NEWS

page 4 Putting midterms to the test page 9 Tufts’ actions fall short of its commitment to DEIJ page 6 Weekender: Killer casting commodifies true crime tragedies NEWS

1 FEATURES 4 ARTS & POP CULTURE 6 FUN & GAMES 8 OPINION 9 SPORTS BACK

THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF TUFTS UNIVERSITY EST. 1980

THE TUFTS DAILY

VOLUME LXXXIV, ISSUE 11

Thursday, November 17, 2022

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MASS.

INVESTIGATIVE ras file petition with National Labor relations board after university denies union recognition

The union bid represents the latest development in a yearslong struggle between university administrators and resident assistants, who now seek recognition from the National Labor Relations Board.

by Ari Navetta

Investigative Writer

Tufts administrators on Wednesday declined to recognize the United Labor of Tufts Resident Assistants (ULTRA), setting back the RAs’ push for benefits like wages, a meal plan and more scheduling flexibility. Within hours, ULTRA responded by filing a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for an election to become the certified bargaining representative of Tufts RAs.

The university’s decision comes despite pressure from Tufts Community Union Senate and the city councils of Medford and Somerville, all of which passed resolutions urging Tufts to recognize ULTRA voluntarily.

Tufts RAs’ bid to form a union comes amid a wave of organizing efforts among undergraduate student workers. Since 2016, unions have formed among student workers at Grinnell College, Dartmouth College and Wesleyan University.

The request came a week earlier, on Nov. 9, when resident assistants walked into Ballou Hall and delivered a letter seeking union recognition from the university. More than 85% of RAs have signed union authorization cards.

What’s next for ULTRA?

Voluntary recognition from the university would have allowed ULTRA to nominate a bargaining committee and begin negotiating with the university right away.

“There is value in making sure that administrators understand the amount of work that goes into this,” junior David Whittingham, an RA and union organizer, said. “If Tufts really does stand by and really does believe in civic engagement and active citizenship … then it would certainly be my hope that they would respect … organizing activities of their students in all forms, including organizing as workers.”

Patrick Collins, executive director of media relations at Tufts, affirmed the university’s support for the RAs to conduct elections through the NLRB.

“We respect our community members’ right to petition the National Labor Relations Board for recognition and to seek an election to decide for themselves whether unionization is in their best interests,” Collins said. “We think it’s fair that all have the opportunity to fully understand their rights and responsibilities in this process, and to cast a vote regardless of their position on the question, and we will respect the outcome of an election held in accordance with the Board’s procedures for an appropriate bargaining unit of Tufts RAs.”

The Wesleyan Union of Student Employees (WesUSE) became the

see UNION, page 3

UNIVERSITY

‘Take back the Night’ walk shows solidarity with sexual assault survivors, highlights campus resources

by Daniel Vos

Assistant News Editor

After a three-year hiatus, Action for Sexual Assault Prevention continued its tradition of holding “Take Back the Night,” a candlelit walk from the Residential Quad to the roof of Tisch Library to show solidarity with survivors on Nov. 15. After the walk, students and speakers from ASAP, the University Chaplaincy, CARE and Ears for Peers gathered to share a variety of on-campus resources.

Members of the ASAP executive board explained in a joint speech at the start of the event how conversations about assault have changed to include a wider variety of experiences.

“Historically, these marches use dichotomies of darkness and light to symbolize the experiences of survivors of sexual assault or sexual violence,” Emily Karasik, a sophomore and co-leader of ASAP’s survivor safe branch, said. “While widely embraced, the

LAUREN ALIOTTA / THE TUFTS DAILY ASAP hosted its “Take Back the Night” event on Nov. 15.

stranger in a dark alley discourse of assault does not capture the majority of survivors’ experiences. In reality, many survivors know their perpetrators.”

The leaders emphasized the event’s focus on engaging the community at large and focusing on community care and healing.

“‘Take Back the Night’ is a reclamation of space. It is a public example of community accountability,” Nick Hoffner, a junior and co-leader of ASAP’s conversations on masculinity, said. “It is not a one-time show of visibility. It is a call to action. We want the legacy of ‘Take Back the Night’ to extend beyond this moment we’ve shared together tonight.”

see ASAP, page 2

UNIVERSITY

Tufts appoints Cigdem Talgar vice provost for education

by Charlotte Chen

Assistant News Editor Originally published Nov. 15.

Tufts announced the appointment of Cigdem Talgar as the vice provost for education, a new position within the Office of the Provost, in an email to the Tufts community on Nov. 3. Talgar’s official start date is Dec. 1.

Talgar comes to Tufts after serving as assistant vice chancellor in the educational innovation division at Northeastern University. Talgar’s background is in psychology.

“Where I am today is a result of merging two different passions, one for advancing research on cognition and attention and the other for evidence-based high-impact teaching and learning,” Talgar wrote in an email to the Daily. “Soon after receiving my doctorate in experimental psychology (specializing in cognition and attention), I was given the opportunity to integrate my research with work in education and pedagogy that was being advanced by my university’s teaching and learning center.”

Talgar said her time at Northeastern has taught her valuable strategies for implementing large-scale holistic educational programs at a university.

“I have built key skills in collaboration, relationship-building, creative solutioning, integrative, transformative and holistic learning, all skills that I believe will help me learn from the Tufts community, collaborate to create new educational opportunities for our students, and build excitement for the work that we will be taking on at Tufts,” Talgar wrote.

Talgar’s position is one among several other vice provost positions that the provost’s office has implemented over the past few years. Caroline Genco, provost and senior vice president ad interim, explained new different roles.

“I have a new position in my office, the vice provost for innovation, who is looking at innovation across education and research. … We’ve created a vice provost for DEIJ as well, so I’m building a team of people who are experts in these

see PROVOST, page 2

Chloe Courtney Bohl Editor in Chief

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ASAP

Continued from page 1

The statement emphasized the importance of restorative justice and vowed to hold spaces for identities disproportionately affected by sexual violence.

“There is no one kind of survivor,” Rowan Hayden, a senior and president of ASAP, said. “We acknowledge the breadth of experiences and identities that survivors claim. We are committed to valuing each and every truth that survivors carry.”

University Chaplain Elyse Nelson Winger then spoke about the resources the chaplaincy provides for anyone affected by sexual misconduct either directly or indirectly.

“We can talk to you about your options for reporting. We can confidentially ask questions on your behalf as you are thinking about what you might want to do,” she said. “But first and foremost, we are here to listen and to respond to whatever you might be feeling. Grief, rage, strength, hope and everything in between.”

Emma Cohen, associate prevention and response specialist and confidential resource at CARE, then spoke about the wide range of students who come in for support.

“Students come in because a friend is going through something, because a roommate is going through something, because they’re a leader in a student [organization] or an athletic team … and they need some support,” she said.

She also explained that CARE will stand with anyone looking to report misconduct at every step.

“I can talk to OEO on your behalf,” she said. “We can call them on speakerphone without sharing your name, sitting in my office if you want some questions answered. If there is some interaction with TUPD, I can be on all those calls. I could come to all those meetings.”

Cohen went on to highlight the lack of sexual health education in American high schools, pointing to the work of Tufts Sex Health Reps to respond.

“This year, only 13% of incoming first years came from states that mandated medically accurate sex ed,” she said. “That’s a whole lot of people who didn’t get great sex ed, and they arrive on our campus not really knowing about healthy relationships, not understanding necessarily how to ask for consent, and a lot of harm can happen in that way without intention.”

Hoffner spoke to the Daily about the specific programs ASAP runs on gender and violence.

“[We engage with] someone of any identifier to come in and discuss some ways in which masculinity impacted your life and also some of the intersections[it has with misconduct and violence, but also just talking about relationships, friendships, [and] the presence that masculinity can have and how it can affect everyone,” he said.

In an interview with the Daily, Hayden mentioned an ongoing program to help educate organizations on sexual assault prevention.

“We have an education outreach branch which hosts workshops for other clubs and groups on campus and the four workshops are consent, bystander intervention, responding to perpetration [and] creating a code of conduct, and responding to disclosures of sexual assaults,” Hayden said.

Talgar assumes newly created role focusing on education

PROVOST

Continued from page 1 fields. … They’re my senior team of vice provosts who oversee these very specific areas across all our schools,” Genco said.

Genco said the position of vice provost for education was created to “[look] at education from the full spectrum of undergraduates all the way to graduate and professional students [and] coordinate it so that we have this one Tufts education.”

Talgar described her new role as “a combination of collaborative vision building and leveraging the community’s expertise and creativity to build inclusive, holistic, interdisciplinary, and transformative learning opportunities and pathways at the institution.”

While Talgar has not started her new job yet, she has begun thinking about her first steps of action.

“The most important project for me as I start this position will be to get to know the University and to begin to learn from colleagues and students,” Talgar wrote. “Tufts has a rich history and strong culture that centers on impact. This is one of the things that attracted me to the University and this specific position.”

Vice Provost Kevin Dunn, who works primarily in faculty recruitment and retention, discussed his responsibilities and how they will overlap with Talgar’s.

“I think that the two positions will need to be in constant collaboration,” Dunn wrote in an email to the Daily. “To give an example, CELT, the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching, obviously is an educational endeavor, but it’s also part of faculty development, and my office has a great deal of interest in the work of the Center.”

Talgar described the challenges she foresees facing with the start of her new job, noting that because the position is newly created, “different individuals might have different understandings about what the person in this role will be doing.”

“One of the most important parts of my first few months is to build out the role in a way that will best serve the institution as we position it for the future,” Talgar wrote.

Dunn shared his excitement to begin working with Talgar alongside the other vice provosts.

“Dr. Talgar is a highly qualified and collegial person who will be well-positioned to advance our educational efforts across the university,” Dunn wrote. “I’m truly looking forward to working with her.”

Talgar expressed enthusiasm for beginning her new role and joining the Tufts community.

“To be able to collaboratively build and implement a vision for learning, I will want to partner with people across the university to ensure that the vision we develop represents where we want our [students] to go and the impact that we want them to have on them,” Talgar wrote.

Ballou Hall is pictured on Oct. 18, 2020.

ANN MARIE BURKE / THE TUFTS DAILY

UNIVERSITY

students and professors recap election results, political momentum, key ballot issues in panel discussion

by Ava Autry

Assistant News Editor

Professor Jeffrey Berry and Associate Professor Kelly Greenhill of the political science department spoke at a panel entitled “What Happens Next? Understanding Election Results” in conjunction with Tufts Democrats and Tufts Republicans on Nov. 14. The panel focused on major winners and losers of election night, the likelihood of bipartisan compromise in Congress and the local, national and international implications of the election results.

Isabella Getgey, a political science and SMFA combined-degree student, moderated the panel by directing questions toward the professors as well as the student contributors, Tufts Republicans member Andrew Butcher and Tufts Democrats members Neelan Martin and Mark Lannigan, in a roundtable discussion format.

The discussion opened with each panelist’s summation of the key issues on the ballot this election cycle, and how those issues served as motivating factors for voting.

“For our membership [within Tufts Republicans] and for conservatives more broadly, one of the number one issues was the economy and inflation,” Butcher said.

The panelists representing Tufts Democrats pointed to ideological issues — particularly those challenged in the Supreme Court since the last election — as factors that drove larger than expected voter turnout.

“Democrats … have overperformed expectations,” Lannigan said. “I think that’s largely due to underestimation of the role that reproductive justice has played in the midterms. Reproductive rights are big for Democratic voters, especially for Gen Z voters who came out in a really big way for Democrats, especially Gen Z women.”

After the initial conversation about the results, Getgey shifted the topic to the ‘red wave’ predicted by many pollsters — the idea that the Republicans would take back the house by a landslide. Berry reflected on why such a wave did not materialize despite the Republican party’s efforts towards this result.

“First of all, the red wave was a mirage,” Berry said. “One thing that Republicans did that was really dumb was that they helped to propagate this idea that there was a red wave coming, and they actually paid for polling firms to do polls to show that the Republicans were going to do better. Usually in politics you want to lowball expectations.”

A few panelists spoke to the lessons learned about the platforms of the two major parties from this midterm election.

University decision to deny union recognition comes despite pressure from TCU Senate, local city councils

Resident assistants and supporters marched to Ballou Hall on Nov. 14, calling on Tufts to voluntarily recognize their union. Tufts declined their request two days later.

AARON GRUEN / THE TUFTS DAILY

UNION

continued from page 1 first undergraduate student worker union to win voluntary recognition this past March, by entering into a card-check agreement with the university.

At Barnard, undergraduate student workers were denied voluntary recognition after moving to unionize earlier this fall. Barnard students are expected to hold an election through the NLRB Friday.

Employers can contest elections through the NLRB. Resident assistants at George Washington University petitioned the NLRB to unionize in December 2016. University officials appealed the decision on the grounds that being an RA is part of students’ academic experience, not an employee position. The NLRB decided George Washington RAs count as employees of the university and would be eligible to unionize. Shortly before a vote was scheduled to occur, however, the labor group representing the RAs withdrew their petition for an election without consulting RAs, citing the scheduled vote’s proximity to final exams.

If ULTRA wins certification, it will become the bargaining representative for all Tufts RAs — including those who are hired in the future, due to Massachusetts law. The Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU), which represents Tufts RAs, has created a reduced-fees structure for student workers, where each worker is responsible for $270 per year in union dues. The dues go toward things like legal representation and strike payment. RAs hope to negotiate with administrators to receive much more than $270 in the form of a stipend or paycheck from the university, from which union dues would automatically be taken.

How did ULTRA form?

During one week of RA training in late August, summer RAs were expected to work and be on call for as much as 20 hours on some days.

“We would have training from 9 to 5, and then be expected to be making door [decorations] or bulletin boards and preparing for our residents and such, and then they would want us to be on call from nine to nine when training starts at nine,” junior RA Julie Francois said.

The issue, for Francois and other summer RAs, wasn’t only the workload. They’d never agreed to continue their summer jobs concurrent with fall semester training, in what Residential Life and Learning Director Christina Alch described in an email to the Daily as an “oversight” on the part of her office. The contract signed by summer RAs had them working from late May until Aug. 12.

“I would say that [being a summer RA] really burned me out with Res Life, and I had a lot of frustrations with how they were operating,” Francois said.

Francois circulated a Google Form among her coworkers to gauge how they felt about their working conditions. Most of the questions — about workload, pay and training — garnered mixed feedback. Some said it’d be nice to receive more pay and compensation. Others said they were excited to become RAs.

But a question at the bottom of the form gauging interest in forming a union received overwhelmingly positive responses. Whittingham reached out to Francois and offered to help organize the RA workplace. Whittingham has been a longtime member of the Tufts Labor Coalition and attended a conference hosted by LaborNotes, a nonprofit media organization that offers resources to workers on unionization, during the summer of 2022 where he met a Wesleyan student who had helped organize WesUSE.

During RA training in late August, Whittingham began reaching out to unions. On Aug. 26, after organizing a meeting which about half of the approximately 145 RAs attended, RAs decided to work with OPEIU Local 153.

An organizing committee of RAs began meeting weekly with Grace Reckers, lead Northeast organizer with OPEIU, who also represents WesUSE and the Barnard RAs. Organizers began having conversations individually with RAs, working to get a majority of the workplace in support of a union. Once this was achieved, the organizers and Reckers held a meeting on Oct. 23 where RAs began to sign union authorization cards. From there, RAs worked to get as much of the workplace to sign authorization cards as they could, with the goal of requesting voluntary recognition from the university before Thanksgiving.

RAs cite stressful working conditions during pandemic, poor communication from ORLL

During the 2020–21 academic year, RAs reported an increased workload and conditions they said threatened their mental and physical health as a result of responsibilities like enforcing mask mandates and social distancing. According to senior RA Lee Romaker, the university’s housing office struggled to fill resident assistant positions during the pandemic since more RAs were quitting, leaving remaining RAs responsible for more residents than usual.

Alch confirmed RAs were expected to enforce COVID-19 safety policies, and wrote that ORLL communicated about changes the pandemic would bring to the position to RAs during summer 2020, offering RAs the chance to not take the role and still receive housing.

Following RA training for the spring 2021 semester, 48 RAs wrote an email to Josh Hartman, the director of residential life at the time, requesting changes to the position. One of those requests was increased compensation, stemming from the belief that RA compensation did not match the responsibilities that were added to the position during the pandemic. Hartman agreed to help push for increased compensation, but said ORLL did not have the budget to fulfill the request at the time.

The RAs’ email did result in the formation of an RA Council, where RAs can voice concerns to the university. However, according to Francois, the RA Council has been ineffective in addressing the concerns of RAs, and meetings are frequently held during times when many RAs are in class, despite requests to meet at more convenient times.

Alch explained that the council meeting rotates between days of the week, in an effort to accommodate different students’ schedules. “Scheduling meetings for larger groups is always a challenge, particularly when everyone has different schedules and demands,” she wrote.

Frustration over the lack of response from ORLL led some RAs to explore the possibility of unionizing during the spring 2021 semester, but they realized the probability of success was