Dear Reader,
I write to you now, at the close of The Tufts Tribune’s sophomore year, with both the same cautious optimism and sober resolve that we began the year with. Let us set our lands in order.
This year, our team did a lot. We broke news on a new Tufts policy, designed in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 case on affirmative action: Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard; we discovered that the Tufts Committee on Student Conduct (CSC) likely failed to take a severe case to appropriate disciplinary review; and we found that the Courts at Professors Row fail to meet Massachusetts standards for living, according to a landlord-tenant relationship known as “implied warranty of habitability.” Perusal of our website evinces much more. There, you can find Tufts-relevant cultural analysis, comprehensive examinations of campus institutions, and the like. These three are just highlights.
By the end of the year, more non-staff writers than staff writers were authoring our Point/Counterpoints. We see that as the beginning of an unequivocal win in establishing the Tribune as a writerly forum for campus opinion. We want our pages to be a place where students can both find the thoughts of their peers and share their own. We hope to strengthen that precedent in collaboration with the authorship of ever more non-staff writers.
We would be remiss not to mention the threats to free speech that continue to pervade contemporary American life. As we’ve outlined before, our freedoms stand on two pillars—the fundamental legal protection of speech by the state and the exercising of such speech among its private individuals. Today, the integrity of each pillar is threatened.
From the public sector, we see near unprecedented control of speech. The effects of a wartime precedent to restrict non-citizens’ speech, invoked when deporting Rümeysa Öztürk, have played out clearly. Throughout the year, international students have balked at the idea of speaking to reporters and have consistently refused to speak on the record, almost exclusively citing safety concerns. This precedent has, before now, only been invoked during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II, none of which bear a resemblance to today’s level of conflict. With America at war against Iran, one must fear that the administration will hold onto the precedent without renewed, contextual justification—creating a perpetually unwelcoming speech environment for non-citizens. This is a major blow to speech, abstractly. Its practical effect is equally, if not more, chilling. We are left with a hole in the written record where these students would have been. Issues are not holistically understood, articles are written incompletely, and information is spread that inaccurately represents our world. When the integrity of the press is threatened, the world as we know it is altered.
By a factor of more than two, 2025 set a four-year-record for cases of assault against journalists, with 2026 on record to roughly match 2025. Most of these cases took place at protests staged against the current administration’s immigration policies and were at the hands of police officers or agents of ICE. The overwhelming majority of cases took place in Los Angeles, California, and Washington, D.C.
Even internally, the government has imposed speech restrictions. The Department of Defense has assumed editorial powers over Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military’s previously independent newspaper.
These threats are global, too. It is outside of our prerogative and expertise to comment on situations that are not related to the freedom of speech and its constituent parts. The atrocity against journalists that continues to take place in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though, is not beyond this scope. The United Nations, among many other sources, has labelled the conflict the “deadliest conflict ever for journalists,” the brunt of which they report to be borne by local Palestinian journalists.
To us and to many, these are the heaviest of subjects. On their account, we feel more resolve than ever to continue in the pursuance of our founding mission—to protect the freedom of speech on campus and cultivate civil discourse. The energy in the room each time we meet is evidence of its merit, and it is in these moments that we feel an ability to make change in what small ways we can. We are the sum of our parts (and maybe a little more). To nourish each other’s ideas, expertise, and commitment is to bring good into the world. Nothing that I am so proud of has been possible without the hours that each and every member of our team devotes to this project. I am in debt to them, and I admire them every day. We look forward to another year of opening our arms to ever more people with a passion for ideas, information, and their free proliferation.
Thank you,
Stanley Spence, Editor-in-Chief