I’ll drink to that: Tufts Dining reflects on former campus pub see FEATURES / PAGE 3
WOMEN’S TENNIS
No. 1 Eagles soar over No. 8 Jumbos in Friday battle
Dean Solomont: Is this civic engagement? see OP-ED / PAGE 8
SEE SPORTS / BACK PAGE
THE
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T HE T UFTS DAILY
VOLUME LXXIII, NUMBER 49
tuftsdaily.com
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MASS.
New student publication looks to shine spotlight on arts at Tufts by Kat Grellman
Contributing Writer
Currents Magazine, a new arts-centered magazine, will release its first issue on both the Medford/Somerville and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) campuses this month, according to cofounder and SMFA dual-degree student Lily Pisano. Pisano, a first-year, founded the magazine with fellow firstyears and SMFA dual-degree students Georgia Oldham and Polina Pittell. Funding for Currents was approved by the Tufts Community Union Senate in February as part of the Art History Society, according to a Feb. 27 Daily article. Pisano said she came up with the idea for an arts-centered publication after realizing early this year that there is no publication dedicated solely to the arts at Tufts.
“From the get-go, we kind of realized there was a problem of a lack of the spreading of arts on the campus and lack of artistic presence in that way,” Pisano said. “Art is such a pivotal part of life, and it’s all around us: in architecture, in thought and in critical thought. It’s just a different way of thinking about things, and I think that it’s so important to have on a campus.” According to Oldham, one of the magazine’s objectives is to promote collaboration between SMFA students and students in Tufts’ Schools of Arts, Sciences and Engineering (AS&E). “It’s a Tufts University publication, but one of our big goals was to bridge the gap between Tufts, the Medford campus, and SMFA, the Fenway campus, because there was that big merger last year,” Oldham RAY BERNOFF / THE TUFTS DAILY
see CURRENTS, page 2
First-years Georgia Oldham and Lily Pisano, two of the three dual-degree students who cofounded Currents Magazine, pose for a portrait in Carmichael Hall on March 29.
New student-run textbook exchange initiative to begin in fall 2017 He explained that the exchange system will act as a third-party seller, with the primary goal of facilitating textbook exchanges in a streamlined manner. “Students will bring their textbooks in to us and list them with a price that they want. We’ll take them and then we’ll put them on sale, keeping an updated Excel document on Facebook,” he said. “Students can come in to browse SEOHYUN SHIM / THE TUFTS DAILY and compare qualA sudent checks out a textbook from the Tisch Library textbook reserves, which lets students to rent textbooks for ity and prices from up to four hours. either the Excel docby Maddie Gupta bring in textbooks between May 1 and 8, ument or in the Campus Center.” Staff Writer Miller said. Miller explained that he has felt frusAccording to Miller, a first-year, this trated by the financial burden that textA new student-run textbook exchange initiative seeks to create a physical loca- books often place on students and the will start in September, according to tion for the existing textbook exchange lack of a convenient way to exchange Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senator schemes online. books between students. He said that he Philip Miller, who has worked to imple“There is already an Excel document was motivated to run for TCU Senate to ment the program. The exchange, which floating around online and a Facebook attempt to fix the situation. aims to reduce the financial burden of group, but we’re trying to create a place on “My textbooks this year, had I bought buying textbooks, will be housed in the campus that students can go to drop off them from the bookstore, would probably Mayer Campus Center, and students can and pick up new books,” Miller said. have cost like $500, and I know it’s worse
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for STEM-heavy fields,” he said. “It made no sense to me that there’s 200 kids that just took the class and want to get rid of the textbook and I want a textbook while the middle man, the bookstore, is just making a ton of money off of us.” According to Laura Wood, director of Tisch Library, there have already been attempts to address inefficiencies in the textbook resale market. “At the time that [Miller] approached us, the library was also trying to do something about textbooks,” Wood said. “We have a pilot called the Lending Library where we’re purchasing copies of textbooks for a number of classes and put them on reserve so that students can borrow them.” According to Wood, the Lending Library is still an imperfect solution. “In an ideal world, every student has their own text that they can use at any time, but we can’t divert that much funding to textbooks, so we’re looking for compromise ways that we can use the funding to have a significant impact on students,” she said. According to Martha Kelehan, head of scholarly communications and collections at Tisch Library, the library will collaborate with TCU Senate by providing book boxes and carts to facilitate textbook transportation. Kelehan added that the library is working to assist with the textbook availability issue.
NEWS............................................1 FEATURES.................................3 ARTS & LIVING.......................5
see TEXTBOOK, page 2
COMICS....................................... 7 OPINION.....................................8 SPORTS............................ BACK