THE
INDEPENDENT
STUDENT
N E W S PA P E R
OF
TUFTS
UNIVERSITY
E S T. 1 9 8 0
VOLUME LXXXIII, ISSUE 20
MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MASS.
tuftsdaily.com
Friday, February 25, 2022
ANNABEL NIED, IRIS YANG AND MICHAEL WU / THE TUFTS DAILY
CMHS keeps up with pandemic Tufts Digital Collections demand, brings on additional providers and Archives unveils 124 years of student media through new collection by Ella Kamm News Editor
Amid a nationwide college mental health crisis, Tufts Counseling and Mental Health Services reports that students are being scheduled to see counselors in a timely fashion, aided in part by the addition of two counselors from outside provider Mantra Health. “CMHS counselors are aware of the challenges of being a college student during the pandemic and in the current racial, environmental, and political climate in the U.S. and the world,” Julie Jampel, CMHS director of training and continuing education director, wrote in an email to the Daily. “We want to be there for the students who want to speak with us and welcome our colleagues from Mantra Health to help meet this n eed.” Jampel said that first appointments with clinicians are currently being scheduled for the following
by Chloe Courtney Bohl Executive News Editor
ELIN SHIH / THE TUFTS DAILY
Sawyer House, the location of Tufts Counseling and Mental Health Services, is pictured. week, a timeline that is typical for CMHS. During particularly busy periods, such as around midterms, appointments may need to be scheduled for a few weeks out. Jampel also said that there is no difference in the quality of mental health services offered by the
Mantra Health clinicians currently employed by CMHS. “All clinicians are highly skilled, licensed mental health professionals and are experienced in working with college students,” Jampel
Tufts, writing about invasive beetles, among other topics. “I thought it was a really fun thing to report on,” Kaplan said. “I got to go into Somerville, meet some Somerville people. [I] went to City Hall, and that kind of started me off on doing some more serious reporting that connected things going on in Tufts’ host communities with our campus community.” Kaplan moved through the ranks of the news section, covering student government, Tufts’ research institutes and Massachusetts state news, before becoming the section’s executive editor in the spring of his sophomore year. It was an intense but rewarding job, Kaplan said, made all the more so when students were sent home after the outbreak of COVID-19.
“Everything that one does as a journalist has two parts,” Kaplan said. “There’s the overt function and the underlying motivation, and so [the pandemic] is where I really began to question the difference between the two in a way that I think we hadn’t been doing a lot at the Daily in quite a while.” Kaplan said that the onset of the pandemic pushed him to reflect on the differences between “reporting for reporting’s sake” versus fulfilling the newspaper’s role as “the bedrock of the active citizenship virtue that Tufts holds so dear.” For the rest of that semester, he and the rest of the news section continued reporting university and local news from afar, publishing digitally amid an unprecedented pandemic.
see CMHS, page 2
Daily veteran Robert Kaplan discusses the role of journalism in a community
by Chloe Courtney Bohl Executive News Editor
One of Robert Kaplan’s first assignments for The Tufts Daily was an article about an invasive beetle that was wreaking havoc upon Somerville’s ash trees in fall 2018. He remembers the story piquing his interest in journalism. “The thing that I was interested in, which wasn’t being addressed by the Somerville Tree Warden — yes, it’s a real job — was ‘what about the trees on Tufts’ campus?’” he said. Kaplan, now a senior, would go on to hold positions such as executive news editor, business director, podcast host and features columnist at the Daily. But he got his start as a contributing writer in the news section during his first year at
see KAPLAN, page 2
Tufts Digital Collections and Archives launched Newspapers @ Tufts, a digital collection of thousands of issues of the Tufts Weekly, the Tufts Observer and the Tufts Daily, in January 2022. The collection documents 124 years of university history through the lens of student media. The digital collection currently contains 6,000 issues of the three student publications totaling around 80,000 pages. DCA is working on digitizing a final batch of 1,900 issues comprising approximately 34,000 pages, at which point the project will be caught up to the present day. Dan Santamaria, director of DCA, said the Newspapers @ Tufts project was born out of DCA’s belief in the potential impact of making past issues of student publications readily accessible to the wider Tufts community. “We’re constantly looking for ways to improve access to the material that’s under our stewardship, and … using staff expertise and judgment about what’s the most
valuable and what would have the most impact,” Santamaria said. “These student publications consistently rise to the top in whatever method that you look at. They’re used a lot for classes, they’re used a lot by archivists trying to answer questions about the university.” Santamaria spoke about the role of student publications as records of university history. “They’re essential documentation of university history because they provide, more than any other source, the student voices about whatever was happening at Tufts at that particular time, on that particular day,” he said. “They balance out the official records that we get from university offices over time.” DCA started planning the Newspapers @ Tufts project in 2018 and began digitizing publications in 2019. Sari Mauro, digital collections project manager for DCA, described the process of digitizing the preexisting physical collection of student publications and creating a platform where users could easily search the collection by publication title, date and keywords. see ARCHIVE, page 2
MINA TERZIOGLU / THE TUFTS DAILY
The physical collection of archived issues of The Tufts Daily are pictured in the Daily’s office in Curtis Hall on Feb. 24.
PHOTOS / page 6
OPINION/ page 10
SPORTS / back
Vibrant views of Tufts’ campus in winter
Jackson College women pave the way for contemporary female journalists at Tufts
Women’s basketball ekes out a victory vs. Wesleyan in NESCAC quarterfinals
NEWS 1 FEATURES 3 ARTS & POP CULTURE 5 PHOTOS 6 FUN & GAMES 9 OPINION 10 SPORTS BACK