2010-12-02

THE TUFTS DAILY

Sunny 45/28

TUFTSDAILY.COM

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2010

VOLUME LX, NUMBER 55

Where You Read It First Est. 1980

Committee begins quest for Tisch College dean BY

KATHRYN OLSON

Daily Editorial Board

Provost and Senior Vice President Jamshed Bharucha last month announced the members of the search committee for the new dean of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service and expects the body to identify a replacement next spring.

The search committee aims to find a replacement for Robert Hollister, co-founder and dean of the Tisch College, who announced his intention to step down this June after leading the college for 10 years.

The committee is composed of 11 members, including Bharucha, who serves as search committee chair, members of the Tisch College Board

of Advocates and representatives of the faculty, staff and student body.

The committee recently created an advertisement for the position, and the university has employed the professional search firm Storbeck/Pimentel & Associates to collect nominations and solicit applications, Bharucha said.

The committee hopes to reach a decision sometime this April, according to Bharucha.

Senior Caitlin Payne, an undergraduate student on the committee, said the search is still in its beginning stages. The committee plans to meet the candidates in the spring, she said.

“We haven’t looked at any applications yet,” Payne said.

ALEX DENNETT/TUFTS DAILY

Some students who were previously on winter intramural teams will now have to form pickup games in Cousens Gym.

Winter intramural season put on ice

see TISCH, page 2

BY

BEN KOCHMAN

Daily Editorial Board

Solar-powered house soaks up the Cape’s sun BY

CORINNE SEGAL

Daily Editorial Board

A collaborative project between Tufts and Boston Architectural College (BAC) last month unveiled the solar-powered centerpiece for a new sustainable housing development on Cape Cod. The energy efficient home, which was originally built last year, marks the first complete living installment at the new development, Community Green in Sandwich, Mass., and will be the centerpiece of the development once it is

finished, according to Colin Booth, the project manager of the Tufts-BAC group, called Team Boston.

The Curio House was designed and built by a team of Tufts and BAC students called Team Boston for the 2009 U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon.

It made its debut on Nov. 18 at Community Green, a 46-acre development project created by the Housing Assistance Corporation (HAC), a Cape Cod-based see CURIO, page 2

The hundreds of Tufts students who sign up to play in winter intramural leagues will have to find another way to stay warm during the dreary New England winter.

Director of Intramural Sports Cheryl Milligan announced in an e-mail Monday that the winter season, which for the past two years has taken place during the three weeks before and after winter break, has been canceled and replaced with “open gym.”

Students will still have access to the same equipment during the open time slots, which have yet to be announced, but those who enjoy the challenge and fun of being on a competitive intramural team will have to wait until at least March to get back in the game.

“I’m not sure anyone will show up to open gym time,”

sophomore Michael Borys, who was planning on forming a team with his Theta Chi brothers during the winter, said. “I want my organized competition back. If people just show up and [mess] around with a soccer ball, it won’t be the same.”

Milligan cited a lack of space in the Gantcher Center and Carzo Cage during the winter months, when varsity athletics practice indoors, as a reason to end what was a two-year experiment with winter intramural leagues.

She also pointed to student schedule changes at the start of the second semester as an obstacle to an effective winter season.

For Milligan, who is both Tufts’ softball coach and the lone administrator of the entire intramural program — in which 3,467 students participated last year — dealing with frequent cancellations became too much of a headache.

Somerville students ‘Get Ready’ for college BY

KATHRYN OLSON

Daily Editorial Board

The Tufts chapter of Let’s Get Ready (LGR) last night held a “graduation” ceremony at Somerville High School to celebrate a successful semester of college prep.

LGR is a national nonprofit organization that provides free SAT and college counseling classes to underprivileged high school students. At last night’s ceremony, Tufts students and LGR Co-Site Directors Nisha Mohamed and Evie Copeland presented awards to Somerville High School students enrolled in the program.

In turn, some of the high school students presented videos to their favorite Tufts ‘coaches’ who had helped them prepare for Saturday’s SAT. The newly Tufts Community Unionrecognized LGR chapter has for five consecutive semesters sent Tufts students to Somerville High School to teach two threehour classes each week, geared toward helping students with the logistics of the college application process.

Topics covered include the Common Application, the Free Application For

Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), recommendations, application essays and the SAT, according to Copeland, a senior.

“Tufts is really lucky to have a huge high school nearby, so we are able to provide students with this service,” Mohamed, a junior, said. “The issue is that there are so many students and not enough resources.

A lot get left behind. This program shows how far these students will go if they’re given a little attention.”

At the beginning of each semester, LGR offers high school students a diagnostic SAT test, followed eight weeks later by a follow-up test to track their progress.

This semester, students improved their average score by 129 points, the largest increase in the history of the Tufts program, Copeland said.

Mohamed added that the students’ actual SAT scores would most likely be much higher than their practice exam scores.

LGR Assistant Director of Programs Matthew Boyce, who attended the event, praised Somerville High School’s support of the program and the “community feel” that Tufts students in the program create.

Inside this issue

“You can’t get a program this successful without a community like this one,” Boyce told the Daily. “Many students are the first ones to go to college in their families and need a little guidance on how the application process works so they can achieve their goals. LGR provides the framework to make that happen.”

Class sizes typically range from four to six students, allowing students to get oneon-one attention, a key factor in keeping them motivated, according to Copeland.

Somerville High School junior Douglas Funes, who took part in the program, at the end of the ceremony described his experience with LGR. “I got to know both my teachers really well and wasn’t dreading coming to class,” Funes told the Daily. “If you ever came in feeling nervous or pessimistic about college, the coaches found the best things to say to lift your spirits so that you don’t lose sight of your goals. I feel really confident for Saturday.”

Somerville High School senior Jermaine Carty, who is in his second year of the

“Something has to give,” Milligan said. In the past, intramural games would get bumped from playing spaces, making the process of scheduling intramurals difficult, she said.

“We tried to run a winter season, but we’d get bumped out all the time if, for example, the lacrosse team decided to practice indoors one night,” she said. “We needed to make a change, and there will be people that are upset about it, but we’re trying to do what’s best.”

Though there was interest in winter intramurals at the end of first semester last year, Milligan said, the interest died down significantly in the first weeks of second semester. Teams with losing records would often stop coming to games or would have to forfeit due to changes in their players’ schedules. see INTRAMURALS, page 15

Junior class to go to the polls today Members of the Class of 2012 are scheduled to vote today in a special election to fill a vacant Tufts Community Union Senate seat.

Juniors Jonathan Danzig and Jibade Sandiford are vying for the position, which was vacated on Nov. 7 when senior Ian Hainline resigned, citing problems with the nature of the discourse of the body as the impetus for his resignation.

Voting began at midnight and is expected to take place until midnight tonight.

“I think both of the candidates have done a good job publicizing,” Elections Commission Chair Katherine McManus, a sophomore, said last night. She added that junior class elections can be complicated because many juniors study abroad or live off campus.

The candidates participated in an open forum Tuesday night. Danzig, who is studying abroad in Chile, participated via Skype.

—by Matt Repka

see COLLEGE, page 2

Today’s Sections

A new project is attempting to reframe Wikipedia’s reputation in academia.

Skip the supermarket and find yourself fresher and more diverse local produce.

see FEATURES, page 3

see WEEKENDER, page 5

News Features Weekender Editorial | Letters

1 3 5 10

Op-Ed Comics Classifieds Sports

11 12 15 Back

2

THE TUFTS DAILY

Committee seeks candidate who promotes diversity, collaboration TISCH continued from page 1

“This semester, we will review applications as they come in, and next semester, we will begin to do interviews. After looking at many candidates, we will bring a select few to come to Tufts for a second interview.”

At this point, she said, the committee will face its toughest hurdles.

“Our biggest challenges are to come when we actually have to make decisions,” Payne continued. “So far, we’ve only described our ideal candidate.”

The committee, both Bharucha and Payne stressed, is soliciting applicants both within and outside academia. The primary search criterion, they said, will be an ability to work with different populations.

“A professor would be the most typical candidate, but we are opening up the search outside of academia,” Bharucha said. “Anybody we look at is going to have to have proven experience working with both students and faculty.”

The committee hopes that its field of applicants represents a wide range of backgrounds.

“We are casting our net far and wide and not focusing on one type of profession or background,” Payne said. “We are hoping that the ad will go to many different publications and news outlets in order to reach many different types of people. We want a lot of diverse applicants.”

An ideal candidate will show an ability to create new ways of combining academics and active citizenship, as well as a commitment to diversity, Bharucha said.

“We would like to see candidates who are innovative and entrepreneurial and who understand how to weave civic engagement into a very high standard of academic excellence, which includes both teaching and scholarship,” Bharucha said. “The candidate also must have a proven commitment to a sophisticated understanding of diversity.”

The new dean must be able to communicate effectively with groups not

only on the Medford/Somerville campus, but on the Grafton and Boston campuses as well, Payne said.

“The most important quality will be the ability to be a liaison between many different groups,” Payne said. “The new dean will have to inspire and gain the trust of students, faculty, staff and community members. He or she will have to play a lot of different roles.”

Bharucha said that Hollister’s leadership, Tisch College’s strong community of donors and the work of faculty, students and community members have ensured that Tisch College will have a strong future from which the new dean will benefit.

“There are more opportunities than challenges — opportunities to take Tisch to a new level of distinction as the premier place that infuses an ethos of public service into the learning experience and into scholarship,” Bharucha said.

Payne said the challenges facing the new dean will hinge on maintaining Tisch’s success in facilitating collaboration among a variety of groups on campus.

“The biggest challenge will be to inspire all different constituencies and get people to work together,” Payne said.

“Tisch is situated perfectly to mobilize diverse groups to achieve a common goal. His or her challenge will be to make sure that this continues to happen and that Tisch continues to be a forum for collaboration.”

Tisch College Program Coordinator Rachel Szyman was confident in the committee’s search process.

“What’s key is that the university is supportive and engaged in maintaining active citizenship as a keystone of Tufts,” Szyman said. “We are confident we will get a wonderful person and are very excited to see what new direction he or she will take us.”

Szyman expressed excitement over what Hollister’s replacement could potentially bring to Tufts.

“The new dean may introduce whole new areas of active citizenship that we haven’t thought of and bring a new dynamic into the work.”

KATHRYN OLSON/TUFTS DAILY

Tufts and Somerville High School students came together last night at a ‘graduation ceremony’ honoring their college prep work.

Jumbos prep higher schoolers for college COLLEGE continued from page 1

program, felt LGR aided him greatly in the college application process.

“LGR is great if you really want to get into a good college,” Carty told the Daily.

“It gave me an opportunity to increase my SAT scores by a lot.”

In remarks during the ceremony, Boyce highlighted the importance of a strong work ethic and said that the SAT is not a perfect measure of intellectual aptitude.

“The SAT is only one step in the process and is not a test of intelligence,” he said. “No matter how well you do, you can go to college as long as you work for it.”

Colleges look beyond a student’s SAT scores or GPA, Mohamed told the audience.

“Everyone here comes from such different backgrounds and have had such different experiences, but you all have something to offer, no matter what

your GPA or SAT scores say,” she said.

“You all have something different to add to a college.”

Mohamed added that students were at a “breaking point” in the college application process and encouraged them to persevere through the final month of applications and tests.

“Our students are faced with so many challenges,” Mohamed said, prior to the event’s start. “Some work two jobs or act as a caretaker for their family, and they still find time to come to SAT class six hours a week. They could make so many excuses but shouldn’t use them as a reason not to follow through on the application process.”

Mohamed reiterated that it was crucial for students to put in their best effort.

“They are all capable. It’s just a question of what they put into the process,” she said.

NEWS

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Former Guantanamo Bay interrogator visits the Hill, addresses torture issues

JENNA LIANG/TUFTS DAILY

Matthew Alexander, a former senior interrogator and U.S. Air Force officer, delivered a lecture yesterday evening in Braker 001. Alexander is the author of ‘How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, not Brawn, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq’ (2008) and an upcoming book, ‘Kill or Capture.’ Amnesty International at Tufts sponsored the event.

Solar-powered Curio House moved to Cape Cod after competition CURIO continued from page 1

nonprofit. The organization aims to provide sustainable low- and middleincome housing that will also offer community educational programs and services to help improve the lives of residents.

AmeriCorps employee Becca Wolfson and Billy Traverse, network administrator for Barnstable County, will occupy the house and serve as the caretakers of the development.

Team Boston competed against 19 other houses in the 2009 Decathlon, which judged each house in 10 contests measuring the success of each house’s solar power and design by both objective and subjective criteria.

The Decathlon is held every two years, and last year was the first time Tufts had ever participated, Associate Provost and Professor of Mechanical Engineering Vincent Manno, who partook in the project, said.

Antje Danielson, administrative director of the Tufts Institute for the Environment, cut the ribbon on the house at the unveiling event, which group members attended.

“Seeing the house actually in a development now, as kind of the core of this development and serving exactly the purpose they built it for, was, I think, a very emotional moment for them,” Danielson said.

“I think the whole event was just like that,” she said. “It was friends coming together to celebrate that this project has come to a really positive ending.”

Other Tufts attendees included George Kosar, associate director of corporate and foundation relations at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and senior Arlin Ladue.

Kosar spearheaded Tufts’ fundraising for the Decathlon, while Ladue is working on a documentary about the project, according to Danielson.

Community Green will consist of 57 rental units, an agriculture program and an Enterprise Center geared toward economic development, according to its website.

Individuals in the community will be able to participate in job training in the areas of culinary arts, landscaping, green construction, organic agriculture, weatherization and clean energy, the website says.

Ben Steinberg, chair of the project’s policy committee, said the team met with the cities of Boston, Medford and Somerville as well as commercial developers to discuss a location for the house.

Medford was interested in acquiring the house but lacked the funding to pay for it, according to Steinberg.

“They had the land, but they had no money to give us, and we needed to subsidize the cost of our project,” Steinberg said.

The U.S. Department of Energy provides each team with $100,000, but Team Boston’s total project costs reached $800,000, a typical amount, according to senior Matthew Thoms, the project’s head engineering and photovoltaic consultant.

The dean of BAC, Jeff Stein, in 2009 met a representative from the HAC who expressed interest in buying the house, Danielson said.

Steinberg said the nonprofit paid $150,000 for the house. The remainder of the money came from fundraising.

Thoms said that Community Green was a good location for the house.

“We felt that Community Green was a better fit for the goals of the project in terms of trying to make the most impact on people who are going to be pushing the green movement,” Thoms said.

“It’s a sustainable community, and also it’s a community that involves not only providing housing, but training and outreach to people who are in employment transitional situations,” Manno said.

He said that Community Green had hoped to install the house in the spring but ran into permit delays.

Houses from the Solar Decathlon usually do not become private residences, Booth said.

“This is pretty unusual,” he said. “As far as I know, there aren’t any other houses from the 2009 Decathlon that have been sold to private owners.”

Team Boston aimed to create a functioning, livable house, though this was not necessarily a requirement of the competition, Manno said.

“We knew from the beginning that we wanted to make a house that was marketable and could be sold,” Thoms said.

Booth said the houses are often too expensive to be appealing to private buyers. “People typically wanted to sell them for as much as it cost to build them,” he said.

Steinberg said that Team Boston emphasized affordability when designing and building the house.

He said sustainability should not be limited to wealthy consumers.

“If you look at the green movement nowadays, a lot of it caters to the upper class,” he said. “If we’re not responsible and trying to solve problems for everyone in this world, then we really aren’t doing our job.”

“We couldn’t be prouder for where it’s going,” he said, “because it really speaks to the mission of social equality and looking out for everyone.”

Features

3

tuftsdaily.com

University professors give Wikipedia a facelift BY

DEREK SCHLOM

Only in college

Daily Editorial Board

The legitimacy of Wikipedia, the popular online user-edited encyclopedia, as an academic resource has long been doubted; citing information from the website on a research paper would likely result in derision by one’s professor, if not a flat-out F. But a new pilot project created by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia, is attempting to reframe the site’s reputation within the context of academia and purge inaccuracies from a portion of the site.

The Wikimedia Foundation recruited professors of public policy from nine different universities, including Harvard and Georgetown University, to incorporate the improvement of Wikipedia’s pages on public policy into their class curricula.

Donna Lind Infeld, a professor of public policy and the director of the master’s of public policy program at The George Washington University in Washington, is one of the professors working to implement the program, called the Public Policy Initiative.

“The Wikimedia Foundation came to visit campus last spring, and they basically were seeking input from faculty about various ways that we might use Wikipedia in the classroom,” she said. “It sounded like a way for our students to be on the cutting edge in the Internet Age.” The objectives of the Public Policy Initiative were a natural fit for the curriculum of Infeld’s class on policy analysis, she said.

“I’m teaching [students] how to be educated consumers of information and how

ANNA CHRISTIAN | THE COLLEGE SURVIVAL GUIDE

F TIEN TIEN/TUFTS DAILY

Wikipedia is not currently considered a reliable research tool by many academics, but the Wikimedia Foundation is attempting to change this reputation. to critique the validity of information … and that’s true for reading anything, including Wikipedia,” she said.

During the semester, she said, students analyze a societal problem that can be solved via public policy.

“They define the problem, identify a range of possible policy interventions, define criteria to compare those policy options, then give the analysis, and that means they find whatever evidence is available to predict which policy options could achieve the intervention,” she said.

Because of the nature of the students’ projects, alleviating some of the informational problems on Wikipedia’s pages is a perfect end goal for her students, Infeld said.

“After they write the paper, they have some substantive expertise on the policy problem … so they find a relevant Wikipedia page and the use that information to update, modify

and expand the page.”

The real value of the Public Policy Initiative, Infeld said, is in the extensive feedback that Wikipedia’s informationsharing capability provides for students.

“The students monitor the reaction of … readers and editors, people who have changed the page,” she said. “When they just write a paper for me and I critique them, that usually just goes in the garbage can, but in this case they’re putting their ideas out there in the world and getting other reactions besides mine.”

“They’re taking baby steps into the world and stepping up for their ideas, and doing analytic work in a different environment than just for a teacher,” she said.

Incorporating the Public Policy Initiative in her classroom teaches Infeld’s students see WIKIPEDIA, page 4

Street Smarts: Tufts’ sartorial scene Ever notice the Jumbos on campus who put more than a momentary thought into which pair of sneakers doesn’t clash with their sweatpants? We have, and some of their sartorial styles caught our eye in particular.

COMPILED BY ROMY OLTUSKI PHOTOS BY JUSTIN MCCALLUM

or some reason, it has become acceptable — even commonplace — for the typical college student to go out during the week. Tufts does Tuesday and Thursday, my friends’ schools do Wednesday and some schools even do Sunday and Monday. Generally speaking, this behavior is neither healthy nor acceptable, but the concern doesn’t seem to deter many students come nine o’clock. It’s a way to break up the week; nothing seems further away from Monday morning than Friday night, and who really wants to wait that long anyway? However, going out and going to class the next day has students paying the price — it’s amazing how so many of us schedule our week around a class-free Friday just to avoid this cost.

Here are some tips on how to survive the days after your fun-filled college nights, weeknights or otherwise.

1. Plan something productive in advance. The tendency for most students is to wake up late and sit around doing nothing until the afternoon. No matter how bad you feel, sitting on the couch until 5 p.m. generally doesn’t help. If you plan the night before to get brunch the next day in the dining hall or to clean your room like you’d been planning, you’re more likely to follow through and more likely to stop dwelling on your headache and/or nausea.

Sometimes wallowing is the only thing to do, but if you force yourself to get up and get out of the house, the fresh air and distraction will do you good.

2. Try to exercise. Yes, I realize this is the last thing you want to do after a late night, but exercise is an almost instantaneous fix. The first couple minutes will probably be rough, but after that, your body starts to get back to feeling good. I urge you to make time for this (dreaded) activity regardless of packed schedules because it will revolutionize your physical and mental state. A half hour in the gym can pretty much erase any damage you may have done earlier. And if you do make it to the gym, you’ll likely have your pick of machines since so few students are likely to wake up and go.

3. Eat a good breakfast and take a nap.

If you wake up, eat a substantial breakfast and go back to bed, you will wake up a second time feeling completely renewed. It’s no science — it does take some extra time, but this trick can make the latter part of your day highly successful. It’s a lot easier to get yourself to the gym (or to class) if you’re well rested and ready to go.

“I love the scarf, which I got in Russia. I like that it’s a traditional thing that’s still fashionable over there.”

—Julia Stimeck, Class of 2011

“I love my jacket. I got it in Hong Kong, where I’m from. I saw it in the store, put it on and fell in love with it.”

—Jeannette Lee, Class of 2014

“My favorite piece is my Chanel flats. I am obsessed with fashion. I’ve always been obsessed with fashion. My style is classic mixed with a little bit of a twist.

I really like handbags. And shoes … and everything!”

—Danya Al-Qattan, Class of 2013

See Jumbo Slice at blogs.tuftsdaily.com for the full shoot.

Although going out and then going to class is ill-advised by, well, pretty much any adult with common sense, it is part of the college life. Without a doubt, many students have gone to either their Wednesday or Friday classes feeling less than stellar. I feel as though I have to say going out during the week is a bad idea, and I don’t encourage it. But truth be told, hanging out with friends and making stupid (yet somehow acceptable) decisions — they’re all college memories.

So long as you are being safe and can balance school work with social events, I don’t see any reason not to enjoy the delightful ambiance in Ball Square or anything else that weeknight entertainment has to offer. Be smart, and have fun whenever possible. Even on the bad days, college graduates are jealous of where you are.

Anna Christian is a junior double majoring in psychology and community health.

She can be reached at Anna.Christian@ tufts.edu.

THE TUFTS DAILY

4

Professors help students edit Wikipedia WIKIPEDIA continued from page 3

more about Internet-facilitated information dissemination, she said.

“Most use it like an encyclopedia, but most of them have never ventured into editing and working with it,” Infeld said.

“Even though I don’t think most of them will end up being regular contributors, this is a new level of understanding of how ideas get out there, either on Wikipedia or blogs or other sites with public input,” she said. “They get a deeper understanding of how that’s generated and the value and legitimacy of that information.”

Evan Simpson, head of reference and instruction for Tisch Library, also sees Wikipedia as a useful tool — including for academic endeavors.

“Obviously it’s a valuable resource for everyone looking for information on the Internet, whether they’re doing research or not,” he said. “It covers everything … there’s vast amounts of information, it’s open to all and it’s convenient.”

Simpson emphasized Wikipedia’s worth as a jumping-off point for academic papers.

“It’s become a highly utilized starting point, and it’s really started to compete with traditional reference materials like encyclopedias and handbooks which are really intended to help researchers get started, and from there you grow your resources,” Simpson said.

“There’s a reason professors say not to cite Wikipedia, but they don’t say not to use Wikipedia,” he added.

But Simpson worries that some students perceive Wikipedia as a comprehensive source rather than a preliminary investigative tool.

“My fear is that researchers don’t flip the switch eventually from Wikipedia’s use as a starting point and where they need to go next,” he said.

To counteract that mindset, Simpson feels that academics must utilize the site’s strengths while calling to attention its limitations, along the lines of the goals of the Public Policy Initiative.

“If [academic institutions] accept that it’s here to stay, we need to find ways to

participate in it,” he said. “If we continue to just point a finger at it, we’re not going to solve the problem … but we still need to draw distinctions between Wikipedia and scholarly sources of information, which are what students really need to conduct research.”

According to Simpson, the administration of Tisch Library is taking an active role in perpetuating the pros and cons of Wikipedia by developing a browser-based toolbar through which students can directly link to relevant library-owned academic resources from a Wikipedia page.

“That’s one role we see [ourselves doing] at the library in sort of accepting that it’s here to stay,” Simpson said. “As librarians, we in particular need to draw the distinctions between Wikipedia as an open, free knowledge base and the pitfalls in that — the inaccurate information, the bias, et cetera.”

The toolbar will be available for download within the next year, Simpson estimates, and in the meantime he suggests that students make use of the references section at the bottom of most Wikipedia pages — but with discretion.

“Those links are often really valuable, but they can also lead you to inaccurate information,” Simpson said. “That’s why we would never suggest that students cite Wikipedia — because they just can’t be sure of the accuracy of the information and the sources or where it comes from, and that’s the fluid nature of the resource.

One day, an entry can be accurate, and the next day, it might not be.”

Though Simpson does not necessarily see the Wikimedia Foundation’s Public Policy Initiative as a replicable model across academic disciplines, he sees potential for more active student participation on the website.

“If we all see ourselves as participants in a new information environment … we owe it to ourselves to make something that’s highly utilized better,” he said.

“It’s never going to be a scholarly resource because there’s no peer-review process in place,” he added. “But the more people that are participating and watchdogging it, so to speak, who knows what it might become?”

DISCOVER. INNOVATE. ACHIEVE. At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, graduate students work in teams with faculty who challenge them to make meaningful contributions to research and discovery. Here, in the WPI Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center, researchers across biology and biotechnology, biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, and chemistry and biochemistry are focused on improving healthcare, the environment, and quality of life. We invite you to discover WPI, a premier research university in science, engineering, and business.

wpi.edu/+lsbc

FEATURES

Thursday, December 2, 2010

5

Weekender

tuftsdaily.com

Welcome to the Tufts Daily Farmers Market Apples ............ $0.50 Plants ............ $2.00 Newspapers .... Free

DESIGN BY ANDREW PETRONE

Forget Shaws: Options abound for healthy, quality produce BY

EMMA BUSHNELL

Daily Editorial Board

It’s Sunday night, and your housemate with the car just announced this is the only time in the next six days he’s going to have time to go grocery shopping.

So you hop in, go to Shaws — or Stop & Shop or Market Basket — grab a cart and head over to the produce aisle.

What’s there? Some shriveled peppers, aging lettuce and an empty spot where the cucumbers should be. Surely there must be a better way, you think.

In fact, there is. Here are some ways to be environmentally and fiscally conscious while dishing up higher quality greens than the ones you’ll find shrinkwrapped at the local supermarket.

Farm share Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a way to buy produce straight from local farmers. Through the program, you can select a farm and get seasonal vegetables delivered weekly for a per-season flat fee — usually around $450-500.

Some of the farms that offer this service are affiliated in some way with Tufts. World PEAS, a local, small farm co-op that is affiliated with the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, delivers boxes of seasonal vegetables to the Tufts campus on a weekly basis.

Emily Ruff, a senior, has ordered her produce through World PEAS in the past.

“I really liked it,” she said. “It’s not something that somebody who wants to have a menu tailored every week is going to really enjoy because you don’t know what you’re going to get until it comes. The biggest positive, though, is that you’re getting local, high-quality stuff. … It’s also nice to know how things work seasonally and gives you a connection to a farm.”

While CSA farms allow their consumers to choose the size of their boxes — sometimes there are packages designed for couples or families, and other times, small and large sizes are advertised — they give them very little say on what the boxes will contain. Students who participated in a farm share did not think this restriction was too much of a hindrance, though.

“You could be confronted with, ‘Well, I

have three heads of lettuce and nothing to do with it,’” Ruff said. “But you can always call up your friends and give them free food — you’ll be very popular.”

And giving away some of your “share” hardly hurts your own pool.

“We had so much food,” senior Jordyn Wolfand said. Wolfand bought a winter share — a wintertime farm share — through Enterprise Farm, which has a partnership with Tufts Institute for the Environment. “We almost never supplemented. The only time we had to was when we’d think, ‘Oh, my God, we need avocado, and there’s no way that’s ever going to be in season here, so we have to buy one from California.’”

Indeed, with CSA farms offering other fresh items like eggs, grains and honey, not much supplementary groceries are needed at all.

“As a vegetarian, it’s especially nice,” Ruff said. “I would only spend money on pasta and cheese. If you can get over paying $500 upfront for something, then it really ends up being worth your while.”

Community around food Farm shares do more than just provide quality greens without requiring too much green.

“A lot of the farms have events you can go to, and it kind of becomes a club,” Ruff said.

With the farms so close by — many of them are as close as Lowell, Mass. — you are invited to go see the source of your produce. “You can go to the farms and pick wildflowers or attend movie screenings,” Ruff said.

Accompanying your weekly box are newsletters with updates about your farm and the people who work there, along with recipe ideas for the week’s haul.

These updates can be eye-opening and meaningful for consumers.

“In these newsletters, you find out about how your farmer is having a tomato drought or it talks about problems you don’t necessarily always think of. … It puts food more on your mind,” Ruff said.

Wolfand agreed with this sentiment, saying that it made the value of food more salient.

“You start to appreciate certain vegetables more when you see them starting to appear after they’ve been out

of season,” Wolfand said. “It made the season more exciting.”

With farm shares like World PEAS, the types of vegetables you receive can also be unfamiliar because a lot of the farmers are immigrants and are used to farming vegetables many Tufts students may not be used to cooking — a situation in which the accompanying recipes come in handy.

“Sometimes there’d be two or three that I’d have to Google and figure out what they were,” Ruff said. “But a lot of them were good.”

Sometimes the veggies delivered were not so much foreign as exotic.

“I got fiddleheads a few times, which are apparently a delicacy in Massachusetts and very gourmet,” Wolfand said.

Local vs. organic Many of the CSAs provide organic produce, but many of them don’t. How important is it to ensure that you’re receiving the healthiest organic products?

Most environmentally conscious consumers will be the first to tell you that simply buying local is preferable to ensuring that your product is certified organic.

In Massachusetts, farms that wish to be certified must go through a yearslong process of applications and inspections that costs thousands of dollars.

Many of the small, local farms that join together in CSAs are not able to put the required effort and money into the process, but they can provide pesticidefree, fresh produce for a fraction of the price of certified organic produce.

“A lot of times these farms will use organic practices but not be certified organic,” Ruff said. “Personally, I’d rather ensure I have local first.”

Alternatives to farm shares Farm shares are wonderful programs to split among housemates or friends, but what if you’re more of a greens nibbler than an insatiable herbivore?

Local produce is still available at the Davis Square Farmers Market, and many of its stalls are run by farms that also run farm shares, so the quality is comparable.

In addition to the good quality and low prices, the market has what Ruff described as “a really good vibe.”

“One thing I missed [while on the farm

share] was that there was no reason to go to the farmers market,” Ruff said. “If you go all the time, you build a relationship with the vendors and they give you free samples; you develop a rapport.”

Unfortunately, the Davis Square Farmers Market’s season just ended last week. So if you’re without a winter share, what are you do to now?

Fortunately, the practice of labeling the origins of produce in supermarkets has begun to catch on.

“I do try to shop at Whole Foods, not necessarily because of their image, but because I like that they have at least some connection with where they get their produce and have good labeling,” Ruff said.

If you don’t want to commit to a whole winter season of vegetables from a CSA farm, there are also other alternatives to winter shares that will deliver on a week-by-week basis and allow more choice in what each box contains.

Boston Organics offers customized boxes of produce, breads, coffees, teas and other select groceries for as little as $24 a box, which can be ordered online. And like many of the farm shares, they deliver directly to your door, even if that door is a dorm — take note, Tilton residents who wouldn’t mind supplementing their meal plans with some fresh fruits and veggies.

The only downsides of using Boston Organics instead of a farm share are that, although the former makes an effort to provide local products, sometimes those wintertime grapes have to come from California, and also that without a connection to one particular farm, you lose some of the sense of community fostered by farm shares and farmers markets.

One other option is a CSA membership that allows the consumer to come to an appointed drop-off place and grab at the produce that they find appealing for that given week. For the average Tufts student with a full schedule and perhaps limited mobility, though, this alternative could be impractical.

So the next time you’re peering into one of Shaws’ bags of bruised apples on sale, trying to convince yourself that it’s an unbeatable deal, think about these alternatives. Your stomach and wallet will thank you.

THE TUFTS DAILY

6

Thursday, December 2, 2010

WEEKENDER

THEATER REVIEW

‘Assassins’ cast and crew bring historical brutes to life BY

CYNTHIA BRUNELLE Contributing Writer

With a gun in nearly every scene and nine shots fired on stage, Torn Ticket II’s “Assassins” certainly promises to be explosive.

Even though the one-act version of the play has been performed at Tufts once before in 2003, it’s still a bold choice for the troupe’s major fall production.

“It’s definitely a brave, controversial work,” director Logan Reed, a senior, said.

The musical, which won a whopping five Tony awards in 2004, follows the stories of seven of the men and three of the women who attempted — both successfully and unsuccessfully — to assassinate U.S. presidents. From John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln to John Hinckley’s attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life, the morbid revue spans over 120 years of U.S. history.

Seniors Samantha Kindler and Andres Steyerthal produced the show, working alongside Reed, stage manager and senior Molly Clarke and the cast and crew — many of whom are experienced and talented seniors — to create this moving and macabre history lesson.

The musical is not so much driven by the assassins’ devious plots as it is by the unusual connections that they form with one another throughout the course of the play. In this eerie piece, infamous historical figures like Booth and Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President William McKinley, respectively, cross time and space to reside in an unhappy limbo of anger, disappointment and disillusionment.

“All the assassins have an oppression in common — they are poor, desperate, mentally ill or coming from hard family situations. … Above all, they share the feeling that no one is listening to them,” Reed said.

In a compassionate defense of its gunwielding souls, this work sympathetically portrays the inner workings of the murderers’ and attempted murderers’ minds, in what senior Douglas Helman calls “an interesting reimagining” of history.

In the stunning climax of the musi-

JUSTIN MCCALLUM/TUFTS DAILY

Senior Douglas Helman, center, joins the cast of ‘Assassins’ as Lee Harvey Oswald. cal, Helman’s character, Lee Harvey Oswald, is convinced to murder John F. Kennedy by the first-hand accounts of the other assassins.

“What could have happened in Oswald’s head [during the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln] is a mystery. No one knows,” Helman said.

To the credit of its direction, the production expertly and interestingly

employs the actors and the stage space.

Many of the actors shift between roles, and because the cast is so small, the lines begin to blur between assassin and victim, citizen and president.

“It’s not a bubblegum escapist musical,” Kindler said.

She noted that the audience is left grappling with questions of right and wrong, fair and unfair, and the cost of

MOVIE REVIEW

Disney gives classic fairy tale a new hairdo with ‘Tangled’ BY

ALEX KAUFMAN

Daily Staff Writer

Every year there are several Disney movies worth spending that $10-per-ticket fee to enjoy. Last

Tangled Starring Mandy Moore, Zachary Levi, Donna Murphy Directed by Nathan Greno, Byron Howard year, “The Princess and the Frog” and “Up” shared that title, and 2008 saw “WALL-E” take the cake. In their own special ways, these films warmed the hearts of millions of adults and kids alike.

This holiday season’s must-see Disney movie is “Tangled.”

Byron Howard, an animator on “Lilo & Stitch” (2002) and “Brother Bear” (2003), and the director of “Bolt” (2008), brings his Disney animation experience to “Tangled,” and boy does it show. Along with co-director Nathan Greno, Howard assembles a quality cast and production staff, well-known and respected names such as composer Alan Menken and voice actors Zachary Levi and Mandy Moore, to compose one high-quality film.

“Tangled” couples the Brothers Grimm tale of Rapunzel with the classic formula for a Disney movie: Two characters meet from very dif-

ferent backgrounds, and one shows the other a whole new world.

This animated musical begins with a king and queen in a faraway kingdom expecting a child.

Unfortunately, the queen grows ill during her pregnancy, so the royal couple sends a servant on a quest to fetch a cure. He steals a magical herb that heals wounds and preserves youth from an evil witch’s garden, and the queen gives birth to a daughter: Rapunzel (Moore).

The witch, Mother Gothel (voiced

by Donna Murphy), kidnaps their daughter as an act of revenge and locks her in a tower. The witch constantly keeps Rapunzel from escaping, and she uses the magical power of Rapunzel’s hair to maintain her own youth while feigning to be Rapunzel’s real mother.

We all know the story of Rapunzel.

She lets down her hair when her “mother” cries, “Rapunzel,

Rapunzel, let down your hair.” But “Tangled” has a twist: The movie shows the side of Rapunzel that wants to break free.

On each of her birthdays, she sees dazzling lights in the sky: They are not stars like Rapunzel thinks, but rather they’re floating candles cast out from her true parents’ kingdom to beckon their lost daughter home. Upon her 18th birthday, a wanted thief named Flynn Rider (Levi) enters the scene, fleeing his latest robbery. He breaks into the tower where Rapunzel lives and aids her in her wish to be free for a day. Naturally, adventure, revenge and love ensue.

This movie had the entire audience rolling with laughter, excited by the adventure and taken in by the dramatic plot twists. The audience was completely in tune with see TANGLED, page 8

the failed American dream.

Even the individuals motivated by radical political thought or distorted religious doctrine garner sympathy in the end due to the passion behind their beliefs. Audience members will be hard-pressed to deny emotional attachment to the characters, such

TOP TEN | SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE E!’s new reality series, “Bridalplasty,” premiered last Sunday, displaying a heated competition between 12 brides vying for free plastic surgery procedures. WTF, world? It seems the apocalypse must be near.

10. “Glee” cast surpassing the Beatles as the non-solo group with most hot 100 singles: Obviously, those who hate “Glee” aren’t going to be happy about this, but even fans of the show and its music can’t honestly believe that the cast deserves more appearances on the Billboard Hot 100 list than the Fab Four.

9. The Situation signing a book deal: The Situation from MTV’s “Jersey Shore” is writing a self-help book about getting shredded abs, rippling arms, a nice haircut and a smooth tan. ‘Cause who wouldn’t want to be like a Scooby-Doo-faced “Guido” with Popeye’s disproportionately huge arms and the IQ of a second grader?

8. Justin Bieber’s upcoming movie: Despite his cuteness, Bieber is actually one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The other three are Dakota Fanning, Elmo and that little red-headed demon child who lip syncs the Katy Perry songs on YouTube.

7. Proof that Kanye might actually be a genius: After talking about it for ... forever, Kanye finally pulled back the curtain with his new album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” and revealed that

MCT

Flynn Rider (Zachary Levi) is a bit more rebellious than the usual Disney prince.

see ASSASSINS, page 7

the wizard is actually a wizard. And a genius.

6. The calendar: 2012 is next year. Get ready.

5. Sarah Palin still being talked about: Why do people still care about this woman? Because she hunts bears on her reality show and her daughter is on “Dance Your A-- Off” or something? What the hell, America?

4. Europe having no bees: Bees, species of the superfamily Apoidea, are vital in the cross-pollination process of various agrarian products used for hominid alimentary nourishment throughout the world. But if one of those f---ers stings us, we’ll kill it!

3. The Ministry of Magic getting taken over by Death Eaters: We’re all still shaken by the loss of Rufus Scrimgeour, but it’s really the new administration’s fierce antiMuggle propaganda that offends us the most. Dumbledore would never have stood for this!

2. Bridalplasty: While people have been looking to volcanoes, earthquakes and other natural disasters for signs of the apocalypse, nothing is quite as portentous as 12 women competing for a slate of plastic surgical procedures for their wedding days on E!.

1. Larry Bacow Awwwwwwww :(

leaving:

—compiled by the Daily Arts Department

THE TUFTS DAILY

Thursday, December 2, 2010

7

WEEKENDER

‘Assassins’ evokes sympathy ASSASSINS continued from page 6

as the sweet-voiced killer of President James Garfield, Charles Guiteau (senior Jon Sasenick), who plaintively sings, “I am going to the Lordy” on his way to the gallows.

Overall, the creative staging of the show brilliantly supports the character development of each assassin. The set, a well-crafted marquee, exhibits a careful mix of the eras represented in the play.

The music and lyrics, written by Stephen Sondheim, are playful and original in both style and form, contrasting with the tainted reputations of each character. “[The score is a] hodgepodge of Americana,” musical director Kyle Sircus, a senior, said.

From Civil War-era wandering troubadour tunes to 20th-century influences such as Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, the show feeds off America’s rich musical heritage.

“Sondheim truly captures the people who were the voices of their time — we are honored to present his work to the Tufts community,” Sircus said.

“Assassins” will be playing at 8 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the Balch Arena Theater in Aidekman Arts Center.

Although tickets are sold out, there will be available each night 50 standing room only tickets, which will be available at the Balch Arena Box Office the day of each respective show.

Week in Review | TV Many shows took a break last week in honor of Thanksgiving, so besides the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, there wasn’t a lot of new content to cover. However, networks took advantage of the lull in programming to make some announcements concerning new and returning shows.

FX, which has been nicely carving out a niche for itself with edgy dramas (“Sons of Anarchy,” “Justified”) and offkilter comedies (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” “Louie”), announced premiere dates for its new drama, “Lights Out,” and its returning comedy, “Archer.”

“Lights Out,” debuting Jan. 11 at 10 p.m., will follow a former heavyweight boxing champ and his family after his retirement and certainly seems to fit the FX

brand. “Archer,” the animated spy series, will kick off its second season at 10 p.m. on Jan. 27.

ABC also announced a premiere date for its long-gestating “Body of Proof.” The series stars Dana Delany as a successful neurosurgeon who becomes a medical examiner after a car accident leaves her unable to operate. It had originally been slated for Fridays, but after the network’s new series “The Whole Truth” and “Detroit 1-8-7” didn’t work out as planned, ABC bumped this promising show to a better time slot. “Body of Proof,” co-starring Jeri Ryan, Sonja Sohn and John Carroll Lynch, will air on March 29 at 10 p.m.

The CW and HBO also got into the new show announcement game, although their respective series are nowhere near having

premiere dates set. The CW, after finding great success in “The Vampire Diaries,” has hired creator Kevin Williamson to develop a companion series about investigators of supernatural events. And HBO released a new trailer to its fantasy epic, “Game of Thrones,” based on the novels by George R. R. Martin. It is still hard to decide what to make of the series, but the trailer promises a grand scale only HBO could offer.

Finally, in what I hope will soon be followed by a second season renewal announcement, “Terriers” ended its first season last night.

The excellent, but poorly titled and marketed, FX drama went out on a high note. It would still be a shame if it’s the last we see of the series.

—by Ben Phelps

What’s up this weekend Looking to make your weekend artsy? Check out these events!

Tisch Active Citizenship Summer (ACS)

Got Summer Plans?

Attend an info session to learn about summer opportunities in Washington, DC • Thursday, December 2, 5:30pm Lincoln Filene Hall, Rabb Room • Wednesday, December 8, Noon Mayer Campus Center, Zamparelli Room ACS Washington, DC supports summer fellowships with nonprofits, government and public interest organizations as well as extensive networking opportunities.

For more information, please visit: http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/ACS

AAA’s Annual VOICES Concert feat. Goh Nakamura: The Asian American Alliance presents its annual concert, this year featuring San Francisco-based performing artist Goh Nakamura. The night will also feature student acts, clips from Nakamura’s newly completed indie film “Surrogate Valentine,” and a free raffle for a $50 cash prize and other small prizes. (Tonight at 9 p.m. in Hotung Café.

Admission is free.)

SOC Presents: ONE BADA$$ MIXTAPE: Spirit of Color presents its semesterly dance show, which will feature music from such artists as Robin Thicke, Ne-Yo, Corinne Bailey Rae, LMFAO and Rihanna.

There will also be guest performances by Phunk Phenomenon (tonight) and Thee Slap Bracelets (tomorrow). (Tonight at 9 p.m. and tomorrow at 8 p.m. in Cohen Auditorium. Tickets are free with a Tufts ID at the Aidekman Box Office.)

Assassins: Pen, Paint and Pretzels’ (3Ps) Torn Ticket II presents their fall major play, which gathers together seven men and three women who have attempted — and, in some cases, succeeded — to assassinate American presidents. The musical explores the multiple oppressions in these notorious

figures’ lives. Set to a pastiche of Americana music, “Assassins” oversees 120 years of American history. (Tonight, tomorrow and Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Balch Arena Theater. Tickets are free with a Tufts ID at the Balch Arena Box Office.)

TDC Presents: Last Dance With Larry: Tufts Dance Collective presents their semesterly show, which pays homage to University President Lawrence S. Bacow as he enters his final semester as Tufts’ president. Dancers will perform to music by popular artists including Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, Cascada and Cake. (Saturday at 6 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. in Cohen Auditorium. Tickets are free with a Tufts ID and $7 without at the Aidekman Box Office.)

Tufts Fall Dance Concert: The Tufts Dance Ensemble presents “out in front (a little to the left),” a concert inspired by the “Renovating Walden” exhibit at the Tufts University Art Gallery. The concert is entirely student-choreographed and is sequenced by Lecturer Daniel McCusker. Several different genres of dance are presented and fused in this creative, four-piece performance. (Saturday at 4 p.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m. in Jackson Dance Lab. Admission is free.)

—compiled by the Daily Arts Department

Adult Women, ages 18 to 45 years old, with ANOREXIA NERVOSA or Severe Weight Loss are needed for a research study looking at the role of a natural hormone on depression, anxiety and symptoms of AN. The study includes outpatient visits at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Participants will receive a physical examination, nutritional and hormonal evaluations. Up to $750 payment for participation and parking / transportation expenses offered. For more information, please contact Meghan Sullivan at 617-724-7129 or msullivan49@partners.org.

Partners Human Research Committee APPROVAL Effective Date August 03, 2010

THE TUFTS DAILY

8

WEEKENDER

Thursday, December 2, 2010

MCT

The first thing Rapunzel’s (Mandy Moore) knight in shining armor should treat her to is a haircut.

Intricate score and heartwarming story make ‘Tangled’ a holiday spectacular TANGLED continued from page 6

the characters’ emotions, and a large portion of this was due to the wonderful score composed by Menken, the Oscar-winning composer of “The Little Mermaid” (1989), “Beauty and the Beast” (1991) and “Aladdin” (1992). The music adeptly captured the sentiments of the “Tangled” journey.

As expected from Tony Award winner Murphy and pop singer Moore, and surprisingly from Levi, best known as the title character on NBC’s “Chuck,” all the songs were

extremely well performed and easy on the ears. Tunes run the gamut from Broadway style “Mother Knows Best” to tunes such as “When Will My Life Begin” that show off Menken’s poppy composition skills, creating a mixture of musical styles and themes that one wouldn’t generally associate with Disney films.

A novel aspect of “Tangled” is its dual focus on both Rapunzel and her suitor, Flynn Rider.

This is the first time in recent memory that the Walt Disney Animation Studios has put forth a typically “classic” Disney film with a

true male lead. They did so in order to attract all young kids, boys and girls alike, to see this film — and they succeeded. Both leads complement each other and engage both female and male members of the audience: While Rapunzel adds the princess element that we all look for when we see a Disney film, Flynn brings the comic and adventurous side of the feature to the silver screen.

“Tangled’s” graphics are not to be overlooked, either. The film is cast in 3-D and incorporates computer-generated imagery, which creates the appearance of hand-

drawn images on screen. It was more than masterfully done from beginning to end. The only aspect of the animation that became a bother was the three-dimensionality. This element was innovative, but it didn’t add anything more to the film. At the film’s end, the 3-D seemed negligible and even tacky.

All in all, “Tangled” is the holiday movie for all ages. It’s a lighthearted story that teaches us that we should never give up on our dreams, shows us how people can surprise us in good (and bad) ways and emphasizes the value of trust in a way that only Disney can.

ADVERTISEMENT

TCU Senate Bulletin Elections Commission Announcement Want to be paid to run student elections? Apply to be a member of this year’s Elections Commission (ECOM)! For more information on job responsibilities and to obtain an application, please e-mail Samuel.Wallis@tufts.edu or download the application form at senate.tufts.edu.

Applications due Friday, December 3.

NQR Announcement Want a free NQR T-Shirt? Become an NQR volunteer! Volunteers are needed as eyes and ears around the event to ensure it runs smoothly and safely. Beyond the pride in knowing you helped to make a campus tradition a success, all volunteers receive a special NQR T-shirt. NQR will be Friday, December 10th. Volunteers will run for about 2-3 hours starting at 8:30pm. If interested email, NQRvolunteers@gmail.com. Looking forward to seeing you then (in a volunteering capacity, of course)!

Upcoming Meeting Agenda Come to the TCU Senate Meeting this Sunday, December 5th, 7:00pm in the Large Conference Room of the Campus Center to discuss and debate two resolutions: x A Resolution Calling for the Addition of an Entrepreneurial Leadership Studies Secondary Major x A Resolution Welcoming President-Elect Monaco to the Tufts Community

Thursday, December 2, 2010

THE TUFTS DAILY

9

ADVERTISEMENT

Others Before Self

All proceeds will go to Tibetan Children's Villages, an organization dedicated to helping children in Tibet by offering sound educationto allow them to have greater opportunities.

Cosponsored by: Arts, Science & Engineering Diversity Fund, Institute for Global Leadership, International Center, International Relations Program, Office for Campus Life, Student Life Fund, Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, and Tufts Hillel

Design by

THE TUFTS DAILY

10

THE TUFTS DAILY BENJAMIN D. GITTLESON Editor-in-Chief

EDITORIAL Managing Editors

Ellen Kan Carter Rogers Matt Repka Executive News Editor Alexandra Bogus News Editors Michael Del Moro Nina Ford Amelie Hecht Corinne Segal Martha Shanahan Brent Yarnell Jenny White Daphne Kolios Assistant News Editors Kathryn Olson Romy Oltuski Executive Features Editor Sarah Korones Features Editors Alison Lisnow Emilia Luna Alexa Sasanow Derek Schlom Jon Cheng Assistant Features Editors Maya Kohli Amelia Quinn Emma Bushnell Executive Arts Editor Zach Drucker Arts Editors Mitchell Geller Rebecca Goldberg Ben Phelps Anna Majeski Assistant Arts Editors Rebecca Santiago Matthew Welch Rachel Oldfield Bhushan Deshpande Larissa Gibbs Dave Kellog Kevin Luo Jeremy Ravinsky Daniel Stock Elaine Sun Devon Colmer Erin Marshall Lorrayne Shen Louie Zong Craig Frucht Rebekah Liebermann Ashish Malhotra Josh Molofsky Michael Restiano Alexandra Siegel

Executive Op-Ed Editor Assistant Op-Ed Editors

Cartoonists

Thursday, December 2, 2010

EDITORIAL | LETTERS

EDITORIAL

Decision to cancel IM sports was wrong Director of Intramural Sports Cheryl Milligan on Monday announced that the Athletics Department has cancelled the winter intramural sports season due to space considerations and other concerns. Intramural sports will resume in March at the earliest, while relatively unorganized “open gym” sessions will fill the void until that time.

Milligan voiced legitimate problems plaguing the winter intramural sports season. Her primary concern was that there is an inadequate amount of space in the Gantcher Center to accommodate all the intramural sports and varsity teams during the first couple months of the calendar year, after students return from winter break. She pointed to cancellations of games and no-shows during that second part of the winter season as further reasons for canceling the season.

While the Daily recognizes these difficulties, we oppose the Athletics Department’s decision to cancel the winter season. For many students who were active on their high school sports scenes but do not have the time to commit to varsity teams at Tufts, intramural sports offer an opportunity to keep that aspect of their lives alive. Tufts students have myriad interests and canceling the winter intramural season hinders their pursuit for some with the goal of being wellrounded, healthy individuals.

For many students, intramural sports are the best and most enjoyable way to fit exer-

cise into their hectic schedules and stay physically and mentally healthy. Not only are they exercising, but they are doing so in a fun and competitive setting with their friends, with the logistical details taken care of by the university.

While students would still be able to exercise during “open gym” sessions — during which they could show up at an appointed time to use athletic facilities and equipment but not be given the opportunity to compete on organized teams — turnout will undoubtedly be reduced.

Sports in a competitive setting are more likely to attract students than scheduled open-ended and unstructured sessions.

Students could take the initiative to organize competitive matches during these sessions, but this would require students to organize logistics — a level of dedication and organization that would likely deter most students who would have otherwise wanted to participate in such activities. The “open gym” sessions will clearly not be as effective as intramural sports in encouraging athletic participation among the student body.

Several initiatives, from the President’s Marathon Challenge to displaying calorie counts in dining halls, show that the university is committed — at least on some level —to promoting fitness and a healthy lifestyle for all students. The decision of the Athletics Department to abandon ship in the face of

adversity is a disappointing cop out that flies in the face of that commitment.

Issues of space and commitment aside, intramural sports have been offered in the past — with hiccups and headaches, but to the great benefit of the student body.

Even though games are cancelled and many teams drop out, a significant number of students still benefit; the fact that some uncommitted teams drop out does not mean those who keep at it — as well as members of the Class of 2014 who have never experienced intramurals before — should be punished.

Creative scheduling could alleviate space problems — it has been done in the past — and in the event that such issues still remain, just the least popular or most problematic sports could be removed from the schedule.

Or, as in the past, some games could be cancelled. Why cancel the entire season?

By committing more resources to the program, increasing its level of organization and giving it the attention it deserves, student interest, commitment and participation will likely increase. More effort should be made to attract and retain students’ interest, with better advertising, prizes for winning teams and provision of resources like equipment and referees for games.

Committing more completely to the program, instead of getting rid of it altogether, will help promote healthy lifestyles and athleticism among students. Anything less is a disservice to the student body.

ERIN MARSHALL

Editorialists

Philip Dear Executive Sports Editor Lauren Flament Sports Editors Jeremy Greenhouse Claire Kemp Ben Kochman Alex Lach Alex Prewitt Daniel Rathman Noah Schumer Ethan Sturm Assistant Sports Editor Aalok Kanani Meredith Klein Danai Macridi Andrew Morgenthaler Tien Tien Josh Berlinger Virginia Bledsoe Kristen Collins Alex Dennett Emily Eisenberg Dilys Ong Jodi Bosin Jenna Liang Meagan Maher Ashley Seenauth

Executive Photo Editor Photo Editors

Assistant Photo Editors

Staff Photographers

Mick B. Krever Executive New Media Editor James Choca New Media Editors Kerianne Okie

PRODUCTION Leanne Brotsky Production Director Andrew Petrone Executive Layout Editor Sarah Davis Layout Editors Adam Gardner Jason Huang Jennifer Iassogna Alyssa Kutner Steven Smith Sarah Kester Assistant Layout Editor Zehava Robbins Executive Copy Editor Alexandra Husted Copy Editors Isabel Leon Vivien Lim Linh Dang Assistant Copy Editors Andrew Paseltiner Melissa Roberts Elisha Sum Darcy Mann Executive Online Editor Audrey Kuan Online Editors Ann Sloan Emily Denton Assistant Online Editors William Wong Ammar Khaku Executive Technical Manager Michael Vastola Technical Manager

BUSINESS Benjamin Hubbell-Engler Executive Business Director Laura Moreno Advertising Director Dwijo Goswami Receivables Manager The Tufts Daily is a nonprofit, independent newspaper, published Monday through Friday during the academic year, and distributed free to the Tufts community.

P.O. Box 53018, Medford, MA 02155 617 627 3090 FAX 617 627 3910 daily@tuftsdaily.com

OFF THE HILL | RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

Chavez must take major action to help BY

THE DAILY TARGUM EDITORIAL BOARD The Daily Targum

In what can only be described as a public relations stunt, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez recently invited 25 homeless families to move into the presidential palace in Caracas with him. The 25 families became homeless — along with thousands of other families — as a result of a rash of flooding and mudslides in the country. While Chavez’s invite is a nice gesture, it is little more than just that — a gesture, meant to make him look good.

As the leader of the nation, Chavez should be seeking a viable course of action, which legitimately remedies the problems these thousands of displaced families are facing. Sure, by allowing 25 families to live with him he is making a show of good will and crafting an image of himself as a caring leader. But what about the thousands of other families

EDITORIAL POLICY Editorials that appear on this page are written by the editorialists, and individual editors are not necessarily responsible for, or in agreement with, the policies and editorials of The Tufts Daily. The content of letters, advertisements, signed columns, cartoons and graphics does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Tufts Daily editorial board.

affected? What are they supposed to do?

Maybe they should sit tight and hope that their caring leader soon discovers more guest rooms within the palace.

Critics of Chavez often call attention to the fact that he has not done much in the way of providing new housing during his 11-year stint in office. If he had, this situation may not have been as much of a catastrophe as it is now. However, there is no use in dwelling on what Chavez could have done. The past is the past. Now is Chavez’s chance to move forward. It is his chance to correct his own mistakes and give the citizens of his country better lives.

Unsurprisingly, Chavez is not treating it as such. Instead, he is using it as an opportunity to focus first and foremost on his image. The irony of the situation is, if he would take real action and provide more housing, he would be at the same time cultivating an image of himself as a dedicated leader. It is almost humorous how far off the mark Chavez is with his

response to his country’s needs.

Also, one cannot help but wonder about how life will be for the 25 families moving into the palace. Chavez has been decidedly tight-lipped with regard to the specifics. No one knows just how long the families will be allowed to stay — the official word is they will move in temporarily. Does temporarily mean a few days, a few months or a few years? Only Chavez knows, and that is more than a little disconcerting. The families will probably be under constant security surveillance.

After all, who would be comfortable with letting 25 strange families roam freely around their palace without anybody keeping an eye on them?

What Chavez needs to do, then, is provide housing for these displaced families — for all of them, not just a very slim portion of the whole. While he’s at it, he should probably start fixing the slew of other problems plaguing his country. It couldn’t hurt.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Letters must be submitted by 4 p.m. and should be handed into the Daily office or sent to letters@tuftsdaily.com. All letters must be word processed and include the writer’s name and telephone number. There is a 450-word limit and letters must be verified. The editors reserve the right to edit letters for clarity, space and length.

ADVERTISING POLICY All advertising copy is subject to the approval of the Editor-in-Chief, Executive Board and Executive Business Director. A publication schedule and rate card are available upon request.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

THE TUFTS DAILY

11

OP-ED

FROM THE PUBLIC EDITOR

JOSHUA YOUNER | CONSCIENTIOUS AND CONTENTIOUS

Stranded on the moral high ground

BY JACOB

A reluctant community

KREIMER

Over the last month, there have been no fewer than six op-ed articles and letters to the editor dealing in some way with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and as public editor, I felt it appropriate to voice my concern about the discourse.

First, some background. This flare-up of articles began with a film screening of “Occupation 101” (2006) by the Tufts chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), resulting in a back-and-forth between offended pro-Israel students and their counterparts in SJP. One student who suggested I weigh in on the acerbic nature of the subsequent retaliatory response pieces called it like he saw it — “nothing more than using the Daily Op-Ed section for a pissing match over the facts and on the way, pissing all over each other.”

While I understood his concern and felt that some of the accusatory language used in those pieces was chilling or even harmful to campus dialogue, those writers had a right to passionately express themselves.

Yet after several weeks of butting heads, I must suggest that we channel this passion to something more than just discrediting the other side. Now is the time to call out those on both sides of the issue and, in part, the Daily itself for causing more division than unity.

Other heated on-campus issues we’ve seen this semester were followed by more level-headed responses and smoothed themselves out with time. In fact, those who wrote on these topics are to be commended for bringing important topics to the fore for discussion.

Think back to earlier conversation makers: CJ Saraceno’s Ban Together column attacking the idea of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender housing, Tufts Freethought Society’s brief spar with The Primary Source, calls for a more “inclusive” curriculum and the like. From what I observed, these pieces were a shock to the system, which got people thinking about campus questions. Campus media ought to get us thinking about the issues which affect our classmates, and about how our institutions — or lack thereof — reflect on and shape our community.

Within a week or two, these conflicts left the pages of the Daily, but not without leaving their impact on the readership. Ideally, students would have taken the op-eds’ meaningful criticisms to heart and ignored the less savory, biting parts of the articles.

In private e-mails to the heads of some Media Advocacy Board members, I encouraged them to explore tangential issues in their own publications. Perhaps then campus media and the readership itself would emerge healthier and more critical.

I was hopeful that the string of reactions from the screening of “Occupation 101” would have a similar outcome.

Yet the “pissing match” between Israeli and Palestinian supporters continues. The second wave of Daily op-eds before the Thanksgiving break seemed to call for new ways to get past old squabbles and debates, yet the authors couldn’t help themselves and again fit in digs against the other side.

Respectably, writers Ilya Lozovsky of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy on Nov. 22 and Stephanos Karavas of the New Initiative for Middle East Peace on Nov. 23 encouraged Tufts to get over factspewing and to exercise emotional selfcontrol, putting progress over indignation.

Unfortunately, both pieces committed the very errors they criticized.

Lozovsky’s op-ed calls out Tufts’ “quite superficial” dialogue on the Middle East. A few paragraphs later, he frames Israeli journalist Gil Hoffman’s concern with Palestinian suffering as disingenuous — can his assessment of Hoffman’s “mournful tones” be perceived as anything but sarcastic? — only to suggest that a “five-second Google search” would disprove his West Bank land-use analysis. This glib — perhaps itself superficial — dismissal of Hoffman’s credibility did not move Tufts’ Israeli-Palestinian conversation forward, but reduced it to the very paradigm that she lamented.

The next day, Karavas’ piece assessing the state of Tufts’ discourse was generally optimistic. While addressing the need for

I

BOTH MCT

The top photograph accompanied a Nov. 15 op-ed piece, while the bottom ran alongside a Nov. 17 op-ed. improved campus discussion, he decried the “zero-sum game mentality” of the socalled “op-ed war” as “silly and childish.”

After that, he perpetuated the culture he so pointedly identified, perhaps unintentionally. In an attempt to name and shame those who engaged in the “us versus them” framing, his criticism was limited to one of the op-ed contributors, Itai Thaler, and other Israel supporters.

Karavas must have known of his fellow SJP member Lucas Koerner’s Nov. 15 op-ed response to Ariella Charny’s Nov. 3 comments on the screening of “Occupation 101.” There, Koerner asserted that “constructive dialogue is obstructed by a determined mystification of the facts” and “hijacked by a proclivity for conflating criticism of the policies of the State of Israel with attacks on the character of the Israeli people or Jews more generally.” Can words like “determined mystification,” “hijacking” or “proclivity to conflate” really be perceived as anything other than a forceful finger to the chest?

Lest my view seem biased, it must be said that Charny and Thaler’s comments had their share of pushiness. Accusations such as being “too quick to see red in the eyes of Israeli soldiers” don’t exactly seem to be extending the olive branch either.

We must give our peers the benefit of the doubt in these matters, lest things truly spiral out of control and enter into potentially hateful waters.

It’s time to move the discussion forward.

This means reducing our aggressive claims — which seem less convincing than isolating — to the moral high ground. It means lowering our respective walls — or security fences, as they might be — and being willing to hear beyond what we agree with. It means going to the club meeting of someone whom we have called out in our op-eds and commending him or her for the quality of his or her writing. Maybe even meal him or her into Dewick-Macphie Dining Hall and ask about how they got interested in this conflict. It means attempting to cultivate community — which is what media ought to do in the first place.

This effort won’t happen without some changes within the Daily itself. I appreciate the forum the Daily Op-Ed section provides, yet I take issue with its current policies. Though the Op-Ed Department doesn’t significantly change the submissions it receives beyond making grammatical corrections, it does reserve the right to place a picture — sometimes bigger than the article itself — alongside the text. If a picture were ever worth a thousand words, this would be the circumstance.

Over the past weeks, I have frequently found the Daily’s picture choice questionable and its policy of leaving op-ed photos without a caption unacceptable. The caption-free policy purportedly exists as an attempt to prevent editorializing a submission. Yet if the Daily sees fit to add a picture, would a caption really tamper with the intentions of an op-ed that much?

By adding any picture, the Daily wields incredible power to frame the piece.

Readers may be attracted or repelled from an op-ed; perhaps worse, a photo could influence how a reader perceives the overall tone of an article.

Embedding next to Koerner’s Nov. 15 op-ed a photo of a bombed-out building with a man crouching in front adds little clarity to the author’s words. Was this man’s house targeted on purpose by Israelis? Was he a member of Hamas or an innocent bystander? Is it from the Operation Cast Lead the author refers to or a file-photo from earlier aggressions? Similarly, the photo accompanying the Nov. 17 op-ed “Real allies” showing jeeps, barbed wire and protestors seem only to enforce images we’ve come to expect from Israel. What, exactly, are these presumed Israelis protesting or supporting?

Without this critical information qualifying what photos add to op-eds, pictures in the Op-Ed section seem only to enforce stereotypes of the dire situation in the Middle East and keep campus dialogue from blooming beyond the global status quo.

I encourage the Daily to revisit its op-ed photo policy.

Much of my semester as public editor has been spent trying to gather the opinions of the student body and work with our media organizations to synergize together to provide better, conversation-making coverage. My Monday night office hours have welcomed students who were left unsettled by something they read, like the back-andforth about Israel and Palestine that I discuss here.

The reason the public editor exists in the first place is to provide critical reflection on campus media, and I hope this piece has done so. It is a call to stop repeating the same refrains that the respective sides harp on — after all, their solutions have yet to yield peace. I know Karavas is right about his assessment of Tufts’ ability to prevent complete polarization. I look forward to seeing Tufts make even more progress. In the mean time, best of luck with finals.

Jacob Kreimer is a senior majoring in political science.

n a spectacle of bold defiance, WikiLeaks has begun publishing yet another groundbreaking series of secret documents. On Sunday, Nov. 28, the website dedicated to global transparency began publishing over 250,000 U.S. embassy cables. Though the cables will give people around the world an unprecedented look into the inner workings of U.S. foreign policy, there has been international backlash against their publication.

This publication will be the largest set of confidential documents ever released to the public domain. The cables include vast quantities of information about the diplomacy of the United States, relations with other countries and the United States’ foreign policy objectives. The documents provide important eye-opening accounts of otherwise unknown contradictions in U.S. foreign policy, as well as secret diplomatic dealings.

The downsides of this maximal level of openness are numerous and important.

Many of the cables expose the sentiments of Arab leaders who had previously been secretly opposed to and wary of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. These leaders, in conversations documented by the cables, were all too clear about how they feel. A telling example of this is the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi’s description of Iran’s (at best) aberrant president: “Ahmadinejad is Hitler.” There is no question that these leaders will be more guarded in dealing with the United States on this and future issues, which could undermine U.S. diplomats in future negotiations.

In addition to a loss of confidence in U.S. diplomatic partnership, another downside to the publication of the cables is a threat to national interests. It has been made public that the United States and South Korea have begun planning a strategy in the event of an impending collapse of North Korea. Report of this will shake up the region and may cause North Korea to act even more desperately than it has recently.

Though these negatives are real and relevant, the positive aspects of this publication outweigh them. WikiLeaks’ mission is in accordance with the basic tenet of a free press that holds the government accountable. Any democracy must be subjected to this in order to function properly. Moreover, this level of transparency is necessary to deter future war crimes because of the fear of exposure.

The cables also illustrate how the Obama administration’s diplomatic relations have been successful in crucial areas. For one, the United States has successfully built a network of allies against Iran as a potential enemy. Of course this coalition includes Israel, but the cables reveal that many Arab nations, Russia and, most surprisingly, China, have been added to this list. It is important for the American people to be made aware of this point of pride, but it is equally important for Iran to see how effective our policies have been, so as to encourage them to engage with us. It should be noted that Iran mocks the whole operation as a Western propaganda game.

Meanwhile, many around the world have not received this well. Sweden has issued an arrest warrant on charges of sexual assault for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

Interpol has added him to their global wanted list. Assange claims the allegations are part of a smear campaign, and I personally believe him. The United States has begun an “active, ongoing criminal investigation” of WikiLeaks under the Espionage Act, according to Attorney General Eric Holder.

The assault on WikiLeaks and Assange should stop. The benefits of their actions exceed the faults, which amount to a few headaches for U.S. diplomats. We are well served by the publication of these materials. The cables give the public an essential degree of transparency that would otherwise be forgone, and Americans have a right to know what is being done on our behalf around the world.

Joshua Youner is a freshman who has not yet declared a major. He can be reached at Joshua.Youner@tufts.edu.

OP-ED POLICY 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. Op-Ed cartoons are also welcomed for the Campus Canvas feature. All material is subject to editorial discretion and is not guaranteed to appear in the Daily. All material should be submitted to oped@tuftsdaily.com no later than noon on the day prior to the desired day of publication; authors must submit their telephone numbers and day-of availability for editing questions. Submissions may not be published elsewhere prior to their appearance in the Daily, including but not limited to other on- and off-campus newspapers, magazines, blogs and online news websites, as well as Facebook. Republishing of the same piece in a different source is permissible as long as the Daily is credited with originally running the article.

THE TUFTS DAILY

12 CROSSWORD

COMICS

Thursday, December 2, 2010

DOONESBURY

BY

GARRY TRUDEAU

NON SEQUITUR

BY

WEDNESDAY’S SOLUTION

MARRIED TO THE SEA

www.marriedtothesea.com

SUDOKU Level: Defending the Temple, resisting the Greeks’ efforts to assimilate your people

LATE NIGHT AT THE DAILY Wednesday’s Solution

Carter: “Oh, it’s by the same composer as ‘The Little Mermaid.’ ... You know, I’ve seen that movie 168 times.”

Please recycle this Daily.

WILEY

Thursday, December 2, 2010

THE TUFTS DAILY

Wonder What A Law School Class Is ACTUALLY Like?

13

ADVERTISEMENT

HOCKEY FAN BUS! SUPPORT THE JUMBOS!

TUFTS vs NE College Friday December 3rd

Attend A Mock Law Class Run by Dan Norland J.D. Tuesday December 7th 8:00 P.M. Robinson 253 For More Information see Tufts Pre-Law Society Facebook Group or Email owen.rood@tufts.edu

MEN’S HOCKEY Bus Leaves: From: To: Game Time:

6:45pm Campus Center Malden Forum 7:15pm

Invite your friends for a FUN evening.

Bring your Tufts ID for entrance to the game.

No drink containers allowed on the bus.

THE TUFTS DAILY

14

Thursday, December 2, 2010

SPORTS

Strong Wesleyan freshman class stands in the way of a Tufts repeat MEN’S SQUASH continued from page 16

Nate Fowles, Lonnie Gibbs and its number one, Robert Broadfoot, the Cardinals have brought in one of the top freshmen classes in the country.

Freshman John Steele is the team’s new number one, while classmates Zander Nassikas, Jeff Berman, Ethan Moritz, Alex Nunez, and Chase Hochman play four through eight in the lineup in the Cardinals’ lineup, giving the squad some much-needed depth. The six have been impressive so far, going for a combined 12-6 in the Cardinals’ first three matches.

“They lost quite a few players but replaced them,” Eng said. “They are as good as last year and even slightly better at a couple spots.”

Steele has been particularly impressive, going 3-0 so far this season in the number one slot in his first year of collegiate squash. He will provide a tough challenge for Gross in what could be a key matchup for the Jumbos.

ALEX DENNETT/TUFTS DAILY

Junior Chris Mutzel, left, and the Jumbos routed Wesleyan last year, but tomorrow, they will not take the Cardinals lightly.

“It will be the first time that I’ll be playing John,” Gross said. “I will just grind the first few games out until I get a feel for his weaknesses and strengths, and then I’ll try to capitalize on what is working for me.”

While Gross may have no experience playing against Steele, many other Jumbos have seen various Wesleyan players before.

Both Tufts and Wesleyan are in the NESCAC and play each other at least once each season. Also, many players on both teams hail from the Northeast and have played in the same tournaments throughout high school and in college. Thus, communication between players will be crucial to give Tufts an edge in scouting its opposition before the match even begins.

“Because we play the NESCACs every year in the regular season and then possibly again at the conference tournament or at nationals, you see a lot of the same guys,” Gross said. “Our more experienced players will need to pass on tips about where opponents’ weaknesses are.”

Jumbos look to secure first road win of the season at Keene State tonight MEN’S BASKETBALL continued from page 16

win. They hung in there the entire game last year and stole it from us at the end. This year, we knew we couldn’t let Lesley stick around.”

Tufts was dominant right out of the gate. After shaking off a brief 5-3 deficit with a 13-0 run, the Jumbos never let the Lynx get close again. Lesley only got within 10 points twice in the period, but the Jumbos never seemed to feel the pressure.

By halftime, Tufts held a comfortable 22-point lead, 36-14.

Sophomore Scott Anderson led the team with a 14-point, seven-rebound first half performance that the Lynx simply could not match.

Anderson continued to be Lesley’s worst nightmare in the second half, helping to push the lead to 33 with a 13-2 run out of the locker room.

The Lynx’s unraveling only got worse as the Jumbos gained even more momentum, eventually making the score 61-20 on a 3-point shot from freshman Andrew Dowton. From there, the starters took a rest as the reserves continued to rattle Lesley until the final buzzer, when the scoreboard read 86-39.

“I think it all stemmed from the defense,” Anderson said. “We were all involved in defense — talking and communicating — and that translated to the offensive side of the ball. Last year, we were

shooting outside a lot and this year we were able to work the inside a lot better, too.”

The game was a testament to the team’s biggest and newest strengths: depth and teamwide confidence. All 13 active players put at least two points on the board for the Jumbos, and every forward earned multiple rebounds. The freshmen combined for 27 points, while the bench totaled 46 for the Jumbos.

Defense was also on point all-around for the Jumbos, who held Lesley to a dismal 27.7 shooting percentage from the field while causing 23 turnovers. Tufts also finished with a 45-36 advantage on the boards, led by Anderson’s nine and seven from junior tri-cap-

tain James Long.

Still, the Lesley game should be taken with a grain of salt, as tougher competition awaits. The Jumbos now face a demanding schedule of five games in the next eight days before heading home for the holidays, and a solid run before facing NESCAC competition will be key to keeping the team’s new dynamic flowing. Tufts will also have to prove it can win on the road, as the team travels to Keene State.

“The most important thing to take away from this game is the energy we had for 40 minutes,” Quezada said. “Last week, when we went on the road to face Regis, we saw what can happen when we

don’t bring the energy. Against Keene State on the road, it will be important for us to bring the energy and get off to a good start. … We’ll have to wear them down in transition and really execute on offense.

We only have one practice really to get ready for them but as long as we stick to what we do, we should be fine.”

“The coaches said after the game that we should be happy and celebrate the moment but that Lesley wasn’t a good team,” Anderson said. “We know Keene State is a good team with a six-foot-10 transfer that is supposed to be dominant. … We can’t settle because we have a lot of better teams coming up so we have to keep working.”

THE TUFTS DAILY

Thursday, December 2, 2010 Around Campus Chaplain’s Table “A look at Dealing with Loss” MacPhie Conference Room, Thursdays, 5-7 PM. December 2, 2010. Swami Tyagananda, Hindu Chaplain, Harvard University. “A Hindu Perspective on Death”

Housing SOMERVILLE UPLAND RD 2 APT AVAILABLE 1st Fl. 2 Br. modern eat in kitchen, with dishwasher, modern bath, hardwood floors, new windows.

2nd Fl. sunny and spacious, 4 Br. modern eat in kitchen, 1 1/2 modern bath, hardwood floors, new windows. Both apts have front and rear porches, shared coin opp washer and dryer, shared yard, parking for 3 cars each unit. No smoking, no pets, rent is $720 per person, not incl. utilities. First and last and security required. Contact Nick (617)863-5306 or email nickkondilis@yahoo.com

15

SPORTS

Housing

Housing

Apt. for Rent Medford - 2 Bedrooms, Lg Kitchen, Dining Room, Living Room & Ceramic Bathroom. Apt all renovated. Must be seen. Plenty off-street parking. Great Location, 5 min. to Tufts, Rt. 93, Rt. 16. No Laundry - Laundry Mart 1 Block away. No smoking. No pets. Available now. $1200/mo. Call (781)507-6351 or after 5pm (781)395-9096

College Ave 5 BR Apt 2 1/2 Baths, kitchen, living room, off-street parking, w/d basement.

Available June 1, 2011. Rent: $3250. First and last month rent required. Tenants pay utilities.

Larger apts available. Call Guy (617) 590-7656.

Housing 4 Bedroom 4 BR very convenient to school.

Available 6/1/11 to 5/30/12. Great condition on Fairmount Ave. Call (617) 448-6233 10 Bedroom One 10 BR well located. Will not last. Also can use as 4 BR and a 6 BR. Available 6/1/11 to 5/31/12.

Call (617) 448-6233

CLASSIFIEDS POLICY All Tufts students must submit classifieds in person, prepaid with check, money order or exact cash only.

All classifieds submitted by mail must be accompanied by a check. Classifieds are $15 per week or $4 per day with Tufts ID or $30 per week or $8 per day without. The Tufts Daily is not liable for any damages due to typographical errors or misprintings except the cost of the insertion, which is fully refundable. We reserve the right to refuse to print any classifieds which contain obscenity, are of an overly sexual nature or are used expressly to denigrate a person or group. Questions? Email business@tuftsdaily.com.

WOMEN’S SQUASH

Women’s squash squad to face upstart Wellesley team and rival Wesleyan BY

BEN KOCHMAN

ALEX DENNETT/TUFTS DAILY

Junior co-captain Mercedes Barba this weekend will look to lead the Jumbos up the national rankings.

Meyers and Caitlin Doherty, who are both playing their first year of competitive squash. Koo believes that while the Wesleyan players at the bottom of the ladder may be more experienced, Meyers and Doherty are talented enough to compete for wins.

“They’ll just have to go all out for the entire match,” she said. “Their opponents may have been around longer, but they shouldn’t let the fact that their opponent is older than them faze them.”

Tufts will wrap up its weekend slate with a match against Boston College, which started the season at No. 32 and,

like Tufts, has stayed put in the rankings. The match will take place at MIT, which counts as a home match for the Jumbos since Tufts does not have its own courts. Tufts is looking to close out its weekend in style and dominate in its final match before winter break.

“We’ve always beaten them in the past, and as long as we can beat Wellesley we should be strong against them,” junior co-captain Mercedes Barba said. “The biggest match this weekend is definitely the Wesleyan match, but everyone will be really excited for the last match before Christmas break.”

Intramurals butt heads with varsity sports for indoor space INTRAMURALS continued from page 1

“The downside is that during the long winter months, there won’t be a season,” she added. “But for 50 percent of the teams, there hasn’t been one anyway.”

Popular winter intramural sports like indoor soccer, dodgeball, basketball and floor hockey will move to the spring season, Milligan said, joining sports like softball and wiffleball.

The open gym nights in the next few months will require no sign-ups and no experience, she said. To prevent chaos, each sport will have designated time slots for friendly pick-up games.

“Ideally, we’d have separate space for intramurals and varsity athletics, but I guess this is the best thing that could be done,” senior Tanzeel Ahmed, an intramural basketball player since

AVINASH ASTHANA | SWITCH HIT

World Cup 2011

G

Daily Editorial Board

The women’s squash team, still ranked No. 23 nationally five matches into the season, will be tested once again this weekend in two matches, both against teams behind them in the standings: No. 28 Wellesley and No. 32 Boston College. A win in both match-ups will give the team a chance to leapfrog NESCAC rival No. 17 Wesleyan and move into the top 20.

First up will be the Blue in a road match tonight, the first of two Tufts-Wellesley showdowns this season. The Jumbos dominated the Blue in the last meeting between the two teams in February, winning 8-1. All eight of the Jumbos’ wins in the contest were decided in straight sets.

But the Wellesley team is no longer the same. The Blue has shown signs of life this year, winning its first four matches and moving into the top 30. The team is anchored by three first-year members in the top three ladder spots — Rosemary O’Connor, Emma Haley and Dorothy Vickery. The commanding trio all won in an upset earlier this year over Smith, a team that Tufts beat this year as well.

“They have three new players at the top and are definitely better than last year,” senior co-captain Valerie Koo said.

“It’s a good match to start off with, and if we can win, it’ll get us some great momentum going into the weekend.”

Wellesley has come down to earth a bit recently and currently rides a fourmatch losing streak, which the Jumbos hope to extend to five.

“I’m not sure how much their lineup will be different, but this is a match that we should win,” sophomore Ushashi Basu said.

A win would be helpful to the Jumbos in multiple ways, as they will need all of the momentum they can muster against Wesleyan in another road match tomorrow night. Last season, the Cardinals dispatched the Jumbos 7-2 in the teams’ sole meeting. But Tufts, returning its top five players from last season, likes its chances against a team that graduated its No. 1 player last year, Casey Simchik.

“They have new girls at No. 1 and No. 2, which pushes everyone else down the ladder,” Koo said. “There will be close matches up and down the ladder. It’ll be close, but we can beat them.”

Tufts will be counting on some inexperienced players at the bottom of its lineup, including sophomores Risa

Wanted $$ SPERM DONORS WANTED $$ Become a California Cryobank donor and earn up to $1,200/ month, receive free health and infectious disease testing, and help people fulfill their dreams of starting a family. Convenient Cambridge location. Apply online: SPERMBANK.com

his freshman year, said. “It’ll be successful if the same groups of people go, as long as people aren’t deterred.”

But some intramural veterans question whether the same amount of people will participate without the same level of organized competition offered.

“I think you’ll ultimately see less people showing up,” junior Jake Schiller, who in the past played indoor soccer in the winter with friends from the club soccer team, said. “There will be more people with less skill and less desire to win that just want to goof around.”

The season’s cancelation is also frustrating to varsity athletes like freshman Solomon Krevans, who was looking forward to forming a floor hockey team with his friends from the sailing team, which competes in the

fall and spring.

“I’m bummed out because the winter is my only chance to play intramurals,” he said. “I might show up for open gym, but I can’t be sure that there will be other teams there for us to play.”

Milligan plans to hold open, town hall-style meetings in the coming weeks for students to share their thoughts about the new system. Schiller, who will be abroad next semester, was more than happy to offer the first few suggestions for future winter seasons.

“A better way to do this would have been to create a shorter winter season starting when we get back to school,” he said, adding that eliminating the season was not the answer.

“I think there could have been ways to work around it,” he said. “Maybe by offering fewer sports.”

oing from one extreme to the other is a hallmark of any Pakistani cricket team. After putting up a great fight against a strong South African team in the test matches — during which a player actually ran away from host city Abu Dhabi to London, citing some death threats made to him by unknown sources, without telling the team management about the “threats” — there are fresh match-fixing allegations against five more players in the team.

Welcome to the life of a Pakistani cricket fan, where you cannot even hope to predict the result of a game as it changes faster than you can say “HOWZAT!” For unknown reasons, bowlers seem to be making this primal scream a way of appealing to umpires even though it sounds more like an expression of intense torture.

This makes predicting the Pakistani team’s game much harder than the rest. Since we do not even know which first-team players will be allowed to take part in the competition, as bans are imposed on some players if the Cricket board does not like the shirt a player is wearing (I exaggerate only slightly), and various match-fixing allegations are sure to crop up, predicting results is nearly impossible. In my opinion, the mercurial Pakistani team will suffer in the World Cup. Even by their standards they have had a very volatile preparation in this crucial run-up to the tournament and it is bound to affect them severely.

Pakistan has a world-class bowler in Umar Gul, who on his day is virtually unplayable in the death-overs. “Boom-Boom” Shahid Afridi is one of the most devastating all-rounders in the game at the moment, and Pakistan has stability in the form of Mohammed Yousuf and Younis Khan. Pakistan always nurtures quality pace bowlers and we are bound to see some fresh talent taking the cricket community by storm during the World Cup. However, the rapid change in personnel, the fact that they are no longer the hosts of the World Cup, the various match-fixing allegations and the evergreen method of chopping and changing the captain of the team, has lead to a disastrous build up for the team and it will struggle to make as big an impact as they normally could. My prediction — quarter finalist.

South Africa: Chokers is the name the Proteas have been given due to their performances in the key games in the worldwide events. South Africa, without fail, provides an excellent team to these events but they almost always flatter to deceive during the crucial games and the reason has been attributed to weak mental strength — a very important part of a cricketer’s game. Graeme Smith, the South African captain, has confidently said that they are eager to get this monkey off their backs. Those are bold words, but various South African captains have used them over the past two decades.

South Africa has the best opening fastbowler in the world in Dale Steyn, the best all-rounder in the modern game in Jacque Kallis, an exciting and prolific batsman in AB de Villiers, and a great opening partnership in the form of Smith and Hashim Amla. They supplement that with excellent fielding, and it’s easy to see why this team can take it to the next level and win a world cup. Their only weaknesses are a tendency to choke and a lack of a quality spinner that is imperative for pitches in the subcontinent. My prediction — semi finalist.

Next time, I will round out the predictions and talk about the Ashes tour that has finally started!

Avinash Asthana is a junior majoring in computer science. He can be reached at Avinash.Asthana@tufts.edu.

Sports

16

INSIDE Women’s Squash 15

tuftsdaily.com

MEN’S BASKETBALL

Against Lesley, Tufts earns largest margin of victory in 15 years Team’s depth on full display as all 13 players score in 86-39 win against the Lynx BY

CLAIRE KEMP

Daily Editorial Board

If it wasn’t already clear that this men’s basketball season was different from last year’s, Tuesday’s game made that fact impossible to miss.

Just one year ago, after talk of Lesley being weak competition, the Jumbos found themselves staring in disbelief as the Lynx hit a three-pointer in the last 14 seconds to win 57-55. But Tuesday night, the Jumbos pounded the Lynx into Cousens Gym’s floor with an 86-39 win that included points from every member of the Tufts roster.

The win marked not only a change from last season, but a defensive turnaround that the program has craved for years. The 39 points Lesley managed are the fewest allowed by the program in 53 years, and the margin of victory is the largest since the squad trounced Endicott by 47 in 1995.

“I think last year, we took them lightly,” junior guard Amauris Quezada said. “Two years ago, we beat them by a substantial margin and we headed into last year’s game thinking they were just going to fold over and give us the ANDREW MORGENTHALER/TUFTS DAILY

see MEN’S BASKETBALL, page 14

Sophomore Alex Goldfarb hit three of his six 3-point tries and had 13 points in 23 minutes on Tuesday against Lesley.

MEN’S SQUASH

Jumbos prepare for NESCAC showdown at Wesleyan Energized by their talented freshmen, Cardinals will provide stiff competition BY

MATT BERGER

Daily Staff Writer

After finishing 1-5 against some of the top teams in the nation at the season-opening Boston Round Robin two weekends ago, the 22nd-ranked men’s squash team will look to get back on track tomorrow evening in an away match against Wesleyan.

The Cardinals, ranked No. 29 in

the nation, enter the contest 2-1 after playing only three matches at the Round Robin.

Wesleyan handled No. 31 Northeastern by a score of 8-1 in its first match of the weekend before losing to No. 12 Bates, also by a score of 8-1, later that day. In its final match, Wesleyan lost no individual matches and only two individual games in a 9-0 sweep of unranked MIT.

Since their opening matches, the Jumbos have been working hard to improve various skills and different types of shots in preparation for the Cardinals.

“We need to attack with harder drives and volleys and make less errors,” coach Doug Eng said. “In practice, we have been focusing on hitting better backhands and [improving our] consistency and power against Wesleyan. We want

to keep errors minimal, play a disciplined game, and stick to high percentage plays.”

The Jumbos trekked down to Middletown, Conn. last season and easily took down Wesleyan, winning 8-1. But despite that result, senior captain Alex Gross let his team know early on this week during practice that it would be no cakewalk for Tufts this year.

“Coach Eng and I have tried to

express that Wesleyan is deeper and stronger than they were last year and that everyone’s match will be decided by a few points,” Gross said.

“The team will go in knowing they will have to fight for every point and not take anything for granted.”

Although Wesleyan, which finished 12-15 last season, graduated five seniors, including co-captains see MEN’S SQUASH, page 14

Editors' Challenge | Week 13 Strike up the band, throw all your hails at the Chief and bow down at your knees while kissing the feet of the all-powerful ruler, because the Daily’s Editors’ Challenge, in honor of University President-elect Anthony Monaco, is about to get all presidential this week.

After a one-week hiatus from the print edition — fear not, loyal followers, because we kept our picks going through Thanksgiving break — the editors are back with a vengeance, ready to conquer the world one democratic election at a time.

Jeremy “Abe Lincoln” Greenhouse was a pretty honest fellow in his time. Turns out, he’s also pretty good at making NFL picks. The defending champion, Greenhouse, who will graduate after this semester, will look to go out in style with another victory. His 12-4 Week 12 put him at 117-59 overall, and two games in first place. All that’s left is the beard, the top hat and the ill-timed trip to a local show. He’s already freed all the slaves. Cookies for Greenhouse.

Dropping back into second place thanks to a respectable 9-7 showing in Week 12 is Steve “George Washington” Smith, who sits behind Greenhouse at 115-61 overall. In Daily circles, Smith is widely known for never telling a lie. Maybe he should start telling people he’s in first, though, because finishing second to Greenhouse again simply won’t do.

Way back in third place is Alex “Peter Campanelli” Prewitt. While Campanelli never became president of the United States, he did run a successful election for fifth-grade president at Thomas OVERALL RECORD LAST WEEK Houston at Philadelphia Cleveland at Miami San Francisco at Green Bay Denver at Kansas City Buffalo at Minnesota Chicago at Detroit Jacksonville at Tennessee Washington at NY Giants New Orleans at Cincinnati Oakland at San Diego Atlanta at Tampa Bay Carolina at Seattle St. Louis at Arizona Dallas at Indianapolis Pittsburgh at Baltimore NY Jets at New England

Jefferson Elementary School under the campaign slogan “Less homework, more pepperoni.”

After an 11-5 showing in Week 12, Alex “John Fitzgerald Kennedy” Lach has surged to fourth overall, but will need to maximize his boyish looks and irresistible charm to have a shot at one of the top spots. Ethan “Barack Obama” Sturm is a boy wonder no more, having dropped to 10 games out of first place. “Yes We Can” has rapidly become “No You Can’t.”

In a two-way tie for sixth place is Daniel “William Howard Taft” Rathman and Noah “Ulysses S. Grant” Schumer. Rathman had a phenomenal 13-3 outing last week and surged ahead from next-tolast. Schumer, on the other hand, continues to do little else except grow a beard and drink heavily.

It’s been a terrible past few weeks for Phil “Teddy Roosevelt” Dear, who’s been relegated to speaking softly and carrying a big stick after dropping down to eighth place overall.

Claire “Jefferson Davis” Kemp will need to summon some sort of Confederate voodoo power in order to rise up from her current ninth-place spot, while soft-spoken Lauren “Jimmy Carter” Flament barely cracked the 100-win barrier. The same cannot be said for Ben “George W. Bush” Kochman. No one’s misunderestimating this editor, but everyone’s asking the question: Am this editor sucking? The answer, of course, is yes.

Guest-picking this week is Alex “Hilary Clinton” Dennett. Because she wants to be one of the big boys but just can’t quite crack it.

Jeremy

Steve

Alex P.

Alex L.

Ethan

Daniel

Noah

Phil

Claire

Lauren

Ben

117-59 12-4

115-61 9-7

109-67 10-6

108-68 11-5

107-69 9-7

104-72 13-3

104-72 9-7

103-73 8-8

102-74 9-7

100-76 10-6

98-78 11-5

Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Miami Miami Miami Green Bay Green Bay Green Bay Kansas City Kansas City Kansas City Buffalo Minnesota Minnesota Chicago Chicago Chicago Tennessee Tennessee Jacksonville NY Giants NY Giants NY Giants New Orleans New Orleans New Orleans San Diego San Diego San Diego Atlanta Atlanta Atlanta Seattle Seattle Seattle St. Louis St. Louis St. Louis Indianapolis Indianapolis Indianapolis Pittsburgh Baltimore Pittsburgh NY Jets New England New England

Philadelphia Miami Green Bay Kansas City Buffalo Chicago Jacksonville NY Giants New Orleans San Diego Atlanta Seattle St. Louis Indianapolis Baltimore New England

GUEST Alex Dennett

Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Miami Miami Miami Miami Cleveland Cleveland Miami Miami Green Bay Green Bay Green Bay San Francisco San Francisco San Francisco Green Bay San Francisco Denver Kansas City Kansas City Kansas City Denver Kansas City Kansas City Kansas City Minnesota Minnesota Minnesota Minnesota Buffalo Minnesota Buffalo Minnesota Chicago Chicago Chicago Chicago Detroit Chicago Chicago Chicago Tennessee Jacksonville Tennessee Jacksonville Tennessee Jacksonville Jacksonville Jacksonville NY Giants NY Giants NY Giants NY Giants NY Giants NY Giants NY Giants NY Giants New Orleans New Orleans New Orleans Cincinnati New Orleans New Orleans New Orleans Cincinnati San Diego San Diego San Diego San Diego San Diego San Diego San Diego San Diego Atlanta Atlanta Atlanta Atlanta Atlanta Tampa Bay Tampa Bay Tampa Bay Carolina Seattle Seattle Seattle Carolina Carolina Seattle Seattle St. Louis St. Louis St. Louis St. Louis St. Louis Arizona St. Louis St. Louis Dallas Indianapolis Indianapolis Indianapolis Dallas Indianapolis Indianapolis Indianapolis Pittsburgh Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Pittsburgh Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore NY Jets New England New England New England New England NY Jets New England NY Jets