The Tufts Daily - September 13, 2017

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Political Science professor speaks in wake of Charlottesville see FEATURES / PAGE 3

TUFTS GALLERIES

New curator hopes to link Tufts, SMFA through art

Men’s Soccer improves to 4-0 balancing offense, defense see SPORTS / BACK PAGE

SEE ARTS / PAGE 5

THE

VOLUME LXXIV, ISSUE 5

INDEPENDENT

STUDENT

N E W S PA P E R

OF

TUFTS

UNIVERSITY

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T HE T UFTS DAILY tuftsdaily.com

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MASS.

Tufts students protest DACA elimination by Daniel Nelson News Editor

More than 60 Tufts students protested yesterday against the current presidential administration’s cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, gathering at the lower patio of the Mayer Campus Center. The program, according to a White House press release, will be phased out over six months, with no new applications accepted. The protest was organized by Tufts United for Immigrant Justice (UIJ) and opened with a short speech by a student named Juan. Juan stood atop a table and spoke through a bullhorn about being smuggled into the United States aboard a van. “I remember feeling this intense feeling of hope when we crossed the border, the likes of which I never felt before,” Juan said. Juan also discussed his enrollment in the DACA program, which he said opened many doors for him in America. “[DACA] gave me the opportunity to work,” he said. “It also made higher education a lot more accessible for me as it opened the door for many scholarships and allowed me to travel the country without fear of being arrested by ICE.” Since its creation in 2012, DACA allowed undocumented immigrants who entered the country under the age of 16 to apply for temporary protection from deportation. The approximately 800,000 enrollees in DACA, none of whom had been convicted of a crime, were able to work and attend school as a result of the program. Former Dean of Admissions Lee Coffin announced in April 2015 that Tufts would accept undocumented students, including but not limited to students with DACA status.

ANGELIE XIONG / THE TUFTS DAILY

But while DACA brought such benefits to many of the student speakers, it came only after they had lived through childhoods marked by a constant fear of deportation, the speakers said. One student, Alejandro, described a sense of betrayal when his parents told him at age 8 to remain wary of immigration officers. “I felt hollow and cold when I learned that I was hated by the country I called home,” he said. With the Trump administration’s Sept. 5 decision to rescind the program, the students, not all of whom said they see DACA, page 2

Tufts Department of Computer Science hires four professors, loses three

by Natasha Mayor News Editor

In the wake of Assistant Professor Ben Hescott controversially leaving the Tufts Department of Computer Science this May after being denied tenure, the department has faced additional faculty changes in the past few months. The Department of Computer Science has hired four new professors and lost three. Megan Monroe specializes in visual analytics and will now be a full-time lecturer, co-teaching Introduction to Computer Science in addition to teaching her own course on natural language processing. In Fall 2016, she taught a class on visualization, acting as a part-time lecturer. Professor Susan Landau is a cybersecurity policy expert and Tufts’ second Bridge Professor who is developing programming between the School of Engineering and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She will begin teaching courses in the spring. “I’m hoping to have most of my courses cross-listed so that students from both places, as well as maybe International Relations or Political Science or

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Psychology or History, can take them as well,” Landau said. Assistant Professor Liping Liu is a machine learning researcher who specializes in working with data sets that have a geospatial aspect, such as the migration patterns of birds. This semester, he is teaching a course on Machine Learning for Ecology and Sustainability. Assistant Professor Jivko Sinapov is an expert in developmental robotics and hopes to start a robotics lab at the University. He is a proponent of hands-on teaching and project-based learning, finding teaching to be much more fulfilling than working in industry. “In industry, you may have interns, but they come in for a semester, then they’re gone,” Sinapov said. “Here, you get to actually watch the students grow. That’s why I’m in academia.” The hiring of these new professors has been accompanied by the departure of three others. Greg Aloupis, who specializes in algorithms and computational geometry, will begin teaching at New York University in see CS DEPT., page 2

NEWS............................................1 FEATURES.................................3 ARTS & LIVING.......................5

OPINION.....................................8 COMICS.....................................10 SPORTS............................ BACK


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