The Tufts Daily - Tuesday, February 25, 2020

THE TUFTS DAILY TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2020 VOLUME LXXIX, ISSUE 21 - “WHERE YOU READ IT FIRST”

40 years of student activists organize, demand change

by Madeleine Aitken Assistant News Editor

Social and political activism have been integral parts of Tufts’ campus culture for generations.

Since its founding in 1980, the Daily has been covering campus activism in its many forms for various issues throughout the years. In commemoration of its 40th anniversary issue, the Daily is highlighting the most memorable moments of student activism captured in print since 1980.

1980s In its inaugural issue, published on Feb. 25, 1980, the Daily covered a tuition protest of hundreds of students who objected to the proposed $1,126 tuition hike.

In 1982, students rallied on a day that the Board of Trustees gathered on campus for a meeting to demand that Tufts divest itself from companies producing nuclear weapons. Students, faculty, clergy

Please recycle this newspaper

Mostly Cloudy 52 / 38

/thetuftsdaily

and administrators attended and voiced their concerns about the nuclear arms race andTufts’ implicit participation in it.

In 1987, then University President Jean Mayer marched in Cumming, Ga., as part of one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in the South since the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Mayer’s march led to a call by Afro-American Society President Arnold Kee for greater on-campus activism. Additionally, Kee advocated for the hiring of a minority recruiter in the admissions office after the position was vacated at the end of August 1986.

1989 saw Tufts students gathering at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, along with more than 50 special interest groups and other college students, to protest the appearance of MobutuSeseSeko,presidentofZaire.Studentsshowed up to oppose the human rights abuses in Zaire, which is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mobutu’s support of South African apartheid.

For breaking news, our content archive and exclusive content, visit tuftsdaily.com @tuftsdaily

tuftsdaily

tuftsdaily

1990s During a Catholic mass at Goddard Chapel in 1990, eight students staged a silent protest of the Catholic Church’s position on AIDS and attitude toward LGBTQ individuals. Most students involved were openly gay and wore t-shirts that said “Silence = Death.”

In 1994, a group of students and faculty, called the Tufts Coalition for Peace, organized a protest at an event where former President George H. W. Bush spoke on U.S. foreign policy in the Persian Gulf during his administration. They did not claim to oppose his right to speak, but rather objected to the foreign policy pursued during his presidency.

Later that year, students attended aTrustee committee forum to demand divestment from HydroQuebec following a rally in front of the Jumbo statue. Hydro-Quebec is a Canadian energy company which was criticized at the time for disrupting and displacing Cree and Inuit peoples.

Contact Us P.O. Box 53018, Medford, MA 02155 daily@tuftsdaily.com

In 1996, members of Tufts’ African American and Asian American communities demonstrated at a Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate meeting to protest the Senate’s decision to remove culture representatives from its body, thereby making it less diverse and representative.

Tufts workers led campus activism at the beginning of the 1997 school year in opposition to Tufts’ decision to transition from their previous cleaning service, the UNICCO Service Company, to the International Service System (ISS). The switch was for cost savings reasons, but it caused 110 UNICCO workers to lose their jobs.

In 1997, it was discovered that Trustee Monte Haymon was involved with Sappi Ltd., a South African paper manufacturer that was under attack at the time for its labor policies in both the U.S. and South Africa as well as its violations of safety, health and environmental standards. Approximately 75 see ACTIVISM, page 2

NEWS............................................1 FEATURES.................................4 ARTS & LIVING....................... 7

OPINION.....................................9 SPORTS............................ BACK

2

THE TUFTS DAILY | News | Tuesday, February 25, 2020

THE TUFTS DAILY Ryan Shaffer Editor in Chief

EDITORIAL Alex Viveros Nathan Kyn

tuftsdaily.com

Activists since 2000 win Africana Studies department, Indigenous People's Day

Managing Editors Tys Sweeney

Associate Editor

Robert Kaplan Alejandra Carrillo Connor Dale Abbie Gruskin Natasha Mayor Matt McGovern Sara Renkert Anton Shenk Seohyun Shim Daniel Weinstein Maddie Aitken Carolina Espinal Alex Janoff Renner Kwittken Bella Maharaj Stephanie Rifkin Sarah Sandlow Elli Sol Strich

Executive News Editor Deputy News Editor News Editors

Amelia Becker Sid Anand Jessie Newman Sean Ong Michael Shames Fina Short Madeleine Aitkin Claire Fraise Jillian Collins Evelyn McClure Marc Weisglass

Executive Features Editor Features Editors

Ryan Eggers Tommy Gillespie Sam Heyman Danny Klain Tuna Margalit Christopher Panella Yas Salon Colette Smith Megan Szostak Geoffrey Tobia Devina Bhalla Hannah Harris Allie Birger Avery Caulfield Paloma Delgado Mason Goldberg Amulya Mutnuri Emily Nadler Eileen Ong Priya Padhye Liz Shelbred Michael Wilkinson Caroline Wolinsky Carys Kong Annabel Nied Julia Zweifach Jake Freudberg Julia Atkins Liam Finnegan Aiden Herrod Savannah Mastrangelo David Meyer Haley Rich Noah Stancroff Delaney Tantillo Sam Weidner Arpan Barua Jacob Dreyer Matthew Goguen Henry Gorelik Pranav Jain Ananda Kao Sruthi Kocherlakota Helen Thomas-McLean Jason Schwartz Eric Spencer Austin Clementi

Assistant News Editors

Assistant Features Editors

Executive Arts Editor Arts Editors

Assistant Arts Editor Executive Opinion Editor Editorialists

TUFTS DAILY ARCHIVES / TUFTS DIGITAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES

Students are pictured demanding divestment from Hydro-Quebec in 1994.

Editorial Cartoonists

Executive Sports Editor Sports Editors

Assistant Sports Editors

Executive Investigative Editor

Elie Levine

Executive Audio Editor

Anne Marie Burke Nicole Garay Evan Slack

Executive Photo Editor

Stephanie Hoechst Caleb Martin-Rosenthal

Executive Video Editors

Staff Photographer

PRODUCTION

Kristina Marchand Production Director Sam Russo Kevin Zhang Daniel Montoya Isabella Montoya Alice Yoon

Executive Layout Editors

Aidan Menchaca

Executive Graphics Editor

Rebecca Barker Jillian Rolnick Anna Hirshman David Levitsky Hannah Wells Abigail Zielinski Cole Wolk Sophie Elia Yiyun Tom Guan Makenna Law Grace Prendergast Mariel Priven Kate Seklir Ethan Steinberg Rae Sun Russell Yip Brendan Hartnett Sam Chung Julian Perry Michelle Roitgarts Luke Allocco Alexis Serino

Layout Editors

Executive Copy Editors Copy Editors

Assistant Copy Editors

Executive Online Editor Executive Social Media Editors Outreach Coordinators

BUSINESS Jonah Zwillinger Executive Business Director

ACTIVISM

continued from page 1 student activists from the Massachusetts area protested outside Ballou Hall in conjunction with the Mass. Jobs with Justice coalition.

2000s The beginning of the 2004 school year saw the addition of a Tufts branch of the national Socialist Alternative organization.The Socialist Alternative had groups at other colleges, including Harvard, and gathered student socialists as well as coordinated student walkouts and participation in national protests.

In 2007, former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers was slated to speak at Tufts, but both faculty and students protested his coming.

Summers was controversial for his alleged views on race and gender.

Students took part in the Day of Silence in 2009, an annual national silent protest against the mistreatment of the LGBTQ community.

Also in 2009, hundreds of students, faculty and staff gathered at a rally on the patio of Tisch Library in response to hate crimes against minority groups on campus. They demanded that the Tufts administration take action to prevent the continued displays of hate on campus. The rally was organized after a drunken first-year yelled racial slurs at mem-

bers of the Korean Students Association who were practicing for a cultural show.

2010s In 2010, Tufts Hillel entered a partnership with Repair the World, a national organization focused on promoting student activism among Jewish American college students on campuses across the country.

Later that year, members of the Tufts community rallied at the Mayer Campus Center for Black Solidarity Day and called for the creation of an Africana Studies department in addition to other academic programs to better represent minority groups.

Activists from Tufts Climate Action participated in a sit-in protest in April 2015 to demand divestment of the university’s endowment from the fossil fuel industry, but were placed on probation over the following summer. Following years of subsequent activism and steps taken by the university, Tufts decided last month that it would form an investment review committee to consider divestment from the fossil fuel industry.

Later that year, about 200 Tufts students joined a nationwide day of protest to call on Tufts to increase its efforts in combating racism on campus and in its policies. The students, organized under the name “#thethreepercent,” did so to call attention to the significant underrepresentation of Black students and faculty among the entire Tufts community.

In urging recognition of the Armenian Genocide, protesters from the Tufts Armenian Club demonstrated in the Mayer Campus Center in 2016.

Later in 2016, faculty voted to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day after the TCU Senate protested the celebration of this controversial holiday with a resolution asking it to be recognized as Indigenous People’s Day. In 2018, students, including many from the trans and gender non-conforming communities on campus, demanded the installation of gender-neutral bathrooms in campus buildings. This was a multi-year activism effort, but one that culminated in 2018 when new gender-neutral bathrooms were planned for installation in Carmichael and Dewick-MacPhie Dining Centers as well as the Mayer Campus Center, and all pre-existing single stall restrooms on the Medford campus were relabeled as gender-neutral.

Much of student activism in 2019 surrounded Tufts dining workers’ contracts, which were perceived to be unfair, and negotiations for which many students rallied behind. Students created the Tufts Dining Action Coalition and organized protests, rallies and demonstrations in response to the contract renegotiation of the University’s dining workers. Ultimately, they were successful.

N

Decades of construction transform, renew the Hill

by Abbie Gruskin and Robert Kaplan News Editor and Executive News Editor

Significant construction and capital projects have transformed the face of Walnut Hill, home to Tufts’ first buildings and the nexus of the Medford/Somerville campus, since the Daily’s founding. The following is an overview of the Daily’s coverage of construction on the Hill since 1980, many buildings of which already seem timeless today.

Mayer Campus Center Construction on the Elizabeth Van Huysen Mayer Campus Center opened in 1983, after years of student support for the building and fundraising by then-University President Jean Mayer. The previous home of the Experimental College was demolished and the provost’s house was

moved to clear the site for the Center’s construction.

Boosted by an anonymous $1.5 million donation from a friend of Mayer’s — but on the condition it be named for Mayer’s wife — the Campus Center opened to the Tufts community in 1985.

Aidekman Arts Center Occupying what was originally a courtyard between Cohen Auditorium and Jackson Gym, the Aidekman Arts Center was completed in 1991. Construction began in 1987 as the first attempt to consolidate the fine arts departments into a single complex, made possible by the donation of $2 million by Shirley and Alex Aidekman.

Olin Center for Language and Cultural Studies The Olin Center opened in fall 1991, housing faculty in Russian, German,

Romance languages and other language departments. The construction was funded in part by a grant from the F. W. Olin Foundation.

As a result of the move, the history department, which was previously split between Braker Hall and Miner Hall, moved into the space in East Hall vacated by the language departments.

Harleston Hall Harleston Hall originally opened as South Hall in the fall of 1991 following two years of construction. A federal court order in February nearly prevented student occupation of the building, due to the building’s indirect connection to the Boston sewage system. It was lifted in June of that year, however, and opened with a 387 bed capacity.

In 2001, Harleston Hall became the first residence hall on campus to allow students

News

Tuesday, February 25, 2020 | News | THE TUFTS DAILY

3

Later construction projects focus on housing, academics, athletics

that lasted more than two years and cost more than $14 million. Named for former Trustee John Dowling (A’59), the construction coincided with the first consolidation of student services operations into one building in Tufts’s history.

Psychology Building In the fall of 2000, the old psychology building on Boston Avenue was demolished in preparation for construction of a new building on the site.

The project wrapped up in 2001 and cost over $5 million, but the Daily reported that the building still had not received a name or donor upon its completion. Instead, the con-

struction was paid for with a $1 million grant from the National Institute of Health, a private $250,000 donation and funds from the Arts and Sciences budget.

SEC Tufts broke ground on the Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) in the winter of 2015 and the project reached completion in 2017. The SEC now houses laboratories and research facilities for disciplines including biology, chemistry, biomedical engineering and more.

The Daily reported that plans for the new building were in the works long before construction started in 2015.

“It was planned before the 2008 downturn and it didn’t happen because of that downturn … [but] since the beginning of 2005, a new state-of-the-art integrated lab complex has been … in the works,” Strategic Capital Program Director Barbara Stein told the Daily in 2015.

Steve Tisch Sports and Fitness Center Named for film producer and New York Giants owner Steve Tisch (A’71), the athletic facility was dedicated in October 2012 after more than a year of construction. Tisch donated $13 million to support the construction of the three-story, 42,000 square foot facility that connects the historic Cousens Gym and the Gantcher Center, which finished construction in 1999.

Houston and Miller Halls Constructed between 1959 and 1961, Miller Hall and Houston Hall received a new façade, elevator and handicap accessible entryways, among other improvements as part of extensive renovations in 2018 and 2019. These changes were long overdue, according to Daily reporting.

“I’ve heard some Tufts alums come back and say that [Houston] is the exact same as when they were here 40 years ago, which is a little concerning,” Alekya Menta, a firstyear student living in Houston Hall at the time, said.

Joyce Cummings Center Construction of the Joyce Cummings Center, one of the newest ongoing projects on Tufts’ campus, began in the fall of 2019 at the intersection of Boston Avenue and College Avenue, though planning began as early as 2015. Director of Government and Community Relations Rocco DiRico said at the time that the new building will be a “transit-oriented development,” due to its placement adjacent to the forthcoming “Medford/Tufts” Green Line Extension station, which is slated to open in 2021.

Once completed, the building will offer new auditoriums, classrooms, faculty offices and collaborative spaces for students.

liberal arts students were not bound to declare their major by a certain time.

Class registration went online for the first time when students registered for classes for the fall semester of 2000. The platform, called the Student Services Implementation Project, replaced the in-person long registration lines in Eaton Hall.

The TCU, which now mostly deals with funding requests and resolutions, was a truly dramatic spectacle in the 1999–2000 academic year, which saw the resignation of 11 senators.

The Daily’s Matthew Kane reported on Feb. 10, 2000 ahead of the TCU Senate’s third meeting that semester: “Thus far this semester, the Senate has not had a general meeting without at least one member resigning.” These resignations apparently occurred for various reasons, chief among which were constraints placed on senators by the TCU Judiciary and the then-named Elections Board.

The Judiciary also took a much more active role in student clubs and life, frequently de-recognizing clubs — a power that the Judiciary still holds but rarely employs. One such club was the Tufts Christian Fellowship (TFC), which was immediately de-recognized and defunded for blocking a gay student from leadership in the club in April 2000. TCF would come back, but history would repeat itself 12 years later when InterVarsity, the group funding TCF, would ultimately be pushed off campus.

The last 20 years of Tufts’ history covered by the Daily have seen a major expansion of majors and minors; for example, the creation of the Middle Eastern studies major in 2000, the addition of Asian American studies courses leading to the launching of a minor in 2012, as well as the creation of the Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora in 2014, which became a department by 2019.

Housing For the majority of the Daily’s history, a staple of housing that is often taken for granted,co-ed dorms, didn’t exist. In the early 2000s, several proposals were raised and struck down by the administration, which was headed by then University President John DiBiaggio. On Jan. 27, 2000, Daily reporters called a move towards a co-ed housing proposal “progressive.” This proposal, first floated by the then-named Tufts Transgendered, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Collective would become successful years later after being struck down by DiBiaggio and other members of the administration.

In as early as 1988, the Daily documented a shortfall in beds available for undergraduates on campus. The trend, however, was not consistent; in 1988, 40 students were left without housing, but 120 extra beds were available the following year. The Housing Office, as it was then known, was beset by logistical and administrative woes.

Errors in the 1982 housing lottery, for example, prompted it to be rescheduled that year. In 1991, the housing lottery was moved to an all-digital system for the first time, in an effort to mitigate allegations of student fraud.

By the early 2000s, Tufts’ now-chronic housing shortages began to cement ahead of the construction of Sophia Gordon Hall (SoGo). Around the late 90s, the state of Tufts’ housing fluctuated between surpluses and shortages. But Tufts’ increasingly large applicant pools allowed for a higher matriculation rate even as the acceptance rate decreased — Tufts’ student body increased faster than Tufts could house it. The completion of SoGo in 2006 would allay the crisis, but only temporarily.

Around the same time, Tufts piloted what has now become the norm for those entering Tufts: first-year only dorms. Tilton Hall was the first such dorm, but more would follow. It is interesting to note that dorms such as Stratton Hall, now con-

sidered a mid-level sophomore residence hall, was around this time coveted by juniors and seniors before the majority of Tufts juniors and seniors were expected to move off-campus.

Another tidbit from the archives on housing: the Office of Residential Life imposed fines on the entire residence hall when Wren Hall’s pinball machine and ping pong table — both of which Wren Hall had at the time — were vandalized.

In one of the incidents, the pinball machine was thrown off of the bridge to Wren Hall.

Hate crimes Despite recent attention paid to hate crimes at Tufts due to three incidents on campus last semester, bigotry is by no means new to Tufts’ campus. The Daily documented multiple antisemitic incidents in the 1992-93 academic year alone, two of which occurred in Haskell Hall.

In 1994, while the Granoff Family Hillel Center was still being constructed, a bomb exploded in the early morning at the construction site. The Daily reported at the time that the explosive was likely a makeshift device, such as a Molotov cocktail. There was no damage to the building and no one was injured.

In the late 1990s, three more incidents occurred: as many as 12 swastikas were found in Houston Hall, proselytizing fliers were found in Jewish books in Tisch Library and two students were hospitalized after being assaulted in a hate crime on Emory Street in Medford.

The 2000s also saw several hate crimes; however, many of these Daily issues are not fully available in Tufts’ Digital Archives. Their descriptions, however, note that students called on administrators to properly address these crimes. The question of administrative response is an ongoing discussion to this year, but the Tufts community currently awaits hearing more about University President Anthony Monaco’s new Bias Response Team initiative, announced last semester.

JUSTIN GOLUB / TUFTS DAILY ARCHIVES/ TUFTS DIGITAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES

Dowling Hall is pictured during construction on Jan. 14, 2000.

CONSTRUCTION

continued from page xx to use ID cards to enter its doors as part of a pilot program overseen by the Department of Public and Environmental Safety. Harleston was “wired” for ID access when it was originally built in 1991, but the system faced “hardware problems” that made it inoperative.

Harleston Hall was renamed in 2016 for former Professor of Psychology Bernard Harleston, who was Tufts’ first African American tenure-track faculty member and a former dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Dowling Hall Student Services opened in Dowling Hall over the summer of 2000, in a project

News roundup: 40 years in headlines

by Austin Clementi and Robert Kaplan

Executive Investigative Editor and Executive News Editor

The Daily is constitutionally mandated to be Tufts’ newspaper of record, striving to capture Tufts’ history for future generations to look upon.

From overhauls of academic requirements to a mass resignation in student government, the following is a selection of developments from Tufts’ history — documented in thousands of issues, written by thousands of student-journalists.

Academics and student culture Now ubiquitous among the academic experiences of undergraduate students in the School of Arts & Sciences, the World Civilization requirement was only implemented in 1992. Faculty voted three years later to expand the number of courses which would satisfy the newest requirement, which joined the other requirements that still remain for liberal arts students. Students and faculty were divided over the new requirement; the policy was approved by a slim margin, with 58 faculty members in favor, 41 opposed and four abstaining.

Academic minors — a standard option for an undergraduate’s educational career today — were only adopted in full force at Tufts in 1992. Though the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate long advocated for the change, many professors expressed reservations that it would enable “pure credentialing.”

The requirement that students in the School of Arts & Sciences declare their major before registering for classes in their junior year was suddenly introduced in March 1995, during that year’s “majors week.” The change was made three weeks before registration for fall courses, and only one faculty member voted against the requirement at the time. Before the change,

4

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Features

tuftsdaily.com

Past EICs recognize skill, relevance, strong community at the Daily

by Madeleine Aitken Assistant News Editor

Editor’s note: The Daily’s editorial board acknowledges that this article is premised on a conflict of interest. This article is a special feature for Daily Week 2020 that does not represent the Daily’s standard journalistic practices.

Since its founding in 1980, The Tufts Daily has evolved from an operation led by about a dozen students to one with 25 executive editors alone.

“To look at what the Daily is today is really to look at an amazing, impressive organization, not only in the content that they’re putting out but also in the mindfulness that is being [put] toward the content that is being put out. If that is, in any way, an extension of the embryo that we started 40 years ago, then I feel really good about that,” Bill Frechtman (LA’81), a founding member of the Daily, said.

Frechtman served as editor in chief during the spring semester of 1980 as well as both semesters of the 1980–81 school year, which were the first three semesters of production.

“The student activities office, seeing the need for some kind of daily journalism and news and information on campus, put together the concept of having a daily paper, organized meetings around that and got student funding for it,” Frechtman said.

Frechtman added that production was done without computers when the Daily first started.

“At that time, everything was being typed up on an IBM Selectric typewriter in columns, and then you had to cut them and wax them onto boards,” Frechtman said.

Bob Goodman (LA’91), who was editor in chief in the spring of 1990, saw

the shift from this process to a computer-based one.

“We made what we thought was this massive transition from boarded and waxed and stenos and knives and things to it being on the computer,” Goodman said.

Despite changes in production, the Daily has always been an important part of campus life.

“It would sort of fly off the stands, and people would bring it to class, and they’d basically be — as if on their phone in class — they’d be reading it,” Goodman said. “It really was a focus of everyone’s attention in an exciting, although intense, way.”

Among those who would go on to become editor in chief, joining the Daily seemed like an obvious choice.

“I had always loved journalism, I had always loved writing, I had volunteered in high school at my town newspaper where I lived … to be able to do it and see my name in print was so cool,” Caroline Schaefer (LA’95) said.

Schaefer started writing for the news section of the Daily as a first-year student and quickly progressed, eventually to editor in chief in the spring of 1994.

For others, however, the Daily was something they just stumbled upon and then got into.

“I hadn’t done my high school paper, I was sort of marginally interested in journalism, but I got really into it my first year at Tufts,” Alex Schroeder (LA’16), who was editor in chief in the fall of 2014, said. “I got right into the sports section right away and hit the ground running out covering a beat.”

Allison Roeser (LA’06), editor in chief in fall of 2005, spoke to a similar idea.

“We were all kind of growing up through the system together,” Roeser said. “None of us had previous experi-

COURTESY BOB GOODMAN

Bob Goodman (LA‘91), editor in chief of The Tufts Daily in spring 1990, is pictured.

COURTESY BILL FRECHTMAN

Bill Frechtman (LA’81), the first editor in chief of The Tufts Daily, is pictured. ence so much in journalism, so we had kind of been trained by the previous generation, just to carry on the integrity and the legacy of what we did.”

Some editors in chief went on to careers in journalism, while others took different paths.

“I’ve been working at WBUR as a producer in various roles and most recently at On Point, and now I’m going to be starting at Marketplace as a producer there,” Schroeder said. “I’m not sure exactly where I’m headed, but I think journalism will definitely play a big role in it.”

Schaefer, Roeser and Goodman all started in journalism after college.

Schaefer worked at Time magazine for a year before going to graduate school at Harvard University for human development and psychology, and then deciding to return to the journalism world.

“I worked at InStyle for three-and-ahalf years, then I worked at SELF magazine, and then, my most recent job was at Us Weekly where I was the executive editor,” Schaefer said.

After taking a couple years off to freelance, Schaefer worked at SoulCycle doing digital content.

“Now I’m working for a startup in the Boston area called Merryfield, basically a clean-label rewards app for food. I’m doing all the content for that,” Schaefer said.

Roeser pursued higher education in journalism after Tufts.

“I went to journalism school after I graduated, I went to Northwestern [University],” Roeser said. “I was kind of unsure what I wanted to do after college, I had changed my major, I think, three times, and I really loved the Daily and I thought that was something to pursue.

I did get some pretty good connections out of it, and I ended up working at Wired magazine out in San Francisco.”

After working in the arts and entertainment department at Wired, Roeser decided to try something else. She now works at a large asset management firm in Boston.

Like Roeser, Goodman worked in journalism after Tufts. He spent four years as a reporter, but is now the vice president of global user exper ience design & content at V irgin Pulse, a global health and wellbeing company.

However, whether or not their career is in journalism, the skills gained and practiced as editor in chief of a daily newspaper are transferable to nearly any job.

“I thought [the Daily] was basically priming me for newspapers, but looking back, it’s still just as relevant in spite of my career having shifted,” Goodman said.

Roeser sees the benefits of the Daily in her career as well.

“It taught me more than most classes did in terms of preparing me for the real world,” Roeser said. “That’s leadership training, it was teamwork, it was project management. You’re managing [under] strict deadlines every night. There was integrity, there was communication, writing. Everything I did there on a daily basis, I still use every single day in my adult life. I can’t say that for a lot of other things I did in college.”

A lot has changed about the Daily, but a lot has also stayed the same. The friends, the experiences and the memories are constants among members throughout the decades.

“I remember it all really well, I could talk about it like it was yesterday. It was really an amazing experience,” Goodman said.

Schaefer shared a similar sentiment as Goodman.

“I loved it. We were like a family,” Schaefer said.

Tuesday, February 25, 2020 | Features | THE TUFTS DAILY

tuftsdaily.com

Current staff, faculty members reflect on their time at the Daily

by Claire Fraise

Assistant Features Editor

Editor’s note: The Daily’s editorial board acknowledges that this article is premised on a conflict of interest. This article is a special feature for Daily Week 2020 that does not represent the Daily’s standard journalistic practices.

Contributing to the Daily is a common experience among Tufts students and multiple faculty and staff members also share that with their students.

Jess Keiser (LA’06), an assistant professor in the English Department, got involved with the arts section as a sophomore when he was an undergraduate.

“I started writing arts and culture reviews for the Daily,” he said. “I did books, movies, music, kind of whatever.”

He would pitch the editors an album or movie he liked — such as Dizzee Rascal in an article he wrote for the Daily called “Wot do U call it?” — and then proceeded to write about them. After doing that for a while, he started to be assigned movie reviews.

“I thought it was cool that we could go to press screenings before the movie came out,” he said.

Eventually, Keiser became managing editor of the arts section, an experience he enjoyed.

While he ultimately stepped away from the Daily during his senior year, his time at the Daily gave him transferable skills, like writing under a deadline and being a clearer writer, that he carried forward with him — even if he found some of the articles he wrote to be embarrassing.

“I have forcefully forgotten [the articles I wrote] because they’re incredibly embarrassing,” he said. “They were so mortifying that I was trying to just forget about them completely.”

Keiser was shocked that there were other faculty members at Tufts who had worked on the Daily during their time at Tufts. He is also not the only member of the faculty who wrote journalistically after moving on from the Daily.

Now-television host and guest lecturer in the film and media studies department Anthony Everett (LA’83) said that, when he first joined the Daily, it was nowhere near as big as it is now.

“My freshman year, which was 1979, [the Daily] was literally a sheet of paper that was being slid underneath people’s doors,” he said.

“By the fall of the following year, it was beginning to look like a newspaper. But really it was just a couple of sheets of either two pages or four pages of pieces of paper.”

He joined the staff of the Daily while he was a first-year. He had been interested in English and creative writing beforehand but being on the Daily gave him his first and best experience with journalism.

“I began to understand how to ask the right questions of who, what, when, where, why and how, and then expand on that,” he said, “Also who to talk to in order to get both sides of the story.”

He did not leave Tufts with a plan to go into journalism.

“I took some time off and went to Colorado with some friends to go skiing, and I literally stumbled into this little radio and television station in Aspen, Colorado … and they had a job opening and I applied and got it,” Everett said.

He deferred his law school acceptances and, on his advice from his friend, decided to stick with journalism as a career. “[My friends said] you found something you love so stick with it, and I loved it so I stayed with it,” he said. “And it’s been a great career.

It’s been everything I could have hoped for in a career.”

Even though Everett found his desire to go into journalism later in life, the Daily provided him with foundational skills he carried forward with him in his life.

Jennifer McAndrew, director of communication, strategy and planning at the

NICOLE GARAY / THE TUFTS DAILY

Jennifer McAndrew (LA’96), the director of communications, strategy & planning at Tisch College, poses for a portrait in Barnum Hall on Feb. 23.

Jonathan M. Tisch College, took photos for the Daily and was the photo editor.

Because this was before digital photography, the development of photography was still physical and the photo staff developed photos in their darkroom in the basement of West Hall.

“It was probably not super well ventilated,” she said. “Probably had some chemical exposure there and I would go and take pictures and then develop them at night and then bring them to the Daily and they would lay it out — like physically lay out the paper.”

Her favorite memory of being on the Daily staff was photographing when George H. W. Bush came to speak on campus.

“It was really one of the coolest things I got to do on the Daily because obviously, as you can imagine, that was something that brought in a lot of outside media,” she said. “So to be there with a press pass, and a picture — I remember that we thought that our photo was better than The Boston Globe’s photo.”

She used photographing for the Daily to capture not only big events like that on campus, but also sports events and smaller moments about her life at Tufts.

“We started something when I was on the Daily where we had a question of the week and then we would ask … people and put photos of them in the paper with their … responses,” McAndrew said. “[The question] could be like something in the national news, or it could be something that was happening on campus.”

While she does not pin her current career directly on the Daily, she did say that having that experience on the Daily gave her the experience of working with journalists that pushed her towards a career in communications.

“Having that experience on the Daily of trying to cover things and trying to get access to things and working on a team of people who really cared about getting it right and getting the story right — that really does stick with me” McAndrew said. “I have found throughout my career that, overwhelmingly, journalists have very, very high civic responsibility.”

5

Lexi Serino Medford Mom

T

My Anchor

ruth be told, dear reader, this column was a difficult one to put together. In honor of the Daily’s 40th anniversary on Feb. 25, I decided to write about my time at the Daily and the impact it’s had on my Tufts experience. Putting into words what this organization means to me without sounding cheesy was proving nearly impossible until I read a letter to the editor submission from Maureen O’Brien Klautky (LA’90), a Daily alumna and a former photo editor like myself. She wrote beautifully about her tenure on the Daily in the late ’80s, and I found myself particularly drawn to the following sentence from her letter: “During my years at Tufts, the Daily was my anchor, the one constant thing in my life.” Nothing has ever rung truer for me.

I was 16 years old when I first started working at the Daily. Medford High School had just started an internship program with the Daily, with the hope of training students to learn the inner workings of a student newspaper so that our high school could institute its own. I was one of the students chosen to be an intern, which meant that I spent two hours per week in the Daily’s office in the dingy basement of Curtis Hall throughout my junior year of high school. I had no way of knowing that, in just two short years, that basement would become a second home to me as a Tufts student.

I’ve been on the Daily throughout the entirety of my Tufts career and it has almost single handedly defined my college experience: not only did that basement become my second home, but the incredible people I worked alongside became my second family. We’ve spent countless late nights hunched over our laptops trying to get our articles edited, our layout arranged and our paper to the printing press on-time. We’ve laughed and argued and learned and grown and worked towards a shared goal: producing journalism that serves our community and speaks truth to power.

What the Daily staff does every day is gruelingly difficult and extremely special. It all happens because this organization is full of people who care so, so deeply — about the truth, about justice and, most of all, about each other. I count myself lucky for the role I’ve played in producing this paper for four years, and it will be one of the things I miss most about Tufts. I know that the Daily will stand strong long after I graduate in May, and can only hope I’ve contributed something meaningful to this institution and that I’ve impacted it in the same way that it has impacted me.

On a sentimental note, to the people that the Daily has brought into my life — Luke, Sean, Caleb, Alice, Shim, Daniel, Ally, Chris and many more names that couldn’t fit in a 500-word column — thank you for making Tufts home. No matter where life takes us, I will always look back on our time together at the Daily with the utmost fondness and gratitude. Please know that your leadership has changed the Daily and that your friendship has changed me. I love you all more than the Daily loves omitting Oxford commas.

Happy 40th anniversary, Tufts Daily.

Here’s to many more.

Lexi Serino is a senior studying political science and Spanish. Lexi can be reached at alexis.serino@tufts.edu.

6

THE TUFTS DAILY | PHOTO | Tuesday, February 25, 2020

tuftsdaily.com

tuftsdaily.com

ARTS&LIVING

7 Tuesday, February 25, 2020

The Daily’s 40th anniversary: revisiting a 1999 “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” review

by Christopher Panella Arts Editor

In 1999, the Daily wrote about the release of “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace”. The review — or rather, a short summary about the release of the film — followed the box office success of “Menace” and discussed some of the key takeaways with which critics were leaving the theaters (too much computer-generated imagery (CGI), good acting, a great film for children). Now, almost 21 years after its release — which was just honored with new merchandise and plenty of fan appreciation this past April during Star Wars Celebration Chicago 2019 — it’s more important than ever to understand its legacy and place in the Star Wars franchise.

The first film of the prequel trilogy is the riskiest Star Wars endeavor — save for “Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi” (2017) — ever. The prequels still receive their fair share of hate, although there’s been a recent appreciation for the trilogy in the past few years thanks to memes on Reddit and post-launch content on the video game “Star Wars Battlefront II” (2017).

But the prequels, especially “Menace,” didn’t deserve the hate they received during their releases. They’re good films, full of love and plenty of quirky moments. There’s somewhat of a tonal shift when comparing the original trilogy and the prequels—although “Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi” (1983) can get pretty campy with its use of Ewoks — but is that what really matters when thinking about the prequels?

No. What matters is what the trilogy brought for its newer, younger viewers. The 1999 review notes, “What the second installment of trilogies [the prequels] does is bring Star Wars into the collective consciousness of another generation of young dreamers, too often inundated with the blockbuster rot of movies like ‘Independence Day’ (1996) and ‘Armageddon’ (1998).” The review is right. The prequels aren’t necessarily just for older Star Wars fans, just like how the sequel trilogy isn’t just for older Star Wars fans. Each generation has its own trilogy to cling to and enjoy, but the wide variety of Star Wars content is available for everyone to enjoy and appreciate.

The aforementioned recent love for the prequel trilogy brings the films back into a sort of a renaissance. It’s all really thanks to the generation that grew up watching the prequels and the television show “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” (2008–).

Thanks to a sort of cultural retrospect, they’re being looked at because of their camp and style, not in spite of it. And that matters. These films weren’t made to be analyzed the same way the original trilogy was. We must look at “Menace” and its successors when thinking about the time of their release.

Thanks to CGI, “Menace” is certainly the most stylized Star Wars film, full of gorgeous new planets and beautiful costumes. It’s an explosion of exciting new images. Coruscant is vibrant and impossibly huge, the lightsaber fights

are choreographed with plenty of jumps and kicks and Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) wears some of the most extravagantly amazing outfits the saga’s ever seen. The 1999 review seems rather lukewarm on the use of CGI, noting that “it is said that he [director George Lucas] relies too heavily on the computer to create his alternate reality.” But as of 2020, isn’t that what most blockbusters seem to do?

CGI and the broader category of visual effects are so common to modern audiences that if “Menace” were released today (with updated effects), we’d probably appreciate it. In many ways, “Menace” and the prequel trilogy feel like some of the first major franchise films to really show off the power of CGI. Now, it’s commonplace.

Take the various video explanations that highlight the effects used in “Avengers: Endgame” (2019). We owe much of that mainstream success to Lucas, who has always been a pioneer of new technology. For “Menace,” and later “Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones” (2002), Lucas experimented with shooting digitally. He pushed the envelope further: “Clones” was the first major blockbuster to be shot completely digitally.

Reviews of “Menace,” like the 1999 Daily summary, weren’t kind to the use of CGI. But we now praise films with advanced visual effects that create immersive worlds. Don’t we owe that success to Lucas and the prequels? We can certainly debate the quality of the movies — sure, they’re not better than the sequels or the original trilogy — but they’re definitely the most unique pieces of content in Star Wars. They connected with their audience when first released, and that audience is now grown and reliving the love they had for them. But that audience is also watching a new generation love the sequel trilogy.

And that’s important. At the core of the 1999 review is the idea that Star Wars is always groundbreaking — whether it be because of CGI or box office success and cultural relevance — and always made to connect both with its older fans and newer fans. But those newer fans are the focus. Each new generation of Star Wars films becomes a cultural touchstone for each new generation of fans. They become childhood classics, inspire new filmmakers and plant a deep appreciation and love for the saga.

This isn’t to say that these films also play into nostalgia for the older generations — they do. But the focus is what’s happening now.

The 1999 review concludes with a comment both on Star Wars as a whole and what “Menace” represented at the time.

“Star Wars is science fiction mainstreamed for both boys and girls, adults and children. It captures the struggle between good and evil as no other series has been able to do since, and its recreation of a galaxy long ago and far away, makes willing suspension of disbelief a pleasurable task. It creates heroes, tears down enemies, and builds new worlds.

Movie magic has never looked so good.”

This conclusion still resonates with us 20 years later.

VIA IMDB

A promotional poster for “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace” (1999) is pictured.

From the Archives: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

by Dara Resnik Arts Editor

This article was originally published in the Commencement 1999 issue of The Tufts Daily.

Mixed reviews in papers around the country did not stop die-hard Star Wars fans from waiting on line for days in some cities for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The film opened this past Wednesday to one of the biggest box offices in movie history.

The general consensus seems to be that his royal digital genuis himself, George Lucas, has used a few too many special effects in the latest installment of his sci-fi brainchild. The fact that Lucas uses digital work in 95 percent of the frames of the film awe-inspiring, but it is said that he relies too heavily on the computer to create his alternate reality. Still, reviews have been positive for the cast which includes the

likes of Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, and Liam Neeson, who has received extremely good feedback nationwide. In addition, as New York Daily News reviewer Jack Mathews said, no matter what, “Children under 12 will love it. Old Star Wars fans, having waited 18 years will likely embrace it.”

What the second installment of trilogies does is bring Star Wars into the collective consciousness of another generation of young dreamers, too often inundated with the blockbuster rot of movies like Independence Day and Armageddon. Star Wars is science fiction mainstreamed for both boys and girls, adults and children.

It captures the struggle between good and evil as no other series has been able to do since, and its recreation of a galaxy long ago and far away, makes willing suspension of disbelief a pleasurable task. It creates heroes, tears down enemies, and builds new worlds. Movie magic has never looked so good.

8

THE TUFTS DAILY | Arts & Living | Tuesday, February 25, 2020

tuftsdaily.com

From the Archives: An Interview with Jerry Seinfeld

by Eric Drachman Contributing Writer

This article was originally published in the Oct. 26, 1987, issue of The Tufts Daily.

“There are not too many comedians that you see out there doing this as their first choice. They’re doing it as a stepping stone to get someplace else: movies, sitcoms, talk shows. I’m doing this as my first choice. I wanted to be a comedian.”

Jerry Seinfeld took a fairly direct path to the field of stand-up comedy. While at Queen’s College in Long Island he majored in theater and communications.

Within six months after he was graduated, he was earning a living as a comedian.

For a short time he held a job selling light bulbs over the phone, but as he says, “It was so hard trying to talk people into [buying them]. There’s not that many people sitting home in the dark going, ‘I can’t hold out much longer. Somebody better call.’”

Jerry Seinfeld has come a long way since then. Last month, he premiered on HBO with his “Stand-up Confidential,” and he currently holds the record for the most money earned by one comedian in one show at a comedy club. He estimates that since his first appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ in 1981, five years into his career, he has appeared 20 to 25 times and has been

on ‘Late Night with David Letterman’ about as often. At 33, he says, “I don’t look back on my youth wishing to be younger ever. To me, life just gets better.”

Jerry Seinfeld couldn’t be happier with the career he has chosen. “College to me was four years of going, ‘I hate this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t like this. I might as well just do what I want which is to be a comedian even if I fail at it, which is what I was fully expecting to do … I thought, ‘Why not just have fun your whole life?’”

He spoke of making his choice to be a comedian even if he couldn’t earn a living doing it, “and it turns out you can make money too, so I’m very happy with the whole thing.”

The following are excerpts from the interview I conducted with Seinfeld last week following his appearance at Catch a Rising Star: Q) Do you get nervous before doing a show?

A) If you’ve got the people there and they can hear me and they can see me, I’m not nervous. It’s when there’s something out of my control [that I get nervous].

Q) When you’re feeling down before a show, how do you become funny on demand?

A) Their laughter. You can do a couple of jokes on automatic pilot, but when you start to hear the audience laugh, that changes your mood. I can’t feel bad when I’m getting laughs… You learn over the years how to do it. You just leave your

problems at the stage and you pick them up when you’re done. They’ll be there when you get off, but for this hour, everything’s great in my life.

Q) Do you do anything to warm up for a show? Anything superstitious?

A) A shower… I like to take a shower … and put on clean underwear.

Q) What do you see yourself doing in the future?

A) Better.

Jerry Seinfeld remains a likable character on and off the stage. On stage he allows us to laugh at ourselves, reminding us of the silly things we do each day but that we would never really admit to ourselves. Off stage, he has a lot of respect for his fans. When our interview was interrupted by a drunken fan banging on the door, he said, “That’s the other side of alcohol. I’m sure he’s not a bad guy.”

He really likes his fans and the feeling is mutual.

Jerry Seinfeld’s career has been advancing for eleven years, and if he can maintain his down-to-earth attitudes about his profession, he will have audiences crying with laughter for many years to come. In his own words, “To me, a ‘comedy star’ is an oxymoron. There shouldn’t really be any such thing… I think success is the poison of comedy. As you make it, you start to lose that hunger, you start to lose that

ALAN LIGHT / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Jerry Seinfeld is pictured at the 44th Primetime Emmy Awards on Aug. 30, 1992.

drive that you’ve got to prove something, you’ve got to really prove you’re funny every night. If you lose that, you erode the foundation that got you there… Joan Rivers, case and point.”

“If you enjoy getting a laugh enough, comedy is the right career. I never get tired of it.”

From the Archives: Tracy Chapman: ‘I sing because I like it’

by Rhonda Bell Staff Writer

This article originally appeared in the Nov. 18, 1982, edition of The Tufts Daily.

The crowd applauded wildly. Even loyal friends and relatives of the opponents hesitated at first, but then humbly acquiesced to the to the common verdict. “Tracy, Tracy, Tracy,”, roared the crowd. What was all the raucous excitement about? Yes, it was a Saturday night and surely that contributed to the raised decibels in MacPhie Pub. Nevertheless, on any night of the week, a certain degree of noise would be generated.

The base of this hubbub lay in two words: Tracy Chapman.

The name may not be immediately familiar, or distantly for that matter.

Chapman is in her freshman year at Tufts.

So what is all the pandemonium about, this Tracy Chapman, a mere Jackson freshgirl?

Easy question … she sings.

“I sing because I like it. It’s a form of expression. Some people write poetry, some people draw cartoons, and I sing.”

And sing she does. At the Tufts Annual Student/Faculty Talent Show, Chapman won first prize. Although she contested her talent against fourteen other worthy opponents, she triumphed considerably. Don Klein, of Spirit, noted, “Tracy was only the 2nd in a lineup of 15 acts, but you could tell the way the audience received her, that she was the obvious winner.”

Chapman entertained the Pub audience with two of her own compositions. The first song, entitled “Baby, Can I Hold You?” seized her listeners’ attention, preparing them for her second song which remains untitled. Accompanying herself on her guitar, Chapman won the audience over with her originality, style and talent.

Composing music is not new to Chapman. She has written over 200 songs, including both lyrics and melody, for her guitar. Obviously, Chapman considers her music to be more than a diminutive hobby, she has been playing the guitar since she was 12 years old, but began to seriously focus on it during her high school years. “I attended the Wooster School, I took guitar

lessons for a year, but I basically taught myself.” Chapman disclosed an engaging anecdote, about how she acquired her present Fender guitar. “I played for a lot of students at Wooster, but I had a cheap guitar. Pretty soon, word got around and the Chaplain wanted to hear me play. He advised me to get a good guitar. It just so happened that one of my good friends’ family had a multitude of guitars. He loaned me a guitar for about a month. Toward the end of the month, I returned Martin’s guitar, but was determined to get a decent one for myself. My mother came up with $100 for the guitar, but the Chaplain noted that I couldn’t get a decent guitar for that amount of money. I looked around anyway, but finally agreed that $100 wouldn’t do the job.

One day, the Chaplain asked me to come to his office and he presented me with a check for $272. It so happened that I’d been playing at chapel services and school coffeehouses. The money came from the Chaplain and his wife, the school administration and faculty.”

With the check, Chapman travelled to New York City to purchase the guitar she presently owns.

Chapman’s interest in singing begins even prior to her interest in the guitar. She noted that her singing goes back to before she can really remember, adding, “When you’re a little kid, you sing a lot, but people don’t think of you as having a really great voice, but … I made a lot of noise.”

Chapman, when asked whether she has studied professionally, answered, “No, but in grade school, I was in the choir. I hated it. I didn’t like what we sang and I didn’t like the choir director. I guess it’s left an impression on me. Now, I shy away from choirs and things like that.”

Chapman’s mother was a first soprano in a band. She sang both gospel music and lounge music. “I sang a lot of the stuff that she sang,” but Chapman refuses to attribute her interest to maternal influence.

Chapman writes songs and although she does not exactly pinpoint a singular reason for this interest, she often reflects on her music.

“I started writing (music) when I was 12. I was writing poetry before then.

Unfortunately, I don’t write poetry anymore, but now I write songs.”

When questioned if Chapman considers her song composing as setting poetry to music, she immediately said, “No, I don’t.

They are different.” She continued on, “For anyone who wants their ideas expressed in this country, poetry isn’t a great vehicle. I think it’s something like 3% of the population who read poetry. Poetry calls for the actual reading, attention … but with songs, you can do anything while you listen.”

Chapman does not follow impulse when writing songs. “I guess I’m inspired by people and events I see, but I write about ideas or emotions. It’s what the word inspiration implies. It’s hard to explain. It’s when I see something or hear something happen. I think … I’d like to write a song on it. Or later on, I reflect on it. It just happens … It just is.”

Although she believes that she can relay emotions of others in her music, Chapman does not think that she tries to deliver messages through her music. “It’s just that you can become anything or see anything. You don’t really have to have done it. It comes to the fact, that you can fabricate. Other people who don’t create, don’t do that. They really do … They just keep it to themselves in their dreams and their daydreams…”

“People always ask why my songs are always sad. I think it’s just that it’s easiest to write depressing things because when you’re happy, when you’re feeling good about yourself, you don’t feel a need to write because you’re active, you’re involved in something. When you become depressed or frustrated, your writing … it seems to understand whatever it is that’s depressing or frustrating you. ”When I write, I write often times of a need to understand something.”

Chapman commented that although she prefers to sing her own compositions, she does sing renditions of recognized tunes. “Whenever, I’m asked to perform, and people ask to listen to the stuff that I write, I do. When they aren’t willing, I sing things that I like.”

When asked if she could categorize her style of composing Chapman

admitted, “No, not really. I’d like to think that every song I write is different than another song. I guess if you wanted to call it something that everyone else could know what you were talking about, I would call it a cross between fold and blues.”

That response triggered yet another factor in Chapman’s music, does it possess any similarities with the music of musicians whom she admires?

“No. In fact, I, Tracy Chapman, own six albums. I do listen to more but that’s not many albums for someone who considers herself a musician.”

“One of my all time favorites is Joan Armatrading, also James Taylor, Billy Joel … I guess basically one of the reasons why I don’t own that many albums because well, I appreciate their styles and the music they produce … but commercialization … they try to sell you, not your music, you know, posters and sensationalizing articles. The way they talk about their private likes and dislikes.”

Chapman responded to an inquiry of whether or not an interview was too personal for her. “Well, not really, because I’m ultimately in control of what I want you to know. There’s no way a person can get himself or herself trapped in an interview. Either you answer a question, or you don’t.”

Chapman seeks higher stakes in her musical quest, but remains apprehensive about the possibility of a musical career. “I like playing and performing for the most part, but they’re millions of other people who like to do those things too … who want to be famous.”

Chapman disclosed that she was offered a contract by a small recording company this past summer. “I didn’t take it for several reasons. I would have had to pay for part of it. I would have had to promote their records. I had already signed myself away to attend Tufts. I decided to take a safer route because college was definite, and I didn’t really trust them.”

tuftsdaily.com

Opinion Letters to the Editor

Daily’s growth mirrors Tufts The origin of the Daily mirrors the growth, development and regeneration of the Tufts community and campus itself.

The paper was founded in the aftermath of its precursor (a paid subscription nightly newsletter) going defunct. Just as that newsletter was deficient to students’ needs on campus, the physical campus itself was insufficiently meeting the needs of its vibrant student body. Imagine no campus center, no cultural arts center, a theater smaller than many high schools boast and a gymnasium stuck in the 1950s. Just as a major capital campaign began to rejuvenate our campus, and then University President Jean Mayer brought national attention and prestige to campus, the Daily was born.

The early days were humble and typo-ridden. A handful of contributors were writing, editing, typing and laying out content five nights a week, rushing to meet the press deadline. We struggled to get out four pages on time and got really excited when there was enough content and advertising for twelve. By spring of 1981, 16 pages was the norm and our unpublished motto twas “All the News that Fits.”

The more important story is the reason the Daily has flourished and evolved into the incredible media product it has become forty years later. And that is the continuity of the foundational principle that drove us in the beginning. Dedication to serve the Tufts community with timely content that is meaningful, accurate and worthy of its audience.

-Bill Frechtman (LA’81), the Daily’s founding editor in chief Congratulations!

Forty years! Hard to believe that much time has passed – and that much newsprint has rolled through the presses – since the first thin issue of the Tufts Daily landed in the dining halls and dorm lobbies of Tufts University. Having been there at the paper’s birth midway through my sophomore year (and having worked at its precursor, Today Tufts, as well), it’s a thrill to see the Daily has not just survived, but thrived.

It was a far-from-perfect product we put out in those first semesters, but I don’t think we ever missed an issue, and we had a great time being the upstarts who churned out a scrappy and snappy Daily with “All he News that Fits.” In short order, the Daily page count grew from a single folded sheet (four pages) to as many as 24 with a special entertainment section. Working with just an Olivetti electronic typewriter (State of the art! You could see almost a whole sentence on the little screen before hitting “print”!), a Polaroid camera, a Kroy Type machine for headlines, lots of sheets of Letraset (look it up, kids) with all sorts of fonts and images and a heated wax roller to make it all stick to the page, the creative denizens of the Curtis Hall basement compiled the first rough draft of Jumbo history. Or at least something that could entertain and inform students and staff while they drank the dining hall coffee that — if memory serves — was rated the worst java in all of Greater Boston.

So happy 40th anniversary, Tufts Daily!

Congrats to all the current and past staff, and best wishes to those who no doubt

will keep the paper going for many years to come.

-Art Charlton (LA’82), editor in chief fall 1981 Daily exemplifies good journalism Thanks to the Tufts Daily, I barely graduated. My GPA looked like a typo. But when I interviewed for jobs, no one cared: They just couldn’t believe what we had done with the resources we had. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a damn miracle.

I’ve since worked in national news and I keep learning the same lesson: You won’t find a smarter, more passionate, more driven cohort in any newsroom. Sure, we had some clunkers (ask me), but if you make it into national news, especially TV, you’ll find that the clunkers are running the show (ask me).

What I loved most — aside from our team — was that we were outsiders; the way journalists are supposed to be. We had disdain for too many things, it’s true. We were sometimes nihilistic or dismissive.

But we had the mistrust of power and institutions that pumps through the veins of all good journalists.

We need more of that spirit in journalism today. And we need to apply it to journalism itself. The fact that journalism is under attack today should not make our defense of it unquestioning. It should inspire us not just to do journalism better as it’s defined, but to redefine it as something better.

And what better place for aspirational idealism than college? The Tufts Daily and Tufts University have given hundreds of aspiring journalists the opportunity to honor that mistrust of power, to hone the tools with which we express it and to fail — non-fatally making the mistakes necessary for any decent learning process.

And oh my god was it fun.

Thank you to both institutions for all of it, for letting me be a part of it, and for making it a part of me.

-Jonathan Larsen (LA’88), editor in chief spring 1988 Reflections from a photo editor The Tufts Daily was my home on the Hill. I arrived on campus in the fall of 1986 with no prior newspaper experience, but a general love of photography. After nervously attending a meeting for students interested in contributing to the Daily, I was given some photography assignments and started working shifts in the darkroom. I absolutely fell in love with everything about the Daily and got more heavily involved. I met wonderful people who took pride in their work and were tirelessly dedicated to high-quality journalism. Friendships and connections blossomed, and I enjoyed the time I spent with my Daily colleagues both on and off duty. As time went on, I became increasingly involved in the photography department and ended up serving as photography editor in the spring of my junior year. During my years at Tufts, the Daily was my anchor, the one constant thing in my life. I felt great pride in playing a role in the smallest university in the country to publish an independent daily newspaper.

It has been many years since graduation, but my personal stash of front page photos still makes the cut every time I move or try to downsize. Working at The Tufts Daily was one of the most important and formative

experiences of my college life. Happy 40th anniversary to our wonderful newspaper!

-Maureen O’Brien Klautky (LA’90), former Daily photo editor The Daily kept pace with media changes The Daily started at a time before CNN, before the Internet, before social media, when print media was central to our culture. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the print edition was the main way people on campus got their news, including both campus and national news, and set the pace for student and faculty conversation.

The Daily has not stood still. It has flexed with the times and embraced digital media, including Facebook, Instagram, podcasts and more. Print and digital media remain a key channel for more reflective thought that provide an important way for people to connect and shape everyday culture. The Daily also allows students at Tufts to build their skills in ways that extend beyond writing and journalism, including business operations, production, design and leadership. Thanks to today’s Daily staff, who juggle their academic work with the enormous job of running a daily paper, recruiting new participants and evolving its role, they are keeping the spirit of the Daily going strong.

-Bob Goodman (LA’91), editor in chief spring 1990 The importance of humor Forty. That is how many cartoons I’ve pitched. All forty of them (except for a few that didn’t make it to print, perhaps considered a bit too depraved) fill my room like a walk-in archive. Cartooning gives me the freedom to conflate the serious with the trivial, rendering the serious as more or less trivial at the inflection point of humor conceived as a thought experiment. I often position my cartoons at the crossroads of storytelling, humor and the mix of mundane in the crazy, the insanity in the ordinary; so naturally they end up a bit scathing but not explosive, witty but with just the right amount of kick (or not, and that’s okay too). Laughter can be a byproduct of humor, but it is not necessarily its end goal. Baudelaire said that laughter is natural to humans (he also said that it is satanic), and I think making fun of and being made fun of are essential to living. The Daily has given me the space to explore this aspect of living and the platform to cultivate my voice and experiment with styles (Mankoffian pointillism, not my forte; Venn diagrams, my forte). Fewer and fewer newspapers and magazines provide the real estate for cartoons even though the social commentaries they bring to the table are more pertinent now than ever. MAD folded last year, and the New York Times no longer publishes daily political cartoons in its international edition at a time when we especially need them for the sake of our collective sanity. I’d like to think that our campus newspaper and its cartoonists are doing their part in the greater discourse while tossing in a bit of humor as a treat.

-Nasrin Lin, senior and Opinion cartoonist at the Daily The value of the Daily My school day does not start without the Daily. The blinding smell of ink and the feel of feather-paper against my fingertips are familiar friends. A copy is always close

9

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

by. I’ll argue with my peers about leads, raise my eyebrows at three-star reviews and quote columns at lunch. So much can happen in 24 hours.

It is thanks to a relentless team of student-journalists that Tufts has a strong sense of self. Student publications are living records of young people at the forefront of the times questioning the world around them. That’s the power of keeping record: we document what our passions and concerns are now.

Years down the road, a student will dig through the archives and glimpse back at us — at our efforts at divestment, our disappointment with Oscar nominations and our unravelling of the university’s relationship with the Sacklers.

This is who we are.

And Tufts students are not perfect.

That’s another beauty of student publications — they make mistakes and learn from them. And this pursuit of knowledge, need for discourse and devotion towards documentation are what makes our campus news publications distinctive. So yes, exercise active readership by criticizing the Daily, but also continue to read and support it. Independent print news sources are quickly losing their footing in a world stooped towards living online. I ask you to consider how lucky we are to control what news we ingest, to know what journalistic standards to which our writers hold themselves accountable and to have a local news source untainted by big money interests.

We don’t know the value of things before we lose them. For me, the Daily signifies a consideration of all things past, present and future: a capsule of autonomy that I can hold in my own hands, to be read with my own eyes.

Akbota Saudabayeva, sophomore and PoPro editor at the Tufts Observer Take time to reflect The Daily abides. This auspicious anniversary affords an opportunity to stumble down memory lane and dredge up those early days. But truth be told, after four decades I still cannot see a nugget of sweet and sour chicken without being transported to the basement of Curtis Hall to recall those many nights spent eating takeout while slapping together the next day’s edition.

Once I had my heroes, once I had my dreams. We should take a moment to remember some heroes who helped the Daily take its first steps, like Louie the Printer, who would stop by the office to collect our paste-up pages and transport them to his pressman job at the Harvard Crimson, while offering sage advice that helped us persevere. Or the Crimson staff for tolerating our use of their presses. Or on a more personal note, the bands who played MacPhie Pub and consented to interviews for our column.

If I may offer some advice to the Daily staff of today, and to their college cohort: consume as much live music as possible, but always keep some earplugs at the ready, and use them. Down the road you might think back fondly on your college days, but you’ll miss your hearing more. And to the Daily itself, as Seneca said, “Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.”

-Chuck Chandler, staff writer from 1981 –82

The Tufts Daily is a nonprofit, independent newspaper, published Monday through Friday during the academic year, and distributed free to the Tufts community.

The content of letters, advertisements, signed columns, cartoons and graphics does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Tufts Daily editorial board.

EDITORIALS Editorials represent the position of The Tufts Daily. Individual editors are not necessarily responsible for, or in agreement with, the policies and editorials of The Tufts Daily.

OP-EDS The Op-Ed section of The Tufts Daily, an open forum for campus editorial commentary, is printed Monday through Thursday. The Daily welcomes submissions from all members of the Tufts community; the opinions expressed in the Op-Ed section do not necessarily represent the opinions of the Daily itself. Opinion articles on campus, national and international issues should be 600 to 1,200 words in length and submitted to opinion@tuftsdaily.com. The editors reserve the right to edit letters for clarity, space and length. All material is subject to editorial discretion and is not guaranteed to appear in the Daily. Authors must submit their telephone numbers and day-of availability for editing questions.

ADVERTISING All advertising copy is subject to the approval of the Editor-in-Chief, Executive Board and Executive Business Director.

10

THE TUFTS DAILY | Opinion | Tuesday, February 25, 2020

tuftsdaily.com

Letter from the Managing Board: Celebrating 40 years Today marks four decades since the founding of The Tufts Daily. In this time, over 1,800 members of our masthead have worked to put rigorous, ethical and community-oriented journalism into print every weekday for 40 years, covering daily life at Tufts and the various milestones along the way. We are humbled to be at the helm of this great institution as it celebrates its 40th anniversary.

In a panel discussion organized by our Outreach team last October, members of the Daily, including ourselves, heard what the office and newspaper was like in past decades. These stories gave us a special chance to reflect on how things have changed, but also stayed the same. Katie Cohen (LA’00) told us about rushing to develop photographs in a darkroom in West Hall for the next day’s paper. Others spoke about delivering the paper in person late at

night to the printer in Harvard Square on pages written on a stenotype. Afterwards, they’d eat IHOP. Their stories are examples of the Daily staff’s commitment to serving the Tufts community. While many digital inventions have now revolutionized our editorial process, the unparalleled nightly work ethic of our dedicated staff persists.

Forty matriculations and commencement issues have passed through the pages of the Daily. In that time, the Daily has earned its status as the smallest independent daily university newspaper in the country. Being one of the few opportunities for aspiring journalists at Tufts, the Daily prides itself on training a new generation of writers on the importance of representing individuals and stories that may not have a platform elsewhere. Looking forward to the next 40 years, our independent status will continue to be crucial in

driving the unique content published by members of our News, Features, Arts & Living, Opinion, Sports, Investigative and Audio sections.

The mark of good journalism is to not just cover what is happening in a given community, but rather to highlight what people are doing to address common concerns and to pull citizens into civic life. This stems from the idea of the newspaper as a way to inform the public on public issues, but it goes a step forward by acknowledging that a newspaper is a medium for civic engagement and collective debate.

The Daily has proven itself to rise to the occasion of providing a forum for debate and publishing stories that are rooted in the concerns of its community. A good newspaper not only informs the public, but also connects citizens to the broader community.

The Daily, however, serves the additional function of introducing students to the field of journalism, opening the doors to the nature and purpose of the profession.

Whether one intends to pursue a career in journalism after graduating, the Daily introduces students to standard journalistic practices and values, which prove vital regardless of future ambitions: leadership, strong communication skills and empathy. These are the values that make for engaged, thoughtful citizens.

Thank you for joining us in celebrating 40 years of compelling journalism.

Sincerely, Ryan Shaffer, Editor in Chief Alex Viveros, Managing Editor Nathan Kyn, Managing Editor Kristina Marchand, Production Director Tys Sweeney, Associate Editor

B

c i g

o m d h d n

t

Are you interested in a major or minor in Earth and Ocean Sciences???

Come to our Open House Thursday, Feb. 27 12:30 PM Room 7, Lane Hall Lunch provided (or bring your own) Tufts Geology students at Canyonlands, 2010

Presentation: Major programs Geology and Geoscience minors Careers in Geology

N at

ural Res ources ural Wond ers N at

Sports

Tuesday, February 25, 2020 | Sports | THE TUFTS DAILY

11

From 1980 to today, Jumbos have dominated, as athletics has grown

ALEXIS SERINO / THE TUFTS DAILY

Bill Gehling, John Casey and Don Mergele pose for a portrait in Cousens Gymnasium on Feb. 20.

ATHLETICS

continued from page 12 ics: last year, Giving Tuesday, for example, generated over $450,000.

“When I was coaching, we never had any of that stuff,” Megerle said. “If we needed money, we would talk to an alum who was doing well and had some affluence, and he’d send us a check for a few thousand dollars to get us through the season. But now, fundraising is a big deal.”

As teams got more opportunities to win on a national scale, publicity

increased, as did fundraising and administrative support, so more alumni became involved, which in turn improved the athletic facilities.

“It was almost like critical mass, like a snowball rolling down a hill,” Gehling said.

“All these things just came together.”

What makes them stick around Both academically and athletically, Tufts has been a breeding ground of sorts for coaches who move on to Div. I schools. In the past year alone, men’s soccer coach Josh Shapiro left for Harvard and women’s

basketball coach of 17 years Carla Berube left for Princeton.

“It’s rare that somebody at this level leaves because they aren’t doing well,” Megerle said. “They leave for something better.”

But there is a solid contingent of coaches who have dominated throughout the past 20 years, as Tufts has grown to become one of the top Div. III teams in the nation.

Field hockey coach Tina Mattera, women’s soccer coach Martha Whiting (LA’93), men’s and women’s swimming and diving coach Adam Hoyt, men’s basketball coach

Bob Sheldon, women’s track and field and cross country coach Kristen Morwick and volleyball coach Cora Thompson (LA’99, AG’01) have all built successful programs over their decade-spanning tenures as Jumbos.

“We very intentionally hired coaches who not only are terrific coaches, masters of the sport and all that, but they are really good team builders,” Gehling said. “They are really good at understanding why a place like Tufts invests in athletics.”

Now-retired coaches such as Branwen Smith-King, women’s track and field and cross country coach from 1982 to 2000 and assistant director of athletics from 2000 to 2017, and Nancy Bigelow, women’s swimming and diving head coach from 1982 to 2015, also defined greatness in the past 40 years of Tufts athletics.

“For all that she was a soft-spoken gal, she had some great athletes,” Megerle said about Smith-King.

Something in the Jumbo culture evidently keeps these coaches around for a long time, which other schools can struggle with. For Casey, it has been the value placed on individuals.

“My feeling about this place from day one was that it was always about people,” Casey said. “I think there are a lot of institutions that are about the institution, and not necessarily about people. That’s always been Tufts’ strong point.”

Looking back at more than four decades, it is hard for people like Gehling not to get a little sentimental.

“You look back and you realize what kind of an impact this whole endeavor has had on the students and on [us],” Gehling said. “It’s been a wonderful ride.”

12 Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Sports

Looking back on 4 decades of Tufts athletics

by Jake Freudberg

Executive Sports Editor

Don Megerle’s office stands out, to say the least.

Tucked into a third-floor suite at 80 George St., Megerle’s office is a sensory overload: aside from the various decorations and string lights, hundreds of photos as well as certificates and honors, cover every inch of the walls both inside and outside the office.

Megerle started his career at Tufts as the men’s swimming coach in 1971, a position he held for over three decades before transitioning to become the director and coach of the Tufts University President’s Marathon Challenge in 2004. After 49 years as a Jumbo, Megerle’s life is up on his walls.

“I stuck around because I never thought that I wanted something better,” Megerle said. “I always felt that better is here …

Polish this a little better. Make this a little better. Make your office your home. And that’s what I’ve done.”

Megerle is not alone in his longevity in Tufts athletics. Four people currently employed by the university have been involved in athletics since the Daily began sports coverage in 1980.

John Casey (LA’80), currently the baseball head coach and associate director of athletics, played baseball and football as an undergraduate. He returned as an assistant coach a year after graduation before securing the head coaching position in 1984 and taking on an administrative role in 2001.

Bill Gehling (A’74, AG’79) played men’s soccer as a student and coached women’s soccer from 1979 until he was promoted to director of athletics in 1999. He led the department as athletic director from 1999 to 2015 and now works in University Advancement as a senior advisor and interim executive director of alumni relations.

Additionally, sailing coach Ken Legler has held his position since 1980, although sailing is not an NCAA sport.

Casey, Gehling and Megerle were quick to point out that athletics at Tufts have always been great. But through those more than 40 years, Tufts as an overall institution has changed reputationally.

“As the reputation grows and more people see Tufts as a great destination, that includes great athletes who are also great students,” Gehling said.

And alongside that growing reputation was a wealth of other factors — including a new restructuring of the NESCAC and NCAA, Title IX, administrative support, facilities improvements, fundraising and dedicated coaches — that together solidified the Jumbos’ top spot in athletics.

The ’70s, ’80s and ’90s: New opportunities Under the leadership of Athletic Director Rocky Carzo, who served in that position from 1974 to 1999, Tufts navigated its way through a changing landscape of athletics through the 1980s and 1990s. “[Carzo] got the ship going in the right direction in so many ways,” Casey said. “If you ever saw this place more than 40 years ago, you wouldn’t recognize it.”

Tufts had been a member of the NESCAC since 1971, but the conference was not as centralized as today. Individual schools used to make their own schedules — often with games against non-NESCAC Bostonarea schools such as Boston University and Harvard University — and there were no conference standings or championships, according to Gehling.

Presidents of NESCAC schools saw athletics as important but wanted to keep them within their “proper bounds.” In other

words, academics came first; athletics were an additional, but not crucial, part of the NESCAC experience.

“When I went to school, athletics at Tufts were across the tracks, both literally and figuratively,” Gehling said. “They were just kind of an afterthought. There were some great athletes and some great teams, but it really didn’t have much focus.”

But slowly the NESCAC, which was originally focused on football, grew and became a more solidified conference through the 1980s as administrators began to see the place of athletics programs as crucial extracurricular activities — a core guiding principle of the conference to this day.

“That’s an argument I’ve been making for a while,” Gehling said. “[Athletics are] part of the overall experience, and that’s not just athletics, it’s all the outside the classroom types of things that you care about …

For the university to flourish, the university has to celebrate that and embrace that as part of the overall experience.”

Importantly, Title IX, which was passed in 1972, required institutions like Tufts to provide equitable opportunities for women’s sports. Prior to Title IX, Gehling explained that Carzo oversaw two separate athletics programs, one for Tufts College, the men’s school, and one for Jackson College, the women’s school. Many of the Title IX changes did not come until the late ’70s, when Gehling was first hired as women’s soccer coach.

Meanwhile, the NCAA three-division system, initially established in 1973, was gaining more traction nationwide, which began to stratify athletic talent and funding.

But, a NESCAC rule largely prohibited teams from competing in national championships until 1993, so most teams competed in the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) tournaments, if anything. Similarly, NESCAC tournaments did not exist for most sports until 2000.

To compare the 11 team national championships and 54 NESCAC championships that the Jumbos have won in recent years to seasons in the 1980s and say that athletics have exploded off the charts ignores the larger narrative.

“When you try to compare eras, everyone gets into trouble because it’s just not the same,” Casey said. “It’s tough to compare things that aren’t the same.”

Sports information and media were other important factors throughout the ’80s and ’90s that gave Tufts athletics more notoriety. Current Director of Athletics Communications Paul Sweeney was hired in 1993, replacing previous sports information directors, who — as Megerle put it eloquently — “didn’t know left from right.” With schedules, statistics and rosters publicly available, fans, other teams and, importantly, prospective students, began to recognize the success that had always been present at Tufts. The Daily’s coverage beginning in 1980, too, bolstered awareness of athletics, replacing the once-a-week Tufts Observer.

“The biggest thing, and I think the Daily gets credit for this, is that people have much more awareness about what these student athletes are doing,” Casey said.

“And a lot of the stuff they do is pretty incredible.”

The 2000s: Presidential fans, new facilities Increased support from former university presidents and current University President Anthony Monaco also spurred the growth of athletics in Jumboland.

tuftsdaily.com

COURTESY JAKE FREUDBERG / THE TUFTS DAILY

“[University] President [John] DiBiaggio was the first president, if you ask me, to recognize the importance of athletics at Tufts,” Casey said. “He just knew that Tufts had it right in the perspective that it was part of the student experience — it wasn’t bigger, but it was important. He had come from Michigan State [University], so he had seen the other side of it being blown out of proportion.”

After DiBiaggio stepped down as president in 2001, Lawrence Bacow was hired as university president. While making himself a more accessible figure on campus, Bacow enthusiastically supported athletics. “[Bacow] brought a breath of fresh air,” Megerle said. “He was very personable, he would go to the games, he would welcome people into his office. Wherever you went, Larry was there.”

Since Bacow stepped down in 2011, Monaco has continued the administration’s support of athletics. Monaco is often spotted cheering on the Jumbos at games and meets.

Mergele recalled the 2018 men’s swimming and diving NESCAC Championship at Bowdoin, when Monaco drove to Brunswick, Maine to surprise the team after following the results online. “[Monaco] calls me up and says ‘It looks like the men are going to win the championship tonight. Let’s drive up to Bowdoin togeth-

er,’” Megerle said. “Who would do that?”

The impact of the administration’s support has been tangible for student-athletes.

“One [women’s basketball] player said, ‘The coolest thing that I’ve had as an athlete at Tufts it to look up in the stands and see my president watching the game,’” Megerle said. “I mean that’s powerful stuff.

The kids see that.”

And, the administration’s support has led to several facilities improvements, especially in the past 20 years. Under Gehling’s leadership as athletic director, new facilities were built, including Bello Field in 2004, Shoemaker Boathouse in 2006 and the Steve Tisch Sports and Fitness Center in 2012. While the improvements were funded by donors, they were spurred by suggestions of the athletics board of advisors and supported by the administration.

“Walking into the Tisch Center is such an awesome experience compared to what it was before,” Gehling said. “It was reflective of the fact that Tufts was recognizing the need that I don’t think was really recognized before.”

The fundraising that built these new facilities has gone hand-in-hand with the overall growing reputation of the school and the sports teams. Today, fundraising plays a significant role in developing athlet-

see ATHLETICS, page 11