After all, the United States did just beat Canada, right?

THE TUFTS DAILY

14

SPORTS

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Evening Lecture:

VICTIMS OF TERRORISM Who: SARRI SINGER, co-founder of One Heart, a group which aids, heals, and brings together victims of terrorism.

Singer herself is a survivor of a terrorist attack.

Singer is the daughter of former NJ State Senator Robert W. Singer. She has addressed audiences throughout the world, and we are very excited to have her here at Tufts to teach us about her positive response in the face of hateful acts

When: 8 pm Tuesday, February 23, 2010 Where: Eaton 206

THE TUFTS DAILY

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

15

SPORTS

INSIDE NCAA BASKETBALL

ALEX PREWITT | LIVE FROM MUDVILLE

Kentucky highs and Carolina lows

BY SAM

Unspeakable, unwritten

O’REILLY

Senior Staff Writer

Nearly a year ago, the North Carolina Tar Heels (UNC) were on top of the world. The storied program had just won its fifth national championship — its second out of the last five years.

Senior forward Tyler Hansbrough had completed his mission of bringing his school a title. It was a storybook ending, and perhaps a sign of things to come for one of the strongest basketball programs in the country.

In the world of Kentucky basketball, though, things were very different at the end of last season.

In a place where basketball is revered with an almost-religious fervor, many fans had already forced the sour memories of the season into the dark confines of their minds. The Kentucky Wildcats had failed to make the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 18 years and had not made the Final Four since their last national championship in 1998. For a program that has won seven titles, this failure was a public embarrassment.

Today, the two teams find themselves in very different positions.

The Wildcats are ranked No. 2 overall by the Associated Press (AP) and are viewed as one of the favorites, with March Madness just a few weeks away.

Meanwhile, UNC, with an uncharacteristic and unimpressive 3-9 Atlantic Coast Conference record so far this season, will likely not make the NCAA Tournament, barring a miraculous run though the ACC Tournament.

UNC has lost 10 of its last 13 games, including a 71-67 setback to a mediocre Boston College team on Saturday.

The rise and fall of the UNC and Kentucky programs demonstrate an interesting trend in college hoops: that teams can go fast from one spectrum — champions — to the other — the conference cellar.

One thing that makes college basketball different from the NBA is how difficult it is to win a championship, let alone to create a dynasty. Unlike professional athletes, college players cannot be on the same team for over four years. Furthermore, the best NCAA players tend to leave early so they can begin playing in the NBA. The core of players that makes up a team changes from year to year.

Herein lies a paradox. A team can win a championship if its best players stay for extra time, like Hansbrough and his supporting cast did at UNC, but if they do, much of the younger talent doesn’t get enough playing time to truly improve. On the other hand, if players keep leaving early for the

I

MCT

Freshman phenomenon John Wall has the Kentucky faithful forgetting about a disappointing 2008-09 season in which the Wildcats failed to make the NCAA Tournament.

NBA, the team doesn’t have enough time to gel and learn to play together.

In order to win in the long term, college programs must find the right balance between developing young talent for four years and having players jump to the NBA. And to do that, a college must hire a coach who can both recruit and develop players needed for a title run.

After another abysmal season under coach Billy Gillispie in 2009, Kentucky set out to find a new coach. The school settled on John Calipari, who has become one of the most recognizable coaches in the nation over the last few years after his success at Memphis.

Kentucky immediately saw returns on its investment, as Calipari brought along with him one of the strongest recruiting classes of recent memory.

The 2010 Wildcats are led by freshman point guard John Wall, a dynamic offensive threat — he currently averages 16.8 points and 6.3 assists a game — who is likely to be the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s upcoming NBA draft. He is joined by fellow freshmen DeMarcus Cousins, Daniel Orton and Eric Bledsoe, who were all five-star recruits and will likely be joining Wall in the NBA very soon.

As Kentucky sits on top of the rankings and eyes an eighth national championship, coach Roy Williams’ Tar Heels are likely preparing for an appearance in the NIT Tournament. So much can change in a year.

Then again, in college basketball, so much can change in a single moment — a team that nobody is focusing on see INSIDE NCAA BASKETBALL, page 13

DAILY DIGITS

1 Seed of the U.S. men’s hockey team in the Olympic tournament after a stunning 5-3 win on Sunday over Canada. In Vancouver, the Americans rode a 45-save effort from goalie Ryan Miller and two goals out of nowhere from Brian Rafalski to stun the Canadians and advance to the quarterfinals of the tournament. Thanks to a 3-0 win by Sweden over Finland, the United States will next take the ice on Wednesday against the winner of Switzerland-Belarus, having upset Canada, the heavy gold-medal favorite.

27 Points in the standings accumulated by the men’s hockey team thus far this year, the most by the Jumbos in the NESCAC era. Tufts, which improved to 12-9-3 on the year thanks in part to a dominating 7-2 win on Friday at home against Saint Michael’s, has also accumulated its most number of wins since the 2000-01 season, and the squad’s 23 victories in the past two campaigns are the most in back-to-back years since 1999-2001.

12,490 Career rushing yards for running back LaDainian Tomlinson in nine seasons with the San Diego Chargers. Tomlinson, the most prolific back in San Diego history, was released on Monday afternoon, thanks in large part to his relatively old age of 30 and declining numbers over recent years. Tomlinson, additionally, has rushed for 138 touchdowns since coming out of TCU and has caught another 15 touchdowns through the air.

60.9

12

457

Free-throw percentage shot by the women’s basketball team over the course of last Saturday’s 65-54 overtime loss to Bowdoin in the first round of the NESCAC Tournament.

The Jumbos, who battled back in the second half to tie the game at 50-50, shot just 10-for-17 in the latter 20 minutes, their worst half in which they attempted at least 10 free throws since Jan. 16.

Shots taken by Antawn Jamison in his Cleveland Cavaliers debut on Friday, failing to make a single one. Jamison’s 0-for-12 mark was the worst for any player in his first game with a new team. Since trading for the former Wizards forward, the Cavaliers have dropped three straight (though Jamison did not play in one of them), marking the first time they’ve suffered such a long losing streak in two years.

Senior diver Lindsay Gardel’s score in the preliminaries of the 1-meter event on Friday at Middlebury College in the NESCAC Championships, which broke the Middlebury Natatorium record. Gardel topped a field of eight qualifiers for the finals by almost 55 points. In the final, her 437.95 score was ahead of the closest competitor. Gardel helped lead the Jumbos to a fourth-place overall finish at the Championships.

told myself I wasn’t going to write about it. I told myself that, when Tiger Woods finally emerged from his self-inflicted divot and addressed the media about his various transgressions, I would keep my opinions to myself. After all, who am I to condemn one of the most dominant athletes of my time, a person who’s inspired millions of people and made even more in dollars?

I told myself that I should be busy having a good time in Vancouver, enjoying the adventurous mountains, glittery snow and curling rinks that The Tufts Daily sent me to report on. Rather than disrupt the trip of a lifetime, I owe it to myself to ignore all of this brouhaha surrounding Woods’ press conference.

I told myself that this was a touchy subject, something so many columnists have addressed over the past few days.

Everyone has their opinion about Woods, ranging from the volatile and angry to the sympathetic and encouraging.

I told myself that I wasn’t going to write about it.

So I’m not going to.

I’m not going to lament about how uninspired his speech was, how he took methodical pauses between his words that nearly lulled me to sleep. At a time when Woods needed to present himself as an upstanding citizen, one who can reach down and relate to the common man and tug on some heartstrings, Woods instead remained up on his perch, peering down with a barrage of clichés about how “sorry” and “selfish” he was.

I’m not going to say how badly I want to believe Tiger that he is going to change. Everyone deserves a second chance, even the most horrific of adulterers. I want him to return to the golfing form he showed on the 16th hole at the 2005 Masters, at a time when he was only an athlete and not a public figure plastered across tabloids and Web sites. He needs help and, rightfully so, he’s seeking it out. I can only hope that it somehow tames the Tiger back into the cage.

I’m not going to talk about how disappointed this has made me, that someone who seemed above the glamour and glitz of Hollywood athletics could fall so far.

Before Thanksgiving, Woods’ private life was just that — private. Now look what happens when the mightiest and holiest of all athletes falls into the gutter amid a car crash, rumors of domestic abuse and a cheating scandal. Photographers followed his wife, they stalked out the schools of Tiger’s children, the latter being over-the-line and unacceptable.

Of course, it comes with the territory of being so famous, that the public will want to know when something detrimental happens, because gossip is in our society’s DNA. But why give the masses anything to talk about to begin with?

I’m not going to tell my readers how this scandal shocked me to my very core.

This was a man whose story was perfect.

Biracial son and devoted father bond on links en route to son becoming arguably the greatest golfer of all time. Father passes away, bringing out only emotion anyone has seen in son for years. The CBS movie writes itself. Maybe, though, it’s more interesting this way, a soon-tobe redemption story that will play better with the public than your run-of-themill happy ending. But this isn’t fiction.

This is a man’s life we’re publicizing.

I’m not going to explain how Tiger single-handedly made me pay attention to golf. I’m not going to discuss his pathetic excuse — that he worked hard his whole life and thought he deserved temptation. I’m not going to praise him for recognizing how he let millions of fans down, as well as his loving family.

I’m not going to wonder why questions were not asked at the press conference.

I’m not going to criticize Woods for any of this.

Because it’s his life, and I told myself I wouldn’t write about it.

Alex Prewitt is a sophomore who has not yet declared a major. He can be reached at Alexander.Prewitt@tufts.edu.

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INSIDE Inside NCAA Basketball 15 Live from Mudville 15

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MEN’S SQUASH

Jumbos close season with great performance at Summers Cup BY

ALEX PREWITT

Daily Editorial Board

Before this weekend’s threematch slate in the Summers Cup at the College Squash Association (CSA) Team Championships, members of the men’s squash team told themselves that their showing would determine the overall success of the season.

If the Jumbos’ historic showing in New Haven, Conn. at Yale University was any indication, this year’s campaign was one for the ages.

Thanks to a 7-2 win over George Washington University (GW) in the final match of the three-day event, Tufts matched the program record for most wins in a season of the past 10 seasons with 12, and solidified a No. 19 ranking in the latest CSA national poll. More importantly, though, the Jumbos closed out the regular season on a winning note.

“To come out and beat GW was, I think, very impressive,” senior co-captain Zach Bradley said. “I definitely think this weekend was a success for us. It was a nice way to go out.”

In the 19-20 playoff game against the Colonials, the Jumbos used victories in the top four ladder spots to clinch a No. 19 national ranking, surging past a tough GW squad that had previously rolled over a solid Stanford unit and had come close to upsetting Middlebury. The win was thanks in large part to the efforts of junior Alex Gross.

Playing at the No. 1 spot against Colonial freshman Omar Sobhy, Gross battled back from a 2-1 overall deficit to win consecutive games

by 11-5 scores. After taking the first game 12-10, Gross promptly fell behind after dropping the second and third sets by 11-6 and 11-7 margins, respectively. But in stealing the match from Sobhy, Gross set the tone for the Jumbos’ victory, though Tufts hardly cruised from there on out.

Six of the nine matches went into at least four games, with both senior John Subranni at No. 2 and first-year Sheldon Taylor in the No. 6 slot coming back from being down 1-0 against their respective opponents to take their overall matches in four sets.

Bradley, though, had little trouble dispatching senior Matthew Grossman in three sets, allowing just 14 aggregate points en route to his third win of the weekend.

Junior Ben Rind, who, after struggling to a 13-11, first-set win over freshman Player Haynes, ceded only three points the rest of the way in his three-game victory at the No. 4 position. Senior Scott Leighton also completed an undefeated slate at the Summers Cup after winning in four games at No. 7.

“I think we were prepared for a tough battle,” Leighton said. “We didn’t really know GW’s style, so we weren’t sure how things would match up, but I think because of that we were more focused. It was maybe the most decisive victory of the season. All weekend we were really focused and played well.”

The Jumbos were dropped to the 19-20 match against GW thanks to a grueling 5-4 loss to Amherst on Saturday in a rematch of the Lord Jeffs’ 6-3 win on Feb. 6. This weekend, Amherst placed junior

INSIDE OLYMPIC HOCKEY

ALEX DENNETT/TUFTS DAILY

Junior Alex Gross and the Jumbos held on to their No. 19 ranking with a 2-1 weekend at the CSA National Championships.

Andrew Kriete, someone who had not played much this year, in the No. 4 slot, a move that bumped the Lord Jeffs’ ladder down one spot and surprised the Jumbos.

“It was very impressive considering everyone on our team at the bottom was playing someone who usually played one spot higher,” Bradley said. “It should have been a more lopsided victory for them, if anything.”

Still, with its shuffled lineup, Tufts managed to take Amherst to the brink, nearly taking the Summers Cup title thanks to

another dominating performance from Gross, who powered past junior Brian Warner to a threegame victory.

At the No. 3 slot, Bradley also won in three games, as did Rind at No. 4.

Leighton took sophomore Matthew Arnold to four games, dropping the third set 11-9 before winning the fourth 11-7 to capture the victory.

However wins in the No. 8 and No. 9 matches for Amherst gave the Lord Jeffs their 12th win of the year.

“There were better individual performances against Amherst than the last time we played them,”

senior co-captain Max Dalury said.

“Guys were just really focused. It would have been great to finish off our season on such a high note against a team we’ve had such contentious matches with.”

“It’s not always about the victory for us; sometimes it’s just about the effort we put in,” Leighton added.

“I think there was a sense in the air that things would be a lot closer.

Everyone realized that this was at nationals, so if there was ever a time to put in the effort, now was the see MEN’S SQUASH, page 13

WOMEN’S SWIMMING

Four records broken en route to fourth-place finish at NESCACs

BY JESSE

WEINBERG

Senior Staff Writer

Going into the NESCAC Championships, the women’s swimming team’s goal was to WOMEN’S SWIMMING AND DIVING NESCAC Championships at Middlebury, Vt., Friday-Sunday 1. Williams 2. Amherst 3. Middlebury 4. Tufts 5. Colby

MCT

U.S. center Ryan Kesler, left, and teammate Zach Parise celebrate after Kelser’s diving, empty-net goal with 45 seconds remaining sealed the United States’ 5-3 upset over Canada in Olympic hockey action on Sunday.

U.S. hockey team sets miracle in motion BY

EVAN COOPER

Daily Editorial Board

Forget the Winter Classic.

Forget the Miracle on Ice. And definitely forget the “Mighty Ducks” (1992-1996) movies. This past Sunday was, quite possibly, the single greatest day of hockey you are ever going to see.

Whoever is in charge of Olympic hockey scheduling is some kind of genius.

In the afternoon, it was the Czechs and Russians in the battle for Eastern Europe. In prime time, the United States and Canada were squaring off in the ultimate continental grudge match. Then, after most of the East Coast had gone to bed, Sweden and Finland were dueling in a rematch of the 2006 Torino gold medal game.

It just doesn’t get better than that.

A lot was at stake this weekend, see OLYMPIC HOCKEY, page 13

1954 1376 1146 1070.5 936

match its third-place finish last season — the team’s best-ever finish in the 10-year history of the event — and to best the conference opponents who dealt Tufts its worst dual-meet record since the 1999-2000 season.

And while the Jumbos didn’t quite meet that standard, taking fourth place at this year’s meet, they performed more than admirably, breaking four school records, posting six NCAA national “B” cut times and accumulating 1070.5 overall team points.

Williams College continued its domination in NESCAC swimming, winning its 10th NESCAC championship and finishing well ahead of next-closest competitors: Amherst, Middlebury and Tufts, who placed second through fourth, respectively.

“There was not a bad swim in the entire weekend for us,” senior tri-captain Joanna Drinane said.

“I really couldn’t have anticipated

this. I knew people would do well and I knew people were aiming for “B” cuts, but seeing it all coming together was outstanding.”

The Jumbos were led by a number of strong individual performances, most notably from senior All-American Lindsay Gardel, who won the 1-meter diving event.

Gardel broke the Middlebury Natatorium record in the preliminaries with a score of 457, topping a field of eight qualifiers by over 50 points. In the finals, Gardel edged Middlebury sophomore Meagan Collins 437.95 to 419.6 en route to her first conference title.

Gardel also finished in fourth place in the 3-meter event, an impressive feat given that she suffered a strained back Friday night and was unable to bend over to dive the following day. But the senior fought back, ultimately completing her final dive.

“We weren’t sure whether or not I was going to compete, but I kind of felt like I should finish out my last championship meet,” Gardel said. “It was disappointing because I didn’t do as well as I should have. I didn’t think it was worth not doing; it’s my last championship meet, so I felt it was worth at least competing ... I didn’t want to just quit.”

Sophomore Kelly Flanagan also had an outstanding showing in the 3-meter dive in her first championship meet, narrowly

missing out on the finals after finishing 10th in the preliminaries, over 40 points out of the top eight.

In the pool, sophomore Valerie Eacret was the conference runner-up in the 50-yard butterfly, finishing less than a half second behind Williams sophomore Logan Todhunter and improving on her own school record set at the NESCACs last year.

First-year Christine Garvey set the Tufts record in the 200yard butterfly, breaking the 20-year-old mark set in 1990

by Maureen Monahan (LA ’91), and earning 11th place in the process. Freshman K.J. Kroetch broke the Tufts record in the 50-yard backstroke with a time of 28.38 seconds, surpassing Michelle Caswell’s (LA ’09) four-year-old record. Kroetch finished in seventh place, while sophomore Katie Russell also swam an NCAA “B” qualifying time in the preliminaries of the 500-yard freestyle.

Such efforts from the youth on the Jumbos’ roster, according to Drinane, helped Tufts’ tremendous showing.

“It’s really important for everybody to step up, and I think it’s a great meet for the freshmen to show what they’ve got,” she said.

“It’s hard to adjust to swimming in college with all of the changes that happen when you get here. I think this showed them that they see WOMEN’S SWIMMING, page 13