In The 'Cac

Cal, of the exponentially successful Tufts spawn Timeflies, spits rhymes about Boston like he’s a native:

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By the time most students get to college, they roundly agree that college rankings are skewed at best and arbitrary at worst (unless, of course, you go to Williams). Today in silly college rankings is a clear conflict between the Times and the Beastover Tufts. Don’t they compare notes!? We’re not hinting that the New York Times Magazine‘s “Meh List” is objective in any way, but here you go:

Ouch. More meh than Strawberry Special K? That stuff isn’t just meh, it sucks. This Meh List is from the Nov. 11 issue, and it sparked numerous criticism both here and on Twitter, where Henig responded to detractors by saying, “Our extensive reporting led us to believe that it was, overall, a meh university.”

But the plot thickens: When we first reported on the Meh List, we were unaware that The Daily Beast had already declared Tufts the fifth “hottest” school of the past decade! A Jumbo recently uncovered this ranking from Dec. 2009 in order to, perhaps, extricate his future alma mater from its mehness.

So did Tufts go from being “hot” to “meh” in about two years? Have the characteristically eclectic and interesting Jumbos gotten complacent? For what it’s worth, coconut-milk beverages turn out to be great hangover cures, and somehow Ohio Wesleyan University is “hotter” than the real Wes, so we call BS on both counts.

Yesterday, graffiti (including swastikas and white supremacist slogans) was discovered on and around the Tufts football field. This incident comes one the heels of graffiti (reading “CUNT”) discovered on the opposite end of the Tufts campus: on signs, cars parked in outdoor campus parking lots, and cars parked immediately off-campus.

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(Source: inthecac)

DJ/Producer duo Shapes of Light, comprised of Tufts’ Andrew Berman (A14) and Nicolas Russo-Larsson (A12) recently played at Electric Daisy Carnival Orlando; were signed to Less Than 3 Records; released their first EP, titled Chroma; and have climbed Beatport’s Top 100, as well as taken part in the one-off “mau5hax” session during 2012′s WMC week. And their success isn’t going to stop: SoL just released ERA! (below), an acid-influenced house track that has two great drops–the second is a doozy–and is a must download.

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(Source: inthecac)

As we covered in Coal Divestment In The ‘Cac, the movement to remove colleges’ endowment investments from coal companies and the fossil fuel industry is surging across the conference. The campaign is directed by Middlebury’s Scholar in Residence Bill McKibben and 350.org, his international environmental protection organization.

Tufts Divest for Our Future has been one of the most active, successful, and–to some Jumbos–invasive campus divestment groups. Last week, a video showing Tufts Divest members interrupting a prospective students’ info session was leaked to Facebook and YouTube. (The video was meant to be shared internally amongst Tufts Divest members.) The below footage shows student activists pressing an admissions officer about specifics of the University’s $70 million investment in the fossil fuel industry (the questions begin about 1:40 in). When the speaker would not give a clear answer, the students pushed her further in an info session that was apparently already going to be cut short, drawing an aggressive response from those in attendance. One man, presumably the father of a pre-frosh, stands up near the end of the video and tells a Tufts Divest member he is going to “get security if you don’t shut the hell up.”

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Back in 2000, the Tufts Christian Fellowship (TCF) lost funding and recognition from the Tufts Community Union (TCU) for removing a gay member, Julie Catalano, from her leadership position. Catalano had been “trying to reconcile her sexual orientation with her religious beliefs for her three years at Tufts and, at the end of her junior year, came to the conclusion that her religious beliefs about homosexuality had changed, and that she no longer wanted to pray to change.”

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They keep telling us we’re graduating. At Tufts, the senior class celebrated  “76 Days till Graduation” on Sunday (the actual event was supposed to be “100 Days till Graduation,” which makes much more sense, but unfortunately was scheduled the weekend of the nor’easter and, thus, had to be re-scheduled as the less graceful sounding ceremony). The event included “heavy hors d’oeuvres” (which, for whatever reason, translated to Italian, Pan-Asian, Picnic-style, and Southern finger-food), miniature stuffed Jumbos with the already-set date for our one year reunion (people have those?), and very official looking pad-folios (pads + porfolios = pad folios) as the visible symbols of our impending maturity.  For some of us, today started to hammer in the idea that, 76 days from now (including weekends) we will be thrown off our hallowed Hill and into the real world. For others, it was merely free food. In the spirit of 76 days left, here is a list of some of the uniquely NESCAC-ey things we can do now that we may or may not be able to do upon entrance into the post-grad lifestyle:

1. Get real loopy in the library. At some point, I’ve heard, you are expected to actually do more than 1 hour of work/4 hours spent sitting with your laptop open. That, however, could be a myth. Further, I have it on good authority that G-Chatting someone sitting next to you is still acceptable in the workplace, so no need to worry about that.

2. Paint/Decorate statues/emblems. E.g. the Tufts cannon. I don’t think spray painting the exterior walls of your apartment or your subway station is quite the same.

3. Be on first name terms with the President of your organization. While we affectionately (and not so affectionately) refer to our college presidents by various nicknames, I do believe we will have to call our superiors Mr. & Ms. So-and-so once we do, theoretically, become employed.

4. Live 4.5 feet from all of your friends. Unless you get a job in NYC.

5. Drink, unashamedly, from plastic containers. And I’m not talking about Nalgenes or soda bottles. Rubinoff is cost effective now, a year from now its still cost effective, but much more privately so.

6. Dress in theme. Now, people say this, but I have seen “adults” all in theme on bar crawls. So I refuse to give up any of my denim clothing (for Canadian tuxedo theme) or eighties workout gear (for Call On Me theme).

7. Have access to late-night common spaces (campus/student centers) that do not require you to buy something in order to exist in them.

8. Free gym membership.

9. A plethora of outdoor space that you have a unique claim to (sounds ridiculous to say in February, when no one in their right mind wants to claim any of that outdoor space, but spring will come!) Front lawns are not the same as quads, unfortunately. And you can fit far fewer people when you want to sled/tan/climb trees/play Frisbee/participate in Holi/play corn hole/throw water balloons.

10. Dining halls. Where else can you see and be seen, and have access to unlimited pizza, soft-serve frozen yogurt, and coffee? You might get two of those four things at one venue, but never all four.

76 days, seniors. Soak it up like so much soggy green space and get excited for the warm home stretch.

(Source: inthecac)

Full disclosure: I’m from Los Angeles and as Black man, I was absolutely raised with the F**K the Police mentality. I was born during the Rodney King riots, and I know to keep my head up and wave at police so they know I’m safe.  However, I do not walk around with a target on my back. I have never felt unsafe by authority figures since being on the East Coast; until I heard about the PSafe Incident at Wesleyan earlier this semester.

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