THE TUFTS DAILY
Rain 61/55
VOLUME LXIV, NUMBER 16
Where You Read It First Est. 1980 TUFTSDAILY.COM
Friday, September 28, 2012
New provost holds town hall meeting with students Provost and Senior Vice President David Harris met with students yesterday to discuss his career path and goals for Tufts. The meeting was a part of the “A Look Within” discussion series hosted by the Office of Intercultural and Social Identities Programs. The series is meant to allow students to speak with professionals and learn from their experiences, according to Africana Center Director Katrina Moore, who introduced Harris. As provost, Harris is the chief academic officer of the university and will work on a number of financial, academic and diversity-related initiatives, he said. Harris assumed his position as Tufts’ provost on July 1 as the result of a search process that began when former Provost Jamshed Bharucha left Tufts at the end of the 2010-2011 academic year. Harris listed several goals for the year, including meeting people at Tufts and getting to know Tufts’ programs. He said that it is extremely important for the administration to communicate with by
Corinne Segal
Senior Staff Writer
students while planning for the university. “Part of the challenge for us as administrators is always to make sure that we are creating and supporting institutions and environments that resonate with today’s challenges,” he said. After speaking about his background and career path, Harris answered questions from members of the audience about the promotion of diversity at Tufts and the university’s future. Harris said he believes that there should be a holistic effort in place to understand the challenges of minority groups at Tufts and that faculty, students and the Group of Six — a group of six cultural centers at Tufts that promote diversity — could all contribute to this effort. He noted that Tufts is in the process of figuring out what role research plays at the university. “It’s a university that is different from what it was 30 years ago, in the sense that it’s increasingly focused on research,” he said. Sophomore Genesis Garcia asked Harris his opinion on whether students see HARRIS, page 2
Kyra Sturgill / The Tufts Daily
The university will this year present a five-year plan for campus construction spending to the Board of Trustees.
University launches five-year capital planning blueprint by
Martha Shanahan
Daily Editorial Board
The university has begun drafting a five-year blueprint for capital expenditures on maintenance and construction across Tufts’ campuses that will lay out the priorities for each school and program, including plans for a new science building on the Medford/ Somerville campus. The long-term plan for committing funds is a move away from the university’s historically more reactionary approach to capital planning, Vice President of Operations Dick Reynolds said. “We used to ask [the schools] every year, ‘What do you need for capital?’ But then what would happen is that instead of it being put together as a
university-wide plan, it ended up just with the squeaky wheel getting the grease,” he said. The blueprint will act as an approximate agenda for capital spending across the university based on the priorities of University President Anthony Monaco and the leadership of each school. “We’re saying, let’s take a look at what are the priorities over the next five years. We can have a pretty good idea of what cash is going to be available over the next five years for expenditure in capital items, so now we’ve got to get into setting priorities and having the uses equal the sources, at least from a planning standpoint,” Reynolds said. see CAPITAL, page 2
President of Argentina speaks at Harvard forum Kyra Sturgill / The Tufts Daily
A student network focusing on rape culture and consent at Tufts convened for the first time this month.
Students develop network against rape culture by
Rebecca Kimmel
Contributing Writer
A group of students earlier this month gathered at the Crafts House to create a student network centered on discussing sexual assault and consent at Tufts. The network aims to foster communication among student groups with common interests, as well as among individuals concerned with rape culture on campus, according to President of Tufts Voices for Choice (VOX) Rachel Greenspan, a meeting organizer. “There are a lot of really wonderful groups working on similar initiatives around consent and rape and sexual assault, but there hasn’t been a mechanism for communication among the groups as well as individu-
als who are interested in this,” Greenspan, a senior, said. The meeting was attended by students from groups such as Prevention, Awareness & Community at Tufts (PACT); Students Promoting Equality, Awareness and Compassion; VOX; Students Acting for Gender Equality; The Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center; Tufts Queer Straight Alliance; and the Panhellenic Council at Tufts, according to Greenspan. Although the network has not yet been named, the meeting served as a starting point for students to brainstorm the group’s goals and initiatives, she said. “We’re not an established entity yet,” Greenspan said. “So far it is just a meeting. We were trying to figure out our own pursee NETWORK, page 2
Inside this issue
Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner last night delivered a public address on the global economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Fernández touched upon the state of her home country, which she claimed has been strengthened by recent administrations. “If you compare Argentina today with how it was in 2001 or 2003 — a country with no strong leader, with people rallying against their politicians and unemployment rates around 35 percent — much has been transformed for the better since then,” she said. In the past decade, Argentina has experienced unprecedented debt reduction, created five million jobs and become the country with the highest minimum wage in Latin America, she said. Nonetheless, Argentina’s financial growth has stalled somewhat in the past year. Fernandez said that this is to be expected in an increasingly interconnected global environment, and she urged nations to react to this reality accordingly. “We need to join efforts in the international community in order to overcome this crisis, which is clearly becoming political in nature,” she said. “We need to come up with global instruments that are not the ones we currently have.” Fernández claimed that nations would have to adopt policies that are significantly dif-
ferent than those of organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, which she believes have not been able to operate effectively in the global economy for the past decade. She added that economic policies would have to be dramatically overhauled in nations as debt-ridden as Greece and Spain. “Sooner or later we’ll have to see a major debt restructuring in these crisis-struck nations,” she predicted. “The situation is that urgent.” Fernández explained that this type of ingenuity must be displayed not just in the global economy, but also by organizations such as the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), which Argentina is set to join in 2013. “[The UNSC] has lost its ability to operate effectively in today’s world,” she said. “The world in which it was founded ... is over. Today there are different circumstances and different problems which we have to react to.” She ended her speech on an optimistic note, stressing that economic and political challenges can be confronted effectively as long as nations are open to fresh ideas. “It’s very unlikely that the same medicine that caused the disease will also cure the patient,” she said. “You either have to get rid of the medicine, or the doctor, or both.” —by Josh Weiner
Today’s sections
Sci-fi thriller “Looper” provides an insightful take on a classic timetravel theme.
Tufts football uses past defeats as motivation for Saturday’s game vs. Bates.
see ARTS, page 3
see SPORTS, back
News Arts & Living Comics
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Classifieds Sports
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