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Tufts University

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Tufts University
Seal of Tufts University
MottoPax et Lux
(Peace and Light)
TypePrivate
Established1852
Endowment$1.2 billion USD [1]
PresidentLawrence S. Bacow
ProvostJamshed Bharucha
Academic staff
583
Undergraduates4,900
Postgraduates4,300
Location
Medford/Somerville
,
MA
,
USA
CampusUrban/Suburban
ColorsBrown and Blue
AffiliationsNESCAC
MascotJumbo File:Jumbo-logo.png
Websitewww.tufts.edu
Tufts logo

Tufts University is a private university in Medford/Somerville, Massachusetts, suburbs of Boston. The school emphasizes public service in all disciplines[2] and is well-known for internationalism and its study abroad programs.[3] The university is home to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

In 1852, Charles Tufts founded Tufts College and donated the land for the campus on Walnut Hill, the highest point in Medford. Tufts said that he wanted to set a "light on the hill." Originally affiliated with the Universalist Church, Tufts is now non-sectarian. The name was changed to "Tufts University" in 1954, although the corporate name remains "the Trustees of Tufts College." In the late 1970s, the French-American nutritionist Jean Mayer became president of Tufts and, through a series of rapid acquisitions, transformed the school from a small New England liberal arts college to a world-renowned Nobel-Prize winning research university.[4]

Institution

Tufts employs 3,500 people, with 8,500 students from across the United States and more than 100 countries attending classes on the university's three campuses in Massachusetts (Boston, Medford/Somerville and Grafton) and one in Talloires, France. In addition, the university is affiliated with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and with the New England Conservatory of Music.

File:Ballou Hall.jpg
Ballou Hall, seat of the Tufts administration

Tufts is currently ranked 27 on the America's Best Colleges 2007 list by U.S. News & World Report, and the school has been recognized as a "Doctoral/Research Extensive" institution by the Carnegie Foundation. The media often refers to Tufts as a "Little Ivy" or one of the "New Ivies."[5] In the Princeton Review's 2007 Best 361 Colleges, Tufts was named #7 in a list of the 20 schools in the country where students are happiest.

Admissions

Admission to Tufts University is highly competitive and extremely selective;[6] in 2006, the university accepted 25% of roughly 15,300 applications to its undergraduate class of 2010.[7]

In selecting the class of 2011, Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg added experimental criteria to the application process for undergraduates to test "creativity and other non-academic factors." Calling it the "first major university to try such a departure from the norm," Inside Higher Ed notes that Tufts continues to consider the SAT and other traditional criteria.[8][9]

Organization

Tufts is comprised of eight schools, shown here with date of establishment:

In 1910, the Jackson College for Women was established as a coordinate college adjacent to the Tufts campus. Jackson College was later integrated with Tufts College in 1980, but is recognized in the name of the undergraduate arts and sciences division, the "College of Liberal Arts and Jackson College." The campus land that was Jackson College is in the city of Somerville. Women continued to receive their diplomas from Jackson College until 2002.

The Experimental College, ubiquitously called the "Ex College," was created on the Medford campus in 1964 as a proving ground for "innovative," experimental, and interdisciplinary curricula and courses. The college is governed by a board of five students and five faculty members who set policy and select courses. By far, the most prominent feature of the Ex College is EPIIC, a year-long program begun in 1985 to immerse students in a global issue, culminating in an annual symposium of scholars and experts from the field.

The Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service was founded in 2000 "to educate for active citizenship" with the help of a $100 million gift from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam. In 2006 the school was renamed after a $40 million dollar gift from Jonathan Tisch. The Tisch College has been called the "most ambitious attempt by any research university to make public service part of its core academic mission." [10]

Campuses

File:Ballou, President's Lawn, Tufts University.png
The President's Lawn on the Medford/Somerville campus

Greater Boston

The Medford/Somerville campus on Walnut Hill houses the undergraduate campus and university administration. Administrative offices of the university are centered on Ballou Hall, the oldest building on the hill, and extend into the surrounding neighborhoods and Davis Square. The Fletcher School is also located on the Medford campus. Prominent exterior spaces on the campus include the Academic Quad, the Rez Quad, the President's Lawn, and Professors Row, which has been declared a historic site by the Somerville Historic Preservation Commission. The hill is often cited for having two of the three best views in the greater Boston area of the city skyline.[citation needed]

The medical school is located on a campus in Boston adjacent to Tufts-NEMC, a 451-bed academic medical institution that is home to both a full-service hospital for adults and the Floating Hospital for Children. All full time Tufts-NEMC physicians hold faculty appointments at Tufts.

The veterinary school is located in Grafton, Massachusetts, west of Boston on a 634-acre campus. The school also maintains the Ambulatory Farm Clinic in Woodstock, Connecticut and the Tufts Laboratory at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole on Cape Cod.

Satellite facilities

File:Talloires priory.jpg
Tufts' campus in Talloires, France, an 11th century Benedictine priory

Tufts has a satellite campus in Talloires, France at the Tufts European Center, a former Benedictine priory built in the 11th century. The priory was purchased in 1958 by Donald MacJannet and his wife Charlotte and used as a summer camp site for several years before the MacJannets gave the campus to Tufts in 1978. Each year the center hosts a number of summer study programs, and enrolled students live with local families. The site is frequently the host of international conferences and summits.

Culture and student life

File:Tufts cannon.jpg
The cannon

The school colors of Tufts University are brown and blue. The shade of brown is generally called chocolate brown, and the blue is variously described as between light and middle blue, or dusty sky blue. Though this color combination was chosen by the student body in 1876, the colors were not made officially the colors of the school until 1960, when the Trustees voted on the matter.

A fixture on the Medford campus is a replica of a cannon taken from the deck of the U.S.S. Constitution. The city of Medford donated the cannon to the university in 1954. Since 1977, it has been used by student groups and individual students who paint messages on the cannon under the cover of night. Painting the cannon is a competitive activity. Students must guard their handiwork or run the risk of having their message painted over by a rival group. Over the years, the cannon has sported political messages, rallying cries for athletic teams, birthday greetings, and wedding proposals.

The Tufts school mascot is Jumbo the elephant, in honor of a major donation from circus owner P.T. Barnum in 1882. While Barnum gave the skeleton of the animal to the American Museum of Natural History, the stuffed remains of Jumbo were put on display in the basement of Barnum Hall until the building burned down in 1974. The alleged ashes of Jumbo currently reside in a peanut butter jar in the athletic director's office; the elephant's tail is also preserved. A large plaster-statue elephant, Jumbo II, now sits on the academic quad.

File:Jumbo w football players.jpg
Football players pose with Jumbo in 1935. Jumbo was destroyed by fire in 1975.

The Leonard Carmichael Society is the largest student group at Tufts, an umbrella organization for community and public service projects. LCS is comprised of a volunteer corps of over 1,000 and a staff of eighty-five.

The student body of the undergraduate population is known as the Tufts Community Union (TCU). TCU government consists of three major branches: the TCU Senate, the TCU Judiciary (TCUJ), and the TCU Elections Commission (ECOM).

Traditions

On the first night of reading period during the fall semester, several hundred students let off steam by stripping and running around the Rez Quad in the Naked Quad Run. Most students run naked, while many wear body paint or costumes. The event attracts many Tufts students to participate or watch as well as members of the surrounding community. In 2003, the Tufts Community Union Senate introduced the simultaneous Nighttime Quad Reception as a way to legitimize and help improve safety at the event.

A concert known as Spring Fling takes place in the spring semester immediately before final exams on the President's Lawn; acts over the past several years have included The Roots, Less than Jake, and Tufts alumni Guster.

The night before Spring Fling, the Tuftonia's Day fireworks take place on the Rez Quad.

The Tufts Mountain Club famously "pumpkins" the campus on Halloween night, placing pumpkins in prominent and increasingly absurd locations such as atop buildings and statues. Students and faculty awake to the unique decor the next morning. Although the ritual is over 75 years old, the TMC has never officially taken credit for it.

Campus media and publications

  • The Tufts Daily is the daily student newspaper, the most prominent source of news for the last two decades. The Daily is notable for its financial independence, receiving no funding from the student activities fee.
  • The Primary Source, Tufts' Journal of Conservative Thought.
  • The Tufts Observer, a weekly newsmagazine and the oldest student organization on campus, having been founded in 1895.
  • The Zamboni, a humor and satire magazine.
  • The Tufts Traveler, a travel journal founded in 2005.
  • WMFO (91.5 FM Medford) is freeform radio operated by students and community volunteers since 1970. The station broadcasts 365 days a year and operates out of Curtis Hall.
  • TUTV is the campus television station, operated by Tufts students in partnership with the Ex College and viewed throughout the Tufts campus.
  • JumboCast is a student-run broadcast group that specializes in streaming Tufts events live over the internet via webcast.
  • Hemispheres has been, since 1976, one of the few undergraduate journals dedicated to international relations in the United States.
  • The Public Journal is an alternative literary magazine, founded in 2005, which focuses on publishing found literature.

A cappella groups

Tufts notably has an active and competitive a cappella scene, being home to numerous prestigious a cappella groups that (somewhat humorously) each lay claim to a particular niche of Tufts culture.

Athletics

File:NewJUMBO.jpg

Tufts is a member of the Division III National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC), which includes Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut College, Hamilton, Middlebury, Trinity, Williams, and Wesleyan. Tufts distinguishes itself from other Division III schools by competing against nearby Division I schools such Boston College, Dartmouth, and Harvard. Tufts, like other Division III schools, does not offer athletic scholarships. Men's and women's squash and coed and women's sailing are the only Division I sports at the school.

The Tufts football program is one of the oldest in the country. The 1,000th game in team history was played during the 2006 season. Historians point [1] to a Tufts versus Harvard game in 1875 as the first between two American colleges using American football rules. Discussion of the historic game and its place in the evolution of football was featured in the Boston Globe and on ESPN.

History

File:Tufts seal 1943.jpeg
Seal of Tufts College, c. 1943

Charles Tufts was the donor of the land the university now occupies on the Medford-Somerville line. The twenty-acre plot, given to the Universalist church on the condition that it be used for a college, was valued at $20,000 and located on one of the highest hills in the Boston area, Walnut Hill. In 1852, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts chartered Tufts College. Having been one of the biggest influences in the establishment of the College, Hosea Ballou II became the first president in 1853.

P.T. Barnum was one of the earliest benefactors of Tufts College, and the Barnum Museum of Natural History was constructed in 1884 with funds donated by him. On April 14, 1975, fire gutted Barnum Hall; the collection housed in the building was completely lost, including numerous animal specimens, Barnum's desk and bust, and the stuffed hide of Jumbo the elephant.

On July 15, 1892, the Board of Trustees voted to admit women to Tufts College.[2]

The university remained in relative obscurity until the presidency of Jean Mayer began in 1976. Mayer was, by all accounts, some combination of "charming, witty, duplicitous, ambitious, brilliant, intellectual, opportunistic, generous, vain, slippery, loyal, possessed of an inner standard of excellence, and charismatic".[11] Mayer established Tufts' veterinary, nutrition, and biomedical schools and acquired the Grafton and Talloires campuses, at the same time lifting the university out of its crippling financial situation.

Financially, the university has received the three largest donations in its history over the past year. On 4 November 2005, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam donated $100 million to Tufts to establish the Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund.[12] On 12 May 2006, Jonathan Tisch gave $40 million to endow the University College of Citizenship and Public Service, which now bears his name.[13]

Notable alumni and staff

Main article: List of Tufts University people
  • Hannah, the heroine in Curtis Sittenfeld's second novel, The Man of My Dreams, goes to Tufts. Interestingly, the heroine in Sittenfeld's first novel, Prep, was rejected from Tufts.
  • Pete and Berg, the lead characters in the sitcom Two Guys and a Girl met as undergraduates at Tufts.
  • The gate to the President's Lawn was featured in the opening credits of the sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
  • Elaine Benes, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the sitcom Seinfeld, mentions that she attended Tufts, calling it her "safety school."
  • Scott Adler, recurring character in Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series. Eventual U.S. Secretary of State, Adler graduated first in his class at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
  • Dr. Jordan Cavanaugh, title character from Crossing Jordan, played by Jill Hennessy. The fictional Boston medical examiner graduated from Tufts.
  • Amy Abbott on the WB drama Everwood was rejected from Tufts in an episode of the show.
  • Ken Erdedy, character in the novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It is likely that the fictional marijuana addict and resident of Ennet House attended Tufts University, evidenced among other things by the memorabilia in his household (p.25, 360, 362).
  • Dr. Jennifer Melfi, psychiatrist to Tony Soprano on The Sopranos graduated from Tufts Medical School.
  • Julie Merkel, a cutthroat prep school student in Cheats (film), a 2002 comedy starring Mary Tyler Moore, wants desperately to attend Tufts.
  • Kenny, a Stuckeybowl employee on the TV show Ed, graduated from Tufts (and, when asked about it by Ed, replied, "It's in Massachusetts").
  • Jenna Blake in the Body of Evidence mystery novels attends Somerset University, a fictional version of the Tufts campus.
  • Susan Silverman of Robert B. Parker's Spenser mystery series teaches at "Taft University," a thinly-veiled stand-in for Tufts, and Parker uses the Taft setting in several books.
  • Toyota ran an ad in the late 1970s/early 1980s that portrayed a student setting off for college in his new Toyota and driving cross-country from his home in southern California. The ad finished with his triumphant arrival in front of Eaton Hall. For years, this commercial was shown before all campus movies.
  • Some outdoor footage of the Tufts campus was shot in fall of 1967 for the 1968 movie Charly starring Cliff Robertson and Claire Bloom. The movie is based on the short story "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes and is about a slow man made into a genius — temporarily.

References

  1. ^ Russonello, Giovanni. Endowment is thriving, survey demonstrates. (2006). Tufts Daily, 5 October 2006.
  2. ^ Bacow, Lawrence S. "How Universities Can Teach Public Service." The Boston Globe. 15 October 2005.
  3. ^ Kantrowitz, Barbara. "America's Hot 25 Schools." Newsweek Kaplan College Guide.
  4. ^ Gittleman, Sol. (November 2004) An Entrepreneurial University: The Transformation Of Tufts, 1976-2002. Tufts University, ISBN 1-58465-416-3.
  5. ^ Kantrowitz, Barbara (2006). America's 25 New Elite 'Ivies'. Newsweek, August 21-28, 2006.
  6. ^ USNews.com: America's Best Colleges: Tufts University. Accessed July 10, 2006. U.S. News classifies Tufts' selectivity as "most selective."
  7. ^ http://taap.tufts.edu/news/classof2010.asp
  8. ^ Jaschik, Scott (2006). A "Rainbow" Approach to Admissions. Inside Higher Ed, July 6, 2006.
  9. ^ McAnerny, Kelly (2005). From Sternberg, a new take on what makes kids Tufts-worthy. Tufts Daily, November 15, 2005.
  10. ^ Bombardieri, Marcella. At Tufts, civic engagement stretches across the globe. Boston Globe, 14 March 2004.
  11. ^ Gittleman, Sol. "The Accidental President." Tufts Magazine, Winter 2005.
  12. ^ Hopkins, jim. "Ebay founder takes lead in social entrepreneurship." USA Today, 3 November 2005.
  13. ^ Tisch announces $40 million gift to Tufts University. Boston Globe. 12 May 2006.
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