WOMEN’S TRACK AND FIELD
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Team achieves personal, season bests in latest meet
Team secures 8th seed at upcoming NESCACs after solid weekend performance see SPORTS/ BACK PAGE
SEE SPORTS / PAGE 11
THE
INDEPENDENT
STUDENT
N E W S PA P E R
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TUFTS
UNIVERSITY
E S T. 1 9 8 0
T HE T UFTS DAILY
VOLUME LXXVII, ISSUE 20
tuftsdaily.com
Thursday, February 21, 2019
MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MASS.
Tufts community responds to antisemitic posters at open forum by Jessica Blough
Executive News Editor
The Tufts community grappled with hatred on campus in an open forum at the Interfaith Center yesterday, the latest in a series of university responses to last week’s antisemitic incident at the Granoff Family Hillel Center. On Tuesday morning, Rabbi Naftali Brawer, Neubauer executive director of Tufts Hillel, discovered over two dozen posters plastered on the Hillel Center. The posters included images of militarized pigs. The Office of the Provost, which hosted the event yesterday, billed it in its Tuesday announcement email as an opportunity for community members to have facilitated conversation in a safe, supportive space. Administrator and staff attendance outnumbered that of the students. Provost and Senior Vice President ad interim Deborah Kochevar said that the event was necessary to ensure that all felt welcome at Tufts.
“Clearly we’re at a spot in time where that is not the case,” she said. Kochevar then invited Kris Manjapra, director of the Department of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, to lead an opening meditation and reflection. Manjapra read a quote from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a civil rights activist and colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr., on the insidiousness of racism and how discrimination affects different communities. “[Heschel] invites us to think about how different forms of discrimination and radicalization such as antisemitism, on the one hand, antiblackness on the other, are different, and yet also part of an interwoven system of injustice and oppression,” Manjapra said. “He asks us to stretch our minds, and our hearts open to think and feel in terms of solidarity.” Manjapra read the quote a second time, encouraging participants to notice where the words resonated within them. “Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical, how universal and evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is man’s gravest threat to man, the maximum of hatred for a minimum of
reason, the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking,” he read. “How many disasters do we have to go through in order to realize that all of humanity has a stake in the liberty of one person? Whenever one person is offended, we are all hurt. What begins as inequality, some inevitably ends as inequality of all.” After Manjapra, Chief Diversity Officer Rob Mack began a time for open conversation with remarks on past incidents of racism and discrimination at Tufts. “Incidents that are taking place at Tufts … are not acceptable, and it is important for us to come together as a community to think about our role and responsibilities and how we support each other but also continue the work of educating our community,” he said. He said that while it may be difficult to have these discussions while members of the community are hurting, the community has a responsibility to acknowledge what happened. Mack then allowed time for attendees of the event to speak. One student began the discussion by asking about what specific aspect of the posters was offensive.
Brawer pointed to the deliberate, targeted placement of the posters on the Hillel center. “By equating us, and it was us because it was the only building that we were aware of that had these posters and some of them facing were inward — they were for us to read as a Jewish center — equating us with pigs on the most basic level was really offensive,” Brawer said. Brawer specified that he was speaking on his own behalf, rather than for the Jewish community at Tufts. At least one of the posters on the Hillel Center contained an explicitly anti-Israel message, which read, “DESTROY ISRAELI APARTHEID FORCES AND AMERIKKKAN [sic] PIGS WHICH FUND IT. FREE PALESTINE.” Addressing the Israel-Palestine conflict, Brawer said Zionism and Israel are connected to Jewish identity. “It’s our home. And that doesn’t mean that when we build a home, our neighbors aren’t affected,” he said. “But it’s the undermining of our homeland, saying, ‘your homeland is see HILLEL, page 2
Students advocate for dining workers at campus tours, E-Week carnival by Alexander Thompson Assistant News Editor
Members of Tufts Dining Action Coalition (TDAC) continued their campaign in support of the Tufts Dining workers in their contract negotiations with the university last Monday by interrupting campus tours and distributing handouts to the participants. They later unveiled banners in the Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) during the Engineering Week (E-Week) Kick-Off Carnival later that day. The student activists started the day in Dowling Hall, where they made announcements in support of the workers to touring prospective students before the 9:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. campus tours, according to Jesse Ryan, a TDAC organizer. Then, at around 2 p.m., several student activists fanned out across campus in the steadily falling snow and freezing temperatures with megaphones and more handouts to stop groups as they made their way around the hill. Ryan explained that the objective of the action was not to dissuade prospective students from applying or attending Tufts but rather to bring attention to the university’s labor policies. “[The goal] is to educate people about what’s actually going on here and to counter the picture-perfect image the University sells on their tours and in their admissions pamphlets and tell people what the reality of this campus is. The workers, the student
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organizers and activists who are here make up a lot more of the Tufts community than the university would like to tell people on the tours,” Ryan, a sophomore, said. Alex Aronson, a Tufts tour guide whose tour of about 20 prospective students and parents was interrupted by TDAC in front of Ballou Hall, said that tour guides were prepared to handle the interventions by student activists and that a response had been discussed ahead of time. “The way we present it back out to the prospective students is that social activism is a big part of student life on campus, and it’s your choice to be a part of it or not,” she said. However, Aronson did take issue with the activists having interrupted her while she was talking and said that she told TDAC members that in the future they should tell the tour guides they have something to say. Requests for comment made to Tufts Admissions were referred to Patrick Collins, executive director of public relations. “One of the most distinctive and important parts of a Tufts education is our emphasis on civic life and civic engagement,” he said in an email to the Daily. “We respect the right of students to voice their opinions on this and other issues.” Ryan said the group had gotten a mix of responses from tour participants, with encouragement and curiosity coming from many perspectives. Amy Psaila, a prospective student’s parent visiting from New York whose group had been addressed by TDAC members, said that this
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kind of student activism is what college is about. “[Tufts is] going to have to deal with student advocates. They have a student body who cares, and hopefully they’ll be responsive,” she added. Nick Hatzis-Schoch, a prospective student from Newton, Mass., said that the activists had not affected whether he would apply to Tufts, but that on all the other college tours he had been on, participants had never been approached by student activists. “I was a little confused at first as to what they were doing, but after I read their little pamphlet they had handed out, I was a little intrigued and thought I maybe could support the cause at some point,” HatzisSchoch said. The pamphlets, which bore the logo of UNITE HERE Local 26, the union representing the dining workers in their contract negotiations, read: “Tufts can’t compare itself to Harvard, Northeastern, Lesley, Simmons or MassArt.” Ryan explained this is meant to allude to the union’s claim that Tufts compensates its workers less than the institutions to which the university is often compared on tours. The pamphlet also carried a testimonial by Zahra Warsame, a second cook at Carmichael Dining Hall, in which she criticized the healthcare provided by the university as unaffordable. Finally, the pamphlet directly appealed to prospective students to tweet out their support for the dining workers. TDAC continued demonstrations later that
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day at the E-Week Kick-Off Carnival in the SEC atrium. Just before 4:40 p.m., TDAC activists dropped six banners from the walkways over the Dearborn Ave. doors with messages such as “fair contract now” and “healthcare is a human right.” Noah Harris, a TDAC member who participated, explained that the action did not focus on engineers despite taking place during E-Week. The focus was on increasing visibility and keeping up pressure on the university even on a holiday. “This is the students saying to the university that we aren’t taking breaks from this campaign, and we want to show the university that we’re fully on the workers’ side,” he said. The university disputed the view of the negotiations that was presented by TDAC on Monday. Collins wrote that the two sides have continued to make progress with the university’s negotiation team, led by Joseph P. McConnell from the Boston legal firm Morgan, Brown & Joy LLP, and that they had reached tentative agreement on 10 issues ranging from immigration to workplace harassment at the last bargaining session which took place Feb. 5. “The university is glad to be entering the final phase of bargaining, and looks forward to learning more about the union’s economic positions,” he said. The union did not respond to request for comment on the negotiations by press time, but Lior Appel-Kraut (A ‘18), an organizer
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