NEWS

VOLUME LXXXIII, ISSUE 20 MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MASS.

Friday, February 25, 2022

tuftsdaily.com

ANNABEL NIED, IRIS YANG AND MICHAEL WU / THE TUFTS DAILY

CMHS keeps up with pandemic demand, brings on additional providers

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 need.”

Jampel said that first appointments with clinicians are currently being scheduled for the following

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

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 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 KAPLAN, page 2

Tufts Digital Collections and Archives unveils 124 years of student media through new collection

by Chloe Courtney Bohl

Executive News Editor

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 Vibrant views of Tufts’ campus in winter

SPORTS / back

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ARTS & POP CULTURE 5 PHOTOS 6 FUN & GAMES 9 OPINION 10 SPORTS BACK

AlexAnder JAnoff Editor in Chief

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Senior Editors ELIZABETH FOSTER KENDALL ROBERTS

Associate Editors Chloe Courtney Bohl Executive News Editor Delaney Clarke Executive Features Editor Maeve Hagerty Executive Arts Editor Faye Shen Li Thijssen Executive Opinion Editor Makenna Law Editorial Editor Isaac Karp Executive Sports Editor Alex Viveros Investigative and Science Editor Aaron Klein Executive Audio Producer Mina Terzioglu Kiana Vallo Executive Photo Editors Ty Blitstein Executive Video Editor Michael Wu Executive Graphics Editor — PRODUCTION —

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Pandemic-driven isolation, loss, economic hardship main drivers of CMHS demand

CMHS

continued from page 1 wrote. “Like CMHS counselors, counselors from Mantra Health provide therapy within short term treatment models and are familiar with all on-campus resources, including Tufts Deans, the Centers within the Division of Student Diversity and Inclusion, and the StAAR Center, among other resources and offices at Tufts.”

Daniel Schwartz, a sophomore, has called to schedule an appointment with CMHS twice in the past year. The first time, in December, he was able to schedule an appointment with a Mantra Health provider 11 days after his call.

“I think by the end of the semester, there was a lot of demand, and it was pretty crowded,” Schwartz said. “It was a little unfortunate because it was when I needed it the most.”

Schwartz called a second time over winter break and was able to get an appointment for the next day.

Jampel said that CMHS always keeps a set number of appointments open for sameday scheduling.

“A limited number of same day appointments are available to students who need one and can be scheduled by calling CMHS first thing in the morning,” she wrote. “Students with urgent situations or crises will always be seen the same day.”

Schwartz said that securing one of the same-day appointments during busy periods seemed difficult.

“You have to be one of the first callers when they first open, which isn’t the most convenient,” he said.

Theresa Quinto, a sophomore, decided to reach out to CMHS last spring. She had heard that demand had been high and that appointments were difficult to get in the fall, which made her initially hesitant to seek an appointment.

However, after talking to her resident assistant about options for mental health care on campus, she decided to call CMHS. She found the entire process to be user-friendly and appreciated having a list of different providers to familiarize herself with.

“I thought the website that lists all of the counselors there … was very welcoming,” Quinto said. “The people that answered the phone were so nice. Just their tone of voice [made me think] ‘You know what, this is okay … I feel okay.'”

Quinto was able to schedule an appointment for a week or two after her call, and her only request was to be paired with a female-identifying counselor. Quinto was very satisfied with the counselor she met with and appreciated her help with finding more long-term therapy options.

“After the first appointment, it was super easy to book more with the same person,” Quinto said.

In recent years, CMHS has seen a higher number of students accessing its services. Jampel said that this shift has been observed at many colleges and attributes it to both current events and the destigmatization of seeking mental health treatment.

“Students are living in and attending college in very difficult times, including a long-standing pandemic that has brought isolation, loss, and economic hardship to many people,” she wrote. “Also, at Tufts the visibility and accessibility of CMHS has increased over the years, and at the same time, the stigma around needing or accessing mental health care has decreased. Information about and discussions of mental health have proliferated in the media and social media. Public figures–including highly respected athletes from the summer and winter Olympics–have shared their struggles with mental health conditions and have made it easier for everyone to seek the support and care they need.”

Digital archives of student publications preserve university history

ARCHIVE

continued from page 1

“It became clear that we could digitize these newspapers, but the key to making them really useful [was] how you could search them,” Mauro said. “Those two things sort of coincided — our digitization of newspapers with our need for a robust search platform — and became Newspapers @ Tufts.”

The collection begins in 1895 with the inaugural issue of the Weekly and goes on to document the final issue of that publication in December 1968, the emergence of the Observer in January 1969 and the publication of the first issue of the Daily on Feb. 25, 1980.

Santamaria said he noticed the student media landscape evolving over time as worked his way through the Newspapers @ Tufts collection.

“If you look at those early issues of the Weekly [you see] factual stories, a lot of it based on the social life on campus,” he said. “But then as you get into the latter part of the 20th century … there’s a very clear evolution to students seeing themselves more as journalists and having a role in transparency and providing a view on the university and the administration specifically about what’s happening at Tufts.”

Mauro noticed that, especially with physical issues of the Weekly, the content and form of the published issues reflected the historical events surrounding their publication.

“When paper becomes scarce because there’s a war, it becomes fewer pages. And because to digitize, I have to count every page of every issue, I can see that trend happen,” Mauro said. “So there’s this materiality that you can also track as world events impact what’s happening on campus even down to like, how do you produce a newspaper heard during a World War? And [also] just tracking, what are they writing about? What’s making the front page, what isn’t? What’s happening that isn’t mentioned at all? And then how is the production of the paper affected?”

Efforts to collect and archive student publications at Tufts predate the Newspapers @ Tufts project. Luke Allocco (A’21), a former associate editor and outreach coordinator at the Daily, undertook a project of indexing headlines, mastheads and images from past Daily issues in preparation for the paper’s 40-year anniversary in 2020.

“I’ve always been really interested in history,” Allocco said. “Wherever I am, I’m sort of a sponge. I just have this need to know about the history of where I am and what I’m doing.”

Allocco echoed Santamaria’s sentiment that student publications function to preserve university history.

“When researchers are looking back at what the day to day life was like for a student at Tufts in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, or reacting to President Monaco’s retirement, they’re going to come to the Daily, or they’re going to come to the Observer, and they’re going to look in these archives,” Allocco said. Allocco added that archival issues of the Daily help build institutional memory for future writers and editors. “When these big events happen, and when we make changes in the way we do things, sometimes that information gets lost as students graduate and new students come in,” he said. “It’s been really important for us at the Daily as an organization to learn from our history and learn what we’ve done in the past. And I think that helps us make better decisions about where we’re going in the future.” Kaplan recalls accomplishments as executive news editor, business director

KAPLAN

continued from page 1

The following semester, Kaplan became the Daily’s business director, a role he redesigned to address the structural problems and financial needs of the paper in that moment.

“I spent the whole summer doing a diagnosis, an internal research project on the Daily,” Kaplan said. “I got like 12 people involved from across the [executive] and [managing] board, dove deep into what all the problems with the Daily were, we interviewed alumni and so on. And then it culminated in my authoring a 36-item memo that was like, ‘Here’s different problems that [the] Daily has, and ways we can address them.’”

In the end, Kaplan says his “reform agenda” was an overall success. By his count, the paper implemented 30 out of his 36 recommendations including reintroducing special issues, reorganizing ad sales, introducing the Daily’s newsletter and creating the Tufts Daily Alumni Council — all aspects of the Daily that younger readers and writers might have assumed had always existed.

“I think that really reshaped the Daily in a lot of ways,” Kaplan said. “And that’s probably my proudest legacy, even more than my experience as [executive news Editor].”

Kaplan spoke to the difficulty of cultivating institutional memory at an organization such as the Daily, where leadership and membership turn over completely every four years. Some of the changes he implemented targeted this challenge.

“The hope is to give some more continuity over time so we can actually accumulate knowledge [and] experience and, therefore, progress and improve as a paper,” Kaplan said.

After his stint as business director, Kaplan pivoted to a low-stakes and more enjoyable role as host of The Rewind, a Tufts Daily podcast.

“I’ve always been told I had a good podcasting voice, … so that really appealed to my ego,” Kaplan said.

This semester, Kaplan is teaching a course out of the Experimental College designed to help current members of the Daily’s executive and managing boards critically reflect on the work of publishing an independent student newspaper.

Kaplan, who will be graduating this spring, said that teaching the ExCollege course feels like a fitting end to his time at the Daily.

“[The course] facilitates discussions that guide members of the executive and managing boards to coherent and articulate conclusions about their experiential learning as members of Daily leadership in ways that are useful for the Daily, for improving the Daily over time … but also for themselves when they leave the class. Because that’s a timeless skill,” he said.

Kaplan counts professional skills and lifelong friendships among his takeaways from the many positions he has held at the Daily.

“When you spend so much time pouring yourself into something that you love, it’s only natural that you’ll resonate with other people who do the same,” Kaplan said. “I’m extremely grateful for the many friends that I have from my Daily experience.”

COURTESY ROBERT KAPLAN Senior Robert Kaplan is pictured.