The Tufts Daily - Friday, March 11, 2022

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INDEPENDENT

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T HE T UFTS DAILY

VOLUME LXXXIII, ISSUE 30

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MASS.

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Friday, March 11, 2022

Faculty Senate hears presentation on professors’ compensation

Somerville rolls out city boards and commissions diversification initiative

by Olivia Field

Assistant News Editor

NATALIE BROWNSELL / THE TUFTS DAILY

Ballou Hall and Goddard Chapel are pictured on Jan. 31.

by Skyler Goldberg Assistant News Editor

Tufts administration and faculty are reviewing policies for faculty compensation and promotion, with a focus on hiring and retaining talented faculty members. Mike Howard, the executive vice president of Tufts, and Kim Ryan, vice president for human resources, delivered a presentation on the topic to the University

Faculty Senate at its February meeting.

Anne Mahoney, Senate secretary and senior lecturer in classical studies, explained what prompted the Faculty Senate’s discussion of retention in an interview with the Daily.

“We’ve been thinking about [faculty] retention for a long time.

It’s hard to keep good faculty. There are so many other places that faculty can go,” Mahoney said. “And

for some disciplines, for example, you can make a lot more money in a nonacademic job. Veterinarians, for example, can make much more money — and sometimes with less stress — in private practice than they’re going to make as professors at the veterinary school.”

The cost of living in Boston has also presented a barrier to faculty hiring and retention, as

“With Massachusetts a national leader in vaccinating kids, combined with our robust testing programs, it is time to lift the mask mandate in schools and give students and staff a sense of normalcy after dealing with enormous challenges over the past two years,” Baker said in the announcement.

According to vaccination data from the New York Times, 78% of all Massachusetts residents ages 12 to 17 and 47% of residents ages 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated, making the state’s population one of the most vaccinated in the U.S. Colleges and universities were not included in Baker’s Feb. 28 announcement. However, in a letter sent Jan. 28 to presidents of public and private colleges and universities in the state, Massachusetts Secretary of Education James Peyser urged them to ease restrictions on an accelerated timeline.

“Colleges and universities should accelerate their efforts to transition back to ‘near normal’ conditions, which include focus-

ing on individuals who manifest COVID symptoms and test positive for COVID, and especially those who are particularly at-risk for serious illness and hospitalization,” Peyser wrote. “Along with relaxation of strict protocols, must be active, supportive communication and teaching about how to engage within their community safely.”

On top of Baker’s appeal to colleges and universities, Medford and Somerville have each revoked their indoor masking requirements in recent weeks. Tufts, for its part, has remained consistent in its mask requirement for indoor public spaces. The university also updated its isolation protocols on Feb. 28 so that students must test out of isolation rather than being released on day five if they are asymptomatic.

In his letter to college and university presidents, Peyser also encouraged colleges to increase investment in mental health services on campus. According to the letter, these services are needed in

see RETENTION, page 2

Tufts to maintain its mask mandate as Medford, Somerville, Mass. ease theirs

by Fernando Cervantes Jr. Assistant News Editor

Tufts will continue its mask mandate despite the state of Massachusetts dropping its mandate for K-12 schools and Medford and Somerville eschewing their mandates entirely.

In an email to the Daily on March 8, University Infection Control Health Director Dr. Michael Jordan explained the university’s current position on masking.

“Currently we are experiencing a high positivity rate on the Medford/Somerville/SMFA campus,” Jordan wrote. “As a result, we are not in position to relax masking requirements at this time on the Medford/Somerville/ SMFA campus, but we are hopeful that positivity rates will continue to decline and that we will be able to relax our policies in the near term.”

Governor Charlie Baker announced on Feb. 9 that schools in the state will no longer require masks beginning Feb. 28.

see MASKS, page 2

Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne recently launched an initiative to diversify city boards and commissions in the Somerville city government. In an effort to make them more inclusive, the city will reevaluate the selection and application process for positions on boards and commissions.

“If we want to live up to our values of equity and inclusivity, we need to break down those barriers so that our boards and commissions are representative of the wonderful diversity in our community,” Ballantyne wrote in a statement announcing the boards and commissions diversification plan.

Meghann Ackerman, deputy director of communications for the City of Somerville, elaborated on the phases and timeline of the initiative.

“This process has three phases: making the recruitment process more inclusive, reviewing the appointment process, and addressing barriers that prevent people from serving,” Ackerman wrote in an email to the Daily. “The full plan is expected to be rolled out over the next few months.”

Inclusivity and engagement with the community are core tenets of Ballantyne’s administration.

“Mayor Ballantyne is focused on inclusivity, equity, and fostering an environment where there can be progress for all,” Ackerman wrote.

Ackerman explained the importance of ensuring that city boards and commissions are made more inclusive.

“Serving on boards and commissions is a way for residents to be civically involved and to help shape policy, so it’s important that the membership of our boards and commissions reflects

the diversity of our community,” Ackerman wrote.

The initiative is a response to significant barriers that currently exist for prospective city board members.

“We already know about some barriers, including language, lack of childcare, and the timing of meetings, that can make it difficult or impossible for some residents to join,” Ackerman wrote.

According to Ackerman, more diverse boards and commissions not only help to better represent the community, but they also allow for a more diverse set of voices to shape the policies enacted by Ballantyne’s office.

“More diverse membership on boards and commissions brings more diverse views and experiences,” Ackerman wrote.

Ackerman added that city policies are enhanced when these types of initiatives are enacted.

“We get better outcomes when more voices are involved. People have unique lived experiences that can help shape more inclusive and equitable policies,” Ackerman explained.

The work to ensure equity and inclusion in Somerville local government will not stop here. As the program is rolled out over the next few months, the mayor’s office will continue collecting resident feedback to improve future equity and inclusion projects, according to Ackerman.

Though this project is specifically targeting new members of government and barriers to entry, its effects will help to address broader equity issues.

“Boards and commissions have sometimes served as gateways to residents getting involved in local government in other ways,” Ackerman noted. see CITY BOARDS, page 2

NICOLE GARAY / THE TUFTS DAILY

Somerville City Hall is pictured on March 12, 2021.

FEATURES / page 3

ARTS / page 4

OPINION / 7

Students respond to admin’s lack of response to Ukraine

Yay for Ye: A review of “jeen-yuhs”

Social media poses digital dangers

NEWS

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FEATURES

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ARTS & POP CULTURE

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FUN & GAMES

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OPINION

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SPORTS

BACK

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THE TUFTS DAILY | News | Friday, March 11, 2022

THE TUFTS DAILY Alexander Janoff Editor in Chief

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Faculty Senate discusses need to improve faculty retention RETENTION

continued from page 1 Ellen Pinderhughes, faculty senator and Eliot-Pearson professor of child study and human development, emphasized at the Faculty Senate meeting.

The university’s failure to increase faculty’s salaries proportionally with the rise in cost of living “has resulted in pay that … leaves Tufts vulnerable to faculty being — appropriately, through my lens — recruited to other institutions,” Pinderhughes said.

There was little faculty involvement in conversations about hiring and retention prior to the establishment of the Faculty Senate in spring 2017. Faculty members hope to become more involved in setting policies for faculty compensation now that the Faculty Senate exists.

“The faculty of the university as a whole have only really been able to come together and discuss things in the last five years since we had a senate,” Mahoney said.

In her presentation to the Senate, Ryan described the goals of the university’s merit-based faculty compensation policy.

“First and foremost, it’s really to attract and motivate talent,” Ryan told the University Faculty Senate.

“And what I mean by that is … that we have a competitive rate [of compensation] … for people to join the university.”

Mahoney acknowledged that the university sometimes struggles to offer competitive salaries to fac-

ulty with job prospects in nonacademic fields.

“We don’t always have the resources to pay as much as we’d like to and as much as we think we should,” Mahoney said. “We try to stay close to the market, but it can be hard since again, [with] engineering or biology or veterinary medicine or human medicine, the market is so much broader than just what other colleges are doing.”

Ryan explained that at Tufts, decisions about hiring are made at the discretion of the relevant academic department, and decisions about salaries are made by the deans of the individual schools that make up the university.

Mahoney said that most universities make hiring decisions at the departmental level because expertise in the relevant discipline is needed to determine which candidate is the most qualified. Tufts is unique in that salary decisions are made by the deans of the individual schools rather than by the central administration.

“Tufts is quite decentralized.

Harvard has a similar structure. …

But at other schools — the schools where I was a student or where I’ve had instructor jobs — things are much more centralized. The deans are less powerful, and more decisions are made centrally,” Mahoney told the Daily.

Mahoney said that there are advantages to this decentralized approach.

“Advantages are that decision-making is closer to where things happen,” she explained. “If something needs to be done in [the School of] Arts and Sciences, we don’t have to coordinate with central administration, we don’t have to coordinate with the provost or the vice president for finances or any of that stuff. We just do it. Dean Glaser and his team do what needs to be done.”

There are also disadvantages of decentralization, though, and Tufts is actively considering a move away from the decentralized model.

“If you’re not careful about it, you end up with a bunch of different schools all running off in different directions, and nobody’s looking at the big picture,” Mahoney said. “When times are good, when there are good returns on the endowment, when enrollments are healthy, [the decentralization] doesn’t matter that much because things just flow along smoothly. In times of crisis, things need to be a bit more centralized.”

Senate President Jette Knudsen, a professor of policy and international business at The Fletcher School, expressed concern at the February senate meeting that there is little transparency under the decentralized model about how faculty salaries and promotions are determined.

Mahoney later elaborated to the Daily that Knudsen has repeatedly received raises without knowing the criteria that determine

when and by how much her salary was increased.

Ryan replied to Knudsen’s concerns.

“There certainly is a gap in faculty expectations … and guidelines for merit increases, compensation, promotion and tenure,” she acknowledged. “This is something that [Vice Provost] Kevin [Dunn] and I are going to tackle in the provost’s office. … Actually, Mike Howard and I have also had a discussion with [University President] Tony [Monaco] about it.”

Mahoney explained to the Daily how salaries are currently determined: Nontenured faculty such as full-time lecturers generally receive a standardized salary set in their contracts. However, department chairs have discretion to determine tenured professors’ salaries based on the work they publish, their teaching ability, their course enrollment and their collegiality toward colleagues, among other factors.

Course evaluations play only a small role in salary decisions, Mahoney said, because research indicates that they reflect students’ implicit biases.

“This is not just a Tufts thing; this is universal,” Mahoney said.

“Female faculty get comments about how cute and motherly they are. Male faculty get comments about how brilliant they are. And don’t even get me started [on] faculty of color, who also tend to get slammed in course evaluations.”

Ballantyne admin addresses barriers to entry in city government CITY BOARDS

continued from page 1 Somerville City Councilor Kristen Strezo attested that the work done on city boards and commissions is a vital component of the Somerville government.

“As someone who has served [Somerville] for years as a Commissioner, including two terms as a commission chair, I know about the devotion and care and many hours of work that so many commissioners

put forward,” Strezo wrote in an email to the Daily. “I will always fight to ensure our commissioners are receiving the support they need to serve Somerville and I applaud Mayor [Ballantyne’s] commitment to further support their work.”

City boards and commissions work closely with members of the City Council to ensure that policy is enacted efficiently and effectively for Somerville residents.

These goals are reflected in Ballantyne’s 100-day agenda that, according to the City of Somerville website, “is designed to take on the most pressing issues facing Somerville, deliver on community priorities, strengthen basic services that impact daily quality of life and establish the practice of applying an equity lens to all City actions.”

Ballantyne plans to roll out other programs that also address issues of equity and justice in

Somerville, including the Voices of Somerville 2022 survey, which will survey Somerville residents from all backgrounds about COVID-19 and other issues impacting the city.

The mayor will also work with the Department of Racial and Social Justice to “advance the City’s commitment to eliminating institutional and structural racism and its intersections with other forms of oppression,” according to the City of Somerville website.

Case numbers must go down before COVID-19 restrictions ease on Medford/Somerville campus, says university

MASKS

continued from page 1 order to address the anxiety and depression exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Colleges should continue to increase their investments in mental health services to address the widespread issues of anxiety and depression that have been exacerbated by the challenges of the past two years,” Peyser wrote.

Looking to the future of mask mandates at Tufts, Jordan discussed what parameters would be needed to lift these across all campuses.

“Cases on the Medford/ Somerville campus need to decline substantially before any consideration to easing restrictions can be entertained,” Jordan wrote, “On the other Tufts campuses, such as Grafton and Boston Health Sciences, where the cases are very low, we can consider easing restrictions.”

ELIN SHIH / THE TUFTS DAILY

The face covering requirement poster inside Tisch Library is pictured on Feb. 26.

tuftsdaily.com

Features

Tufts students express disappointment by university response to war in Ukraine

by Miriam Vodosek and Lars Kirchhoff Contributing Writers

“Tufts, speak up! Stop the war!” chanted a crowd of Tufts students, faculty and other community members during a rally at Mayer Campus Center last Wednesday, March 2. They gathered to show their support for Ukraine and to express their disappointment in the Tufts administration’s response to the war, hoping to prompt action.

Artem Dinh, a junior, has been at the forefront of the student response to the war in Ukraine at Tufts. Dinh, who is Ukrainian and Vietnamese, feels there has been a lack of support and activism at Tufts, which led him to attend rallies at other universities in Boston.

“I was kind of disappointed in Tufts in general, so I was spending my time … helping colleges where it could make a difference, colleges where there was a movement already,” Dinh said.

Along with other students, Dinh created the informational Instagram account @tuftshelpukraine and compiled a website with information on the war in Ukraine that lists resources to educate and support. Dinh also joined together with other Ukrainian and Russian students, in addition to other Tufts students and alumni, to rally to push the administration at Tufts to take action.

Two days following the rally, on March 4, the university administration sent an email to the Tufts community.

“We write today in one voice to express our solidarity with the people of Ukraine and to express our deepest concern for those impacted by the tragedy of war unfolding there. Our hearts go out in particular to the members of our community whose families and loved ones are directly in harm’s way,” the statement read.

Some students, like Dinh, feel the statement could have come earlier and gone further in its support. “[Tufts was] one of the last colleges in Boston to make a statement, which is a shame for the school in general,” Dinh said.

Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, both released statements to their student bodies on Thursday, Feb. 28.

“For Tufts, it took eight days, and it took a 100-person rally for them to actually speak up. It took us screaming and crying, ‘Please Tufts do something!’” Dzheveira Karimova, a first-year who organized the rally with Dinh and others, said.

Karimova studies international relations at Tufts and is a Russian citizen; her entire family currently lives in Russia.

“So many of us are struggling to wake up every day. We’re struggling to not only go to our classes, just every day checking your phone,” Karimova said. “[My friends are] checking whether their cousins, their aunts, their friends or grandmothers [are] alive. … It takes a toll on you. It takes a toll on you and knowing that everything that your family has worked for is just destroyed, and you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

In an email to the Tufts administration, Dinh and Karimova, along with their fellow student Eulasha Tisnovsky, expressed their disappointment in the Tufts administration’s response. They also proposed to work together with the administration on providing resources

3 Friday, March 11, 2022

Koloris Wu Kolumn

What’s more needed than ‘protecting ourselves’ Content warning: This column discusses human trafficking. he city Xuzhou is a center of transportation in eastern China and a major city in the Jiangsu Province. However, with the exposure of the Xuzhou Feng County incident on Jan. 28, it is worth considering the impact of human trafficking on its sizeable population.

The incident came to light from a sequence of videos of a woman with a chain around her neck that was taken by a man in the rural area of Feng County.

Before the video went viral on Tiktok (known in China as Douyin), there was already concern about human trafficking in rural China.

The incident sparked outrage on the internet at once, but netizens sadly found that the government of Feng County released a statement trying to justify the wrongdoing with the woman’s reported mental illness.

Related speech was quickly censored, even more strictly as the incident fermented under the ongoing Chinese Spring Festival and 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. This intersection of national joy and glory with governmental suppression is an interesting one.

It directed the state media’s reporting — while the former celebrations were seen on a daily basis on the CCTV News Broadcast, the Xuzhou incident had only the internet as its limited opinion field.

As for myself, I have been intentionally avoiding delving into this heartbreaking incident from the beginning.

Certainly, no single woman can be indifferent to it, but my particular escapism to the horrors of this incident comes from an unwillingness to relate to the pain. Moreover, I feel it is easier to know only the result without getting enmeshed in the process.

However, my mother, after seeing the news, expressed her worries about letting me travel alone. She solemnly warned me that I must “protect myself” whenever I go out, because the human trafficking victim in Xuzhou could have been me — it could have been anyone.

While self-protection is necessary, what is more needed are stronger penalties for criminal gangs guilty of human trafficking and more severe sentences for the sale of human beings, which currently is a maximum of three years in prison in China — a lighter punishment than that for purchasing an endangered wild animal.

The country should also conduct fundamental reform of corrupt government personnel, as well as educate people from a young age instead of pretending everything is fine by muting speech.

As for ourselves, we should not be blind to social issues like this. It is important to acknowledge not just the success when a girl gets a medal around her neck but also the abuse when another girl gets chains around hers.

T MINA TERZIOGLU / THE TUFTS DAILY

Tufts community members gather and walk around campus to rally in support of Ukraine on March 2. to students to cope with the current conflict.

Both Dinh and Karimova felt that they did not receive a sufficient response to that email and that the administration did not address their specific questions.

“They basically copy-pasted the same thing they said in their original email,” Karimova said, comparing the response they received to the administration’s statement on Friday, March 4.

Karimova noted that Tufts’ lack of action is particularly frustrating considering the school’s wealth of resources.

“It’s so frustrating seeing how inactive the school has been because it does have a huge alumni network. [Tufts] does have huge connections that they can use to advocate against this,” Karimova said.

Dinh also emphasized that Tufts should increase their effort to educate the community.

“If we cannot educate the student body about what’s going on, how are we expecting them to take actions if the administration is not … able to make any sort of a statement that’s educating that community?” Dinh said.

In an email to the Daily, Patrick Collins, Tufts’ executive director of media relations, wrote on behalf of James M. Glaser, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, as well as Kyongbum Lee, dean of the School of Science and Engineering.

The Daily sent a set of specific questions to Dean Lee and Dean Glaser asking, for example, if the university plans to make academic flexibility more available to affected students, or if they plan to widen their outreach from only focusing on Ukrainian citizens attending Tufts to other students that have less direct ties to the conflict but are nonetheless affected by it. The response sent by Patrick Collins, which was attributed to Dean Lee and Dean Glaser, echoed the prior email the administration had sent to the wider Tufts community.

“While student needs will vary, we want to make sure impacted students know we’re here for them and that we want to do everything we can to ensure that they are able to continue to pursue their education at Tufts,” Glaser and Lee wrote. “We wanted people to know that the university leadership — the president, all deans, and other university leaders — are unified in this commitment.”

Andrew Shiotani, director of the International Center at Tufts, wrote in an email to the Daily that the I-Center has been reaching out to students at Tufts impacted by the war in Ukraine to offer support and are putting in place longterm strategies to help affected students.

Those plans include requesting emergency grants for Ukrainian students on F-1 or J-1 student visas from the Institute of International Education. The I-Center also offers assistance for students applying for Temporary Protected Status from the Department of Homeland Security, which has recently been extended to Ukrainian nationals.

“TPS provides temporary US legal status and work authorization to those who cannot return home due to natural disasters or conflict in their home countries,” Shiatoni wrote.

According to Shiotani, broadening the scope of the I-Center’s outreach to all Tufts community members who are facing difficulties is important at this time.

“In any crisis, the number of community members affected can be much broader than the number of visa holders — we have US citizens, permanent residents, and even other non-US citizens who aren’t on student visas but who have complex family and historical ties to other countries,” Shiotani wrote.

When commenting on whether the administration has plans to widen their outreach to students who are not Ukrainian citizens yet feel affected by the current conflict, Glaser and Lee wrote that the Tufts administration encourages students who are in need of support to contact the “[Office of the] Dean of Student Affairs, the University Chaplaincy, Counseling and Mental Health (CMHS), the Division of Student Diversity and Inclusion, and the International Center.”

According to Dinh, however, the actions taken by the Tufts community so far should only mark the beginning of what he believes Tufts could achieve.

“If we are so proud of Tufts’ history [of activism] in the ‘60s and ‘70s and we are so proud of being a leader in international global education, should we be more active in this? I think so. Because that’s why I actually chose this school. …

I went here because of the [international relations] school.”

Koloris Wu is a first-year who has not yet declared a major. Koloris can be reached at caibinfen.wu@tufts.edu.

4 Friday, March 11, 2022

WEEKENDER

tuftsdaily.com

‘jeen-yuhs’: Ye’s journey as a troubled artist

by Tuna Margalit Arts Editor

One thing you realize as you blow through the recent Ye-focused docuseries, “jeenyuhs: A Kanye Trilogy” (2022) is that our mercurial friend and subject can outpace any public conception of him.

Well, that is if you keep up with the Yeezy zeitgeist — a whirlwind at best, a tornado at worst.

As of late, Ye, who recently changed his name from Kanye West, has been doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on efforts to make his separation from socialite Kim Kardashian and torment of her rebound Pete Davidson as prolonged and unpleasant as possible.

Ye’s often controversial actions can often nullify any empathy someone could have for him, whether the empathy was there from the start and weathered his antics or it was won back via reconciliation — perhaps an apology or a clarification or an eye-opening documentary that illuminates the more benevolent and inspiring sides of the artist and man.

This goal is not expressly written into the series’ bylaws, nor was “jeen-yuhs” made with this intent — that would constitute propaganda. Nevertheless, it fulfills that role.

The series is split into three acts, differentiated by theme.

The first is called “VISION” and it details Ye’s humble beginnings, when fame was just a big dream, something he only saw on the TV screen.

As the title card disappears, we are immediately thrown into the hip-hop scene of the late 1990s.

At rapper and producer Jermaine Dupri’s birthday party, the two foci of this documentary are introduced. The first is Clarence Ivy Simmons Jr., also known as Coodie, co-founder of “Channel Zero” (2016–18) — a public-access show documenting the rap game at the time. He runs into Ye — the documentary’s main subject, of course — at Dupri’s party, while interviewing various hip-hop acts.

The first thing you notice about the pre-celebrity, 21-yearold Ye is a confidence that is not full-fledged in the way the general public knows it to be from 18 years of fame. There is a hint of humility in there.

Coodie has members of a group called Harlem World introduce themselves before getting to Ye. Each one grips the microphone, giving their name and a tag, all while looking directly at the camera. Clearly, this is not their first time introducing themselves as artists.

Then, Coodie moves toward Ye, who has been standing off to the side. He is close but separate from Harlem World. As Coodie makes some preambulatory statements, Ye shifts around awkwardly but is also eager to speak. Finally, Coodie gives him the microphone.

COURTESY WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The poster for “jeen-yuhs” (2022) is pictured.

For about 30 seconds, Ye shouts out different people, almost like an award show acceptance speech. Even though the documentary’s narration voices over a chunk of what he says, just looking at Ye is enough to realize that there was a time where he couldn’t say he was a god and a close second to Jesus so confidently and unabashedly.

As Ye speaks, his eyes dart around, looking for approval and rarely catching the camera lens. After finding the camera, Ye slightly drops his gaze for an instant, as if he became hyper aware and self-conscious. He constantly fidgets and turns his body with little authority. His laughs are almost timid. It’s all quite subtle but shocking nonetheless, seeing the most braggadocious, self-praising pop culture icon of our times not exude coolness with a microphone in hand. Only at the end, when he finally reps his hometown Chicago, does his trademark confidence shine through.

This interaction between Coodie and Ye, as the former describes it, “would be the beginning of a brotherhood that would last for more than 20 years.” The mark of that brotherhood, for Coodie, is the intimate access to Ye’s life as he rose through the hip-hop industry.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of “jeen-yuhs” is that it is a documentary consisting of uninterrupted raw footage, not intercut with interviews that would be wholly unnecessary for such a series. The constant barrage of relatively or completely unseen moments is pure bliss for the audience, especially the fans who finally have visuals to fill in the history they know so well.

Moments that stand out are Ye and his posse entering the Roc-A-Fella offices — hoping to get signed to the label and rapping unreleased songs directly at random employees, only to be met with indifference — and a backstage performance for no one, where legendary rapper Mos Def effortlessly drops his verse

from “Two Words” (2004) and Ye follows it up with all the energy in the world, neck veins popping out, jumping up mid verse, with Mos Def watching in awe.

Throughout the first episode, we see Ye’s gradual ascent to relevancy via his production skills.

Clips of him showing off beats-for-sale to established rappers are peppered in with his own pre-release versions of songs from “The College Dropout” (2004), his iconic debut album.

At around the 50-minute mark, Donda West is introduced.

Donda was Ye’s mother and best friend, and it is made clear throughout the rest of the first episode and second episode that she played a stabilizing role in the artist’s life. She backed his vision wholeheartedly from the start and cheered him on from the sideline as his fame grew but still kept his head level. In one captivating conversation, Donda tells her son, “The giant looks in the mirror and sees nothing,” — a warning that fame can make you lose sight of yourself.

Her death in 2007 coincides with a fracture in Ye and Coodie’s relationship that sees the latter completely lose access to the artist for almost a decade. This was a period of time marked by some of Ye’s best work in “808s & Heartbreak” (2008), “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (2010), “Watch the Throne” (2011) and “Yeezus” (2013) but also his biggest scandal in the interruption of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the VMAs. Ye and Coodie do not reconnect until 2016, at the rapper’s now-immortalized listening party for “The Life of Pablo” (2016). Though most of the time period post-Donda’s death could be described as a decline in Ye’s well-being, this album and its subsequent tour was the beginning of a sharp descent that is still unfolding.

The third and final episode of the documentary shows parts of the few bright spots between 2016 and today — the making of “KIDS SEE GHOSTS” (2018) and the formation of his Sunday Service program — but ultimately centers on Ye’s awakening. This rebirth refers to many changes in Ye’s behavior but overall describes his shift from just music to other cultural endeavors — fashion, business and politics, mainly.

Coodie captures this transformation with little documentarian judgment, but there is an air of concern present. Coodie shows Ye discussing his own mental health with some real estate investors and how he feels the media has persecuted him ever since the Taylor Swift incident. Ye’s words and ideas verge on frantic, which is why Coodie cuts the camera.

The series ends with a relative peak in the “Donda” (2021) listening parties, presumably the most recent footage Coodie got before entering the final editing process for the documentary.

Coodie seems to hope that the Ye he knew before the fame and flashing lights, the Ye of the first two episodes of “jeenyuhs,” might reappear. Or, at the very least, he hopes that Ye would get a mirror big enough for a giant.

But now, checking in on Ye in 2022, the picture isn’t all that pretty, and it isn’t getting better either.

He seems to have graduated from inflammatory remarks to artistic depictions of murdering his ex-wife’s boyfriend. Ye defends himself, saying his art is just art. But the big picture is an obsession and an inability to let go, not to mention hypocrisy as he has dated multiple women since the split.

The hope from the “Donda” album era is no longer there.

Ye has once again outpaced the public’s conception of him.

Whatever empathy and understanding viewers might feel for the artist thanks to “jeenyuhs” is unlikely to last long.

A r t s & P o p Cu l t u r e Sacha Waters Public Cinemy No. 1

Implications of backlash against ‘Don't Look Up’ critics

I

’m growing weary of the current Hollywood craze for substandard movies that play up righteous messages to overshadow their flaws. Call it callous, but it’s difficult to subdue my cynicism towards films pushing truisms like ‘obviously bad thing … is bad,’ especially when creators then weaponize the message, accusing their movie’s critics of stupidity or of opposing its banal, virtuous axiom.

As you’ve probably guessed, I’m referencing Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up” (2021), a dark comedy parodying climate change where scientists discover an extinction-causing comet, only for politicians and media pundits to bastardize and deny their message.

The point is solid, exploring how scientists’ and activists’ efforts to resolve society’s various Gordian knots are debased by bureaucracy. While the film drew mixed reviews, scientists lauded it for its portrayal of their experiences. Fair enough — it had a moral, struck a chord and became a topwatched Netflix production.

But none of this changes the fact that “Don’t Look Up” is a subpar movie, and no dodging of criticism by conflating artistic appraisal with denying climate change will convince me otherwise. The film is less satire, more clumsy funhouse

Friday, March 11, 2022 | Arts & Pop Culture | THE TUFTS DAILY mirror; it fails to offer insight beyond the obvious and then renders the obvious in a cartoonish, obnoxious fashion.

McKay’s bizarre mixture of sophomoric humor, bloated snark and lack of a dictionary within which he could look up ‘subtlety’ rarely works.

It’s almost 2.5 hours of being beaten over the head with a message that quickly becomes tiring and holier-than-thou, ushered in by sloppy editing, vapid performances and flat jokes. The funniest part of the movie is the idea that Leonardo DiCaprio would marry a woman his age.

But critiques of the film have sparked something of a war: a frenzied volley of op-eds and angry tweets, featuring everything from tomato splats to accusations of climate change denial. McKay — who also framed disliking his film “Vice” (2018) as immor-

al because people died in the Iraq War — maintains people may just dislike it because they don’t understand climate change, comparing them to robots watching a love story.

Co-writer David Sirota wrote that critics missed the point and are “laughing at people trying to fix stuff.” Viewers are polarized into those who unequivocally support the film because of the message and those who evaluate it like any other work. Both are valid, but baseless attacks are not. When did critiquing political satires transform from the question, ‘Is the film good?’ to ‘Whose side are you on?’

“Don’t Look Up” shouldn’t be judged as a manifesto but as what it is: a satire that fell flat. Not every jigsaw of pixels plastered with DiCaprio and Meryl Streep’s faces is of Oscar caliber, and no message, however virtuous or politically

5

charged, should shield a movie from artistic evaluation. The backlash to criticism shows intolerance that’s becoming disturbingly common in our sociopolitical atmosphere, a growing tendency of people to reject any perceived challenge to their moral ideals without consideration for nuance nor dissent. Yes, McKay is correct that climate change exists, but that doesn’t mean we can’t dislike his movie. Great films can have problems, and principled films can be badly made. A moral doesn’t make a film well written, and condemning critics doesn’t make McKay any funnier. Such deflection allows moral superiority to create blindness to valid criticism, and that does no one favors.

Sacha Waters is a sophomore studying political science.

Sacha can be reached at sacha.waters@tufts.edu.

6

THE TUFTS DAILY | Fun & Games | Friday, March 11, 2022

F& G

tuftsdaily.com LATE NIGHT AT THE DAILY Alex (on his knees): “Can you PLEASE let me into ATO?”

Fun & Games

SUDOKU

CARTOON

Difficulty Level: Not feeling bad for Jumbo.

Thursday’s Solutions

By Juju Zweifach

SEARCHING FOR HEADLINES...

CROSSWORD

tuftsdaily.com

Opinion

7 Friday, March 11, 2022

OP-ED

Social media: Contending with extremism and misinformation in the digital age

by Janya Gambhir and Joseph Lim Social media has revolutionized terrorism, acting as a tool to streamline communication in underground networks and make the recruitment of individuals more accessible. This has resulted in the increased dissemination of extremist content online, facilitating radicalization.

Terrorist or extremist groups can readily communicate their opinions and misinformation in an immediate and widely accessible format, sharing information with a large, global audience, while also tailoring their messages to specific audiences at local levels. As stated by expert Dr. Maura Conway, “Today’s Internet does not simply allow for the dissemination and consumption of ‘extremist material’ in a oneway broadcast from producer to consumer, but also high levels of online social interaction around this material.”

Large terrorist organizations such as ISIS have used social media to encourage individuals to join their campaigns in Syria and Iraq, taking advantage of a variety of platforms and formats to extend their impact. They utilize platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to spread misinformation and extremism, often employing various tactics like blurring logos, video content and unusual punctuation to evade anti-terrorism detection within these platforms.

They have been able to form teams of social media users who retweet or share propaganda to garner the attention of potential recruits and direct them to more private conversation

sites. ISIS’s social media strategy demonstrates the dangers of social media and the potential it has to fuel extremist thought and mobilize violence, with estimates that they recruited 40,000 people from 110 countries through their online campaigns as of 2018.

Within the United States, private blogs such as Infowars and Roosh V’s Return of Kings provide information and news for far-right extremism, such as for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol or anti-vaccination campaigns. Deep-web social networking sites such as 4chan and 8chan allow like-minded people to share messages and media related to extremist content and orchestrate terrorist acts. This has created an extensive and ever-expanding online community where terrorist groups depend on social media for the support of their organizations and recruitment of new members.

Social media has even become a weapon which people in power use to blast disinformation into walled echo chambers to incite others to violence. Through Facebook troll accounts, the Myanmar military — backed by Buddhist nationalist groups — has disseminated anti-Muslim posts, false news and misleading photos as justification for their massacre of Rohingya minorities.

The Myanmar military learned its tactics from the Russian government, which had divided communities across the U.S. through divisive ads, Facebook pages and fake accounts, to influence the outcomes of the 2016 election.

Former President Donald Trump carried out his authoritarian

neighbors’ tactics in December 2020, tweeting, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild” and “StopTheSteal.” The pro-Trump groups Oath Keepers and Proud Boys responded to his call, mobilizing by storming the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, leaving five people dead in their wake. Unfortunately, these are just a few examples of the global disinformation wars waged across borders.

Disinformation warfare is accompanied by ‘plagues of misinformation.’ Misinformation on COVID-19 and vaccines has spread like the virus itself, leading the World Health Organization and other U.N. organizations to call on member states to combat the “COVID-19 infodemic.”

According to the WHO joint statement, misinformation has cost lives and helped unravel COVID-19 prevention policies, allowing the virus to continue its rampage.

Other devastating plagues are cyberharassment and cyberbullying, which involve online harassers using photos, texts, recordings and videos to inject frustration, sadness, low self-esteem and anger into victims.

Many victims have spiraled into substance use, school difficulties or suicidal thoughts and have even become aggressors themselves, incubating hate to spread like a pandemic.

As global access to the internet rapidly increases, social media continues to revolutionize our communication and provide us with tools to interact with people around the world. The borderless flow of information that social media grants us, how-

ever, can easily threaten our safety. In fact, we have seen how the line between online safety and personal safety has been blurred with the role that digital communication plays in developing radical ideologies and inciting people to violence. It is important to recognize the digital threats we all face and assess how certain platforms may be exploited in the future and play a role in radicalization and recruitment.

We must focus on proactive prevention strategies that governments and online platform providers can adopt to mitigate this issue. Young people are particularly susceptible to extremist propaganda and can easily be coerced into joining organizations to feel a sense of community. Governments should support digital literacy programs through state schools and local and national youth and community organizations to inform minors about the risks of social media and how to recognize propaganda. Beyond this, they can collaborate with social media organizations to ensure that the private tech sector is playing their part in protecting their users from potentially dangerous content.

Governments must promote the effective enforcement of applicable laws that prohibit the dissemination of terrorist or violent extremist content, even when the material is online, consistent with the laws of their nation and human rights law.

However, the main ethical dilemma related to promoting increased governmental regulation is that social media providers are inherently concerned with freedom of expression.

These platforms are designed to be a place where people can freely share their ideas, as the internet is designed to be a limitless platform that promotes open communication. We shouldn’t limit the ability of these sites to provide civil and political rights.

At the same time, the identification and classification of published content as extremist should remain an important pillar of these sites’ goals to guarantee the safety of their users. The question remains: What constitutes necessary restrictions on social media that also serve to foster the platforms’ purpose of providing robust dialogue and free communication?

This issue, among others, will be discussed at the 2022 Norris and Margery Bendetson Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship International Symposium on Problems Without Passports, March 31-April 2, 2022.

The international symposium, designed by a colloquium of students taking the EPIIC course through Tufts, features international practitioners, academics, public intellectuals, activists and journalists who participate in panels and breakout room discussions. Junior Janya Gambhir, an author of this op-ed, will moderate the first panel of the symposium, which is titled “Social Media: Contending with Extremism and Misinformation in the Digital Age.”

Janya Gambhir is a junior studying computer science. Janya can be reached at janya.gambhir@ tufts.edu. Joseph Lim is a junior studying international relations.

Joseph can be reached at han_ sung.lim@tufts.edu.

SPORTS

8 Friday, March 11, 2022

tuftsdaily.com

Women’s lacrosse beats Williams, falls to Colby to start the season The philosophy of

Aiden Herrod The Intangibles

the franchise quaterback

T

his past week has been one the NFL’s absolute craziest. We’ve seen multiple earth-shaking moves come to fruition for the offseason’s quarterback carousel, and there’s still plenty of dominos to fall as free agency kicks off.

Each of the quarterback moves we saw this week represent a philosophy NFL teams have exercised in recent years to address the sport’s most valuable position. Today, I want to break down each of these moves to see which work best, worst and what they may mean for the teams in question.

Aaron Rodgers: The hometown hero Tuesday marked the end of a monthslong saga plagued by drama, controversy and disappointment. Rodgers could have gone anywhere he wanted to push for another ring, but he ultimately decided to return to the franchise that drafted him.

The Packers are exercising the philosophy of building from within with this move.

They drafted Rodgers and many of the other stars that have made Green Bay yearly NFC contenders. It led to a ring early on, but since then it’s led to disappointment. All that said, the Packers and Rodgers are best off, at this point, sticking together. Countless franchises undoubtedly envy the long-term marriage the two have maintained, and the philosophy exercises a degree of patience and commitment rarely seen elsewhere in the league.

Rodgers will always be able to think about the ‘what if’ of testing out another franchise, but the sure thing is often better than the hypothetical.

Carson Wentz: An exercise in agony All too often, teams settle for second-rate quarterbacks in the hopes of letting otherwise strong rosters make a run. Indianapolis did this last year in acquiring Wentz, and they clearly want no part in it moving forward after a hasty breakup. The Washington Commanders are likely upgrading from their previous starter in Taylor Heinicke, but Wentz proved he’s far too reliant on the infrastructure around him to succeed on a weak team like the Commanders.

There are teams that look at marginal quarterback upgrades every year with wishful thinking. The Panthers were an example last year when they acquired Sam Darnold, and other teams will likely follow suit after missing out on the big names. Mediocre quarterback play puts an emphasis on the surrounding roster, and it can certainly still lead to success. But more often than not, teams lacking a top-10 signal-caller hit a wall.

Russell Wilson: Swing for the fences The Denver Broncos acquiring Russell Wilson is in line with one of the NFL’s winningest formulas. Take a solid roster that’s a quarterback away, trade away the future to acquire a proven veteran, and profit. The Buccaneers did it with Tom Brady, the Rams did it with Matt Stafford, and the Broncos even did it back in 2015 with Peyton Manning.

This is a surefire way to bring a team from the depths of mediocrity to Super Bowl contention. Plenty still needs to break the Bronco’s way for them to make a push for the AFC, but they have a guy in Wilson who has won at the highest level and a roster that’s hungry to take the leap.

Aiden Herrod is a senior studying film and media studies. Aiden can be reached at aiden.herrod@tufts.edu.

MAC CALLAHAN / THE TUFTS DAILY

Junior attacker Colette Smith runs past an opponent in a game against Williams on March 6.

by Isaac Karp

Executive Sports Editor

Tufts women’s lacrosse returned to action last weekend with two conference matchups: one against Colby on Saturday and one against Williams on Sunday. The Tufts Jumbos finished the weekend with mixed results after losing to Colby 9–4 and defeating Williams 13–9 in its home opener at Bello Field. Tufts came into the season ranked No. 2 in Division III lacrosse but fell six spots after Saturday’s loss.

In the bout with Colby, Tufts struggled to find its offensive groove. About three minutes into the game, first-year midfielder Genna Gibbons scored the first Jumbo goal of the season, but the Mules quickly answered back in the same quarter and then scored again with about ten seconds left to put Colby up by one after the first quarter. Senior attacker Mae Briody managed to tie up the score in the second, but the Mules controlled the quarter by netting four goals in a row — two each from junior attacker Annie Eddy and first-year midfielder Julia Jardina. In an uneventful third quarter, senior midfielder Kathryn Delaney scored an unassisted goal for Tufts to bring the score within 3, and senior attacker Colette Smith blasted the ball into the net again to start the fourth. But the

Jumbos fell short as Colby scored three more times to keep Tufts at bay. First-year attacker Margie Carden commented on what went wrong during the Colby game.

“We just didn’t start out the way that we knew we could have. We like to play fast, and we didn’t start to pick up the pace until the end of the game. And at that point, it was almost too late,” Carden said.

After such weighty expectations were placed on their shoulders in the preseason, losing their first game back left a sour taste in the mouths of the hungry Jumbos. Carden reiterated that leading up to the Williams game on Sunday, coaches and veteran players emphasized that the team needed to play loose and ignore any external pressures.

“We like to be loud, and we have a lot of big voices on our team. So I just think Saturday, we didn’t really start out with that much energy. We played kind of scared,” Carden said.

The Jumbos played with that renewed energy as they tamed the Ephs 13–9. Tufts initially fell behind as Williams scored first, but the Jumbos took charge by scoring three straight goals — two coming from graduate student Claire Wright and one from Gibbons, who’s developing a knack for scoring early in games. The newest Jumbos played a significant role in this win as the

three first-years who were run — Gibbons, Carden and midfielder Caroline Conaghan — accounted for seven goals. Carden, who scored four times, described the team’s depth and what the younger players learn and bring to these games.

“We all are, I would say, very serious competitors. So that’s always fun. And I think these next four years together, it’s only going to get better,” Carden said.

After going back and forth for the duration of the second quarter, Carden made a nice cut, running across the goal area with two minutes left on a sweet dish from Wright to give the Jumbos a two-goal cushion. From this point on, Tufts went on cruise control and held at least a three-goal lead for the remainder of the game, until the time ran out and the final score read 13–9 in favor of the Jumbos.

Carden explained how her goal to end the second quarter gave Tufts the momentum they needed to close out the game.

“So I think in that second quarter, especially towards the end, we had a big momentum shift and just kept the spark and let it take us to where we knew we could go,” Carden said.

Tufts plays Amherst on Saturday, March 12 in what’s expected to be a competitive conference match.