The Tufts Daily
14 Romy Oltuski | The Dilettante
I
Dewey’s turf
t came as a surprise to many of my friends that I waited until the last week of my senior year to hole up in Tisch Library for the first time. It’s not that I’ve never been immersed in Tisch culture — I’ve met people for coffee in it; I’ve used its printers; I’ve rented its DVDs; I’ve taken classes in it; I’ve made out in its book stacks; I’ve smoked on top of it; I even, to my dismay, once saw someone in the back room of its media center jerking off behind his computer in the dark, probably (hopefully) thinking he was not in plain sight of those walking by its roof. But my relationship with Tisch Library was always sort of a Giving Tree relationship — it gave to me, and I took. I never thought to sit down in one of its chairs and keep it company. Until now. On the whole, what I gathered from this experiment was more than I had expected. I came for a few hours of study, and I got a glimpse into a world in miniature, a strange culture with its own rituals and mores, all contained within the giant, white brick walls donated to Tufts by Jonathan M. Tisch but entirely separated from them. As an outsider, I was able to observe its subcultures objectively. Tour with me: Walk in, turn right, and you’ll find the Tower Café, where students drop by for caffeine or sit down to flirt with their TAs and professors, facilitated by the university’s free-coffeefor-students-with-professors policy. A decent studying venue if you like loud background noise you can drown out or if you want to spy on people walking down ProRow through the windows. In both cases, beware: While the Tower is a part of the library, it is not conceptualized as such, and your presence there will be understood as your wanting to talk to people. Musicless headphones are a must if you plan on getting things done. Moving out of Tower, you’ll find several students sprawled on armchairs in the hallway leading from the cafe to the library’s main atrium. They are either on the phone or part of a fringe subculture I don’t yet understand. Turning right and right again, you have the group study area, equivalent to the building’s nightclub. Here, you’ll find pickup artists, socializing and music coming from iPods whose owners don’t realize their headphones aren’t plugged in all the way. This area is not as loud as Tower; it is louder. And the people who come here are more interested in watching YouTube videos and each other than working. Good for study breaks. Returning to the main atrium and heading down the stairs, you are faced with a decision. Turn right if you are either really loud or a shut-in and therefore need your own tiny room within the library, or if you have to pee. But really, turn left, make a U-turn and head straight until you reach the rounded oasis of desks and carrels facing Anderson Hall and labeled “Quiet: Study Area.” If you have arrived at this place, you have won. The harsh overhead lighting is assuaged by the full wall of natural light. The noise level is low enough but not so low that you feel bad noisily resituating yourself in your chair. Now let’s take a trip downstairs. You may think that we are already downstairs. But there’s more: There’s Level G, only reachable through one stairwell but worth the search. Its merits are many. First, there are comfortable armchairs available in its small group study area, which, from what I glean, is rarely a group study area because groups rarely find it. Second, it has movable stacks that are ideal for hide and seek and squashing people you don’t like. Third, it resembles the oasis above it but has a cooler climate, if you’re into that. I hope that this outsiders’ recount has been educational, and I hope you’ll share with me your input or dissenting views about these and other subcategories of Tisch’s socio-cultural geography. Obviously, we’ll leave out late-night study. There are some sacrifices not worth making for research.
Romy Oltuski graduates today with a degree in English. She can be reached at Romy.Oltuski@tufts.edu.
Features
Commencement 2011
For interactive political talk, fast-growing Tufts Roundtable Commons website offers a forum by
Meg Young
Daily Staff Writer
Tufts Roundtable Commons, an interactive news website created and run by a group of Tufts students, has reached 200 bloggers and users. Since the website’s redesign in October 2010, the average number of visits per month has increased to just under 9,000. The website, trcommons.org, which brings together hundreds of blogs by members of the Tufts community including students, alumni and faculty, addresses topics ranging from campus and international news to how to brew your own beer or plan a trip to Paris. It also features a small audio section where bloggers can post their own podcasts. Graduating senior Shabazz Stuart, co-founder and president of Tufts Roundtable, the organization that encompasses both the Tufts Roundtable Commons website and the Tufts Roundtable magazine, said that the organization plans to make the website larger despite its successful figures. “Our number one priority is to continue to expand,” Stuart said. “There are a lot of bloggers at Tufts and in the larger Tufts community, and we want to find all of them.”
Rising junior Aeden Pillai, webmaster of Tufts Roundtable Commons, echoed the organization’s goal. “Our commitment has always been to foster a conversation by those connected in some way to the Tufts community,” he commented in an April post on the website. Indeed, this mission has characterized the website’s evolution over the course of the past few years. The website was originally created to support Tufts Roundtable, a quarterly political magazine started by Stuart and fellow graduating seniors Sam Wallis and Chas Morrison during their sophomore year. “We wanted to create a nonpartisan political magazine,” Morrison said. “There was no common space for students to have a discourse. Tufts [Democrats] have the Public Forum, the Republicans have [The] Primary Source. We founded Tufts Roundtable to be the first step in creating that larger space for campus.” But the founders soon decided that the organization needed an online, not just print, presence. “We quickly realized that [a] magazine was insufficient for creating campus discourse, so we launched a website,” Stuart said. Although they originally did not
have sufficient resources to create a comprehensive website, the team subsequently created a second version of the site. Then, in the summer of 2010, the team received a grant which enabled them to hire professional help in overhauling the website to its current form. Over the course of this process, the Tufts Roundtable magazine and the Commons website have been somewhat differentiated from one another. “At first, a big part of the website was just hosting content from the magazine — it was just to download the PDF of the magazine. Then we started off a community of bloggers, including students, faculty and people abroad. It became an independent community that was separate from the magazine and created specifically for the website,” Morrison said. Today, the magazine still maintains a separate website, which can be found at tuftsroundtable.org. “Originally, the magazine’s focus was on politics, and we try to catch all kinds of things, but it really was an unexpected thing, and when we launched the redesign, it was continuously an experiment,” Pillai said. There is still, however, some consee ROUNDTABLE, page 16
Language requirement unnecessary, some say Students disagree with Tufts’ emphasis on foreign language by Sarah
Korones
Daily Editorial Board
With the exception of engineers, almost every student at Tufts is all too familiar with Olin Hall, the tall brick building at the top of the Hill that houses the university’s foreign language departments. In an effort to prepare students for an increasingly global and connected world, Tufts requires that every student in the School of Arts and Sciences become proficient in a language other than English by taking at least six classes in a foreign language or culture before graduation. But due to the structure of the requirement and the wiggle room it leaves to avoid actual language classes, the value of the requirement has been questioned, leaving many students to wonder — is the walk to Olin worth it? For rising senior Eric Morrissey, the decision to enroll at Tufts three years ago did not factor in the emphasis on foreign languages. It instead- came down to his knowledge of the school’s celebrated science program and its strong music department. Now, as a physics major and a member of the Beelzebubs, an allmale Tufts a cappella group, Morrissey splits the time in his busy schedule between the lab and the recording studio. Morrissey, who admits that foreign languages aren’t his forte, found the extensive requirement to be a source of stress and anxiety. “I was pretty worried about it, because I knew I didn’t intend to major in anything relating to it,” he said. “Engineers get let off the hook, but science majors still have to do it, so that was kind of frustrating.” Every student in the School of Arts and Sciences must take six semesters of foreign language courses. The requirement is further broken down into two parts. First, students must demonstrate knowledge of a foreign language either through three semesters’ worth of courses at Tufts or by placing into higher levels through the language placement test offered during Freshman Orientation or Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB) or SAT Subject Tests in the foreign language of their choice. Once a student has completed this part of the requirement, he or she may choose to continue with his or her original language of study, complete another three semesters of study in a new language, or take three courses that examine a foreign culture. Morrissey, like many students, was able to fulfill the requirement by tak-
ing only one actual language class and two culture classes. While Morrissey views himself as lucky for getting the requirement out of the way in a relatively quick and easy manner, he admitted that his Spanish skills are probably not up to par. “I haven’t taken a [Spanish] class since freshman year,” Morrissey said. “I didn’t go abroad, so I didn’t really give myself a chance to be around the language. I just haven’t used the skills at all since freshman year, so they’re pretty much gone.” But according to Dean of Academic Affairs for the Arts and Sciences James Glaser, the foreign language requirement is anything but a waste of time and actually does provide incentive for students to learn and become proficient in a foreign language.
“It’s true that the requirement at Tufts is heavier than at many other institutions, but we’re proud of that,” he said. “We have long viewed ourselves as an international organization, and our curriculum reflects that.” According to Glaser, many Tufts graduates come out with a facility for one or more languages, and that is often due to the foreign language requirement. “Approaching fluency in another language has long been an important value for education at Tufts,” he said. For Glaser, the opportunity to learn other languages and gain knowledge of different cultures is invaluable, no matter what major students ultimately choose. see LANGUAGE, page 16
lane florsheim/Tufts Daily
The rigorous foreign language requirement has elicited mixed reactions from students.