Last fall, Tufts freshman Ben Sackrey found himself getting sick more than he ever had before. “I had a runny nose, swollen lymph nodes, really swollen tonsils, and I didn’t really know what the cause was,” he said. That was until Sackrey, a resident of the Court at 95 Professors Row, noticed what appeared to be black mold inside his room’s HVAC unit and on the walls of the dorm’s restrooms. When Sackrey’s roommate conducted mold tests in their room, they all came back positive.
After several weeks of back-and-forth with the school administration, Sackrey was able to move to a new dorm. He is a member of the varsity rowing team, and illness had already set his fitness back—he couldn’t afford to get sick again. Almost immediately after moving out of his room at 95 Professors Row, Sackrey noticed his symptoms began to subside, an indication that something in his Professors Row dorm had been responsible for his illness.
To identify the prevalence of mold in the Courts, The Tufts Tribune conducted mold tests of the three dorms’ surfaces, air, and HVAC system.
Mold was detected in the central HVAC system, on dorm surfaces, and in the air. For comparison, tests were also conducted in the recently renovated Blakeley Hall; all of these tests came back negative.
Built in the summer of 2022, the Courts at Professors Row, known by many as “the Courts,” are situated on the site of the former Vouté Tennis Courts and comprise three nearly identical residence halls located at 91, 93, and 95 Professors Row. The complex was created to house 150 first-year students due to overenrollment beginning in 2022 and has since also hosted an overflow of sophomore students when other housing was not available. It replaced temporary COVID-19 isolation units, or “mods,” which previously occupied the site, beginning in 2020.
Although the current Courts structures offer more robust housing than the isolation units that preceded them, one gets the sense they were never intended to be permanent. When the buildings were announced in the spring of 2022, they were framed as a “temporary” part of “Tufts’s first-year housing offerings for at least the next five years,” according to a 2022 email sent to university community members.
Although Sackrey’s is an extreme case, it is not the only one. Concerns over mold and other safety issues in the Courts—including occasional flooding, poor ventilation, and faulty plumbing—have been widespread.
According to its residents, one ubiquitous characteristic of the Courts is a persistent odor, which can often be a sign of excess moisture and mold growth. “Maybe a month or two after moving into my room, I noticed it had an unusual smell,” said first-year student Jett Pedersen, who currently lives at 95 Professors Row. Pedersen is also a member of the rowing team and was Sackrey’s roommate until Sackrey moved out due to health concerns.
According to emails obtained by the Tribune, Pedersen submitted a work order to have his AC unit cleaned, to which Facilities & Maintenance took over three weeks to respond. He also asked the school to help him re-test his room for mold, but his request was never met. “I was wondering if someone could retest the room for mold to see if the issue is resolved,” Pedersen wrote in a March 2026 email to Residential Life staff, “and if the tests are still positive, I was wondering how to go about requesting a room change.” Pedersen was never able to change rooms. According to Sackrey, it was only after his parents complained about their son’s persistent illness that the school helped him leave the Courts.
Talia Polish, a first-year student in Court 91, told the Tribune she has also experienced persistent illness since arriving on campus, including severe congestion and a cough that has lasted both semesters. After becoming sick, Polish discovered “a lot of white visible mold in [her] AC vent.” Upon this discovery, her Residential Advisor requested a work order to clean the vents in her room. Still, Polish remained sick, leading her to believe that more widespread mold was the culprit. “I just find the correlation between [coming] back to the Courts after a long break and becoming very sick to be too strong,” she said. Talia explained the emotional impact of being “chronically and persistently sick,” sharing the unfortunate detail that “my friends have told me they’ve never heard what my real voice sounds like.”
Polling of the Courts’ residents suggests that concerns about mold are extensive. In a survey sent to students living in the Courts, 34 out of 36 respondents across all three dorms reported visible signs of mold in their Court. When asked if they had noticed an odor in their dorm that they had not noticed in other buildings, 33 respondents answered “yes.”
Regarding the overall viability of the Courts as living spaces, students expressed a variety of concerns. “Some areas in the floor basically have sinkholes. And the doors do not properly close when there is a [snow] storm,” one student remarked. “Additionally, the toilets and bathroom stalls are always broken.”
Observations by the Tribune substantiate some of these concerns: several Courts bathrooms have areas in the floor that sink under weight, and several toilets appear partly detached from the walls. Earlier this year, students even reported seeing mushrooms growing out of bathroom walls in the Courts, a claim confirmed by photos taken in the fall.
Mold is a naturally occurring fungus that is present in many environments. However, there are cases in which it can become hazardous. Dr. Jonathan Bayuk, a board-certified clinical immunologist and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Tufts Medical School, stressed the fact that mold is not inherently dangerous, but a lack of airflow can make it problematic. “Mold is a part of planet Earth,” Bayuk, who is also the President of the New England Society of Allergy, said. “But . . . you need to build a structure that’s not going to make it worse—and poor ventilation is one of those [problematic] things.”
Mold can have disparate effects. Some people could live in a mold-filled environment without any health risks, while others could face major sickness from living around mold for too long. “If you’re allergic to mold, it can make you sick . . . [with] chronic sinusitis, asthma, and in rare cases, mold toxicity,” Bayuk explained. Mold toxicity can induce any number of the following symptoms: cognitive difficulties, pain, unexplained weight changes, numbness and tingling, metallic taste, vertigo or dizziness, tinnitus, extreme fatigue, and symptoms that resemble hormone imbalances. “Some people do fine, and others get sicker,” Bayuk said. While anyone can experience the full range of symptoms, they are exacerbated by a mold allergy, which according to the National Institute of Health, only affects 3-10% of people.
With students reporting a whole host of chronic maintenance issues in the Courts—of which mold is just one—some wonder whether the modular housing should continue to hold students. “I don’t think that students should be living there,” Sackrey told the Tribune. “Just because, at least in 95, there are soft spots in the floors, and there’s too much mold. I don’t know how, unless they do a real overhaul of the building, students can continue living there.” Some respondents to the Tribune’s survey expressed a similar sentiment: “The Courts are eternally damp and [are] not made for long-term student living,” one resident wrote.
The university has recognized some of the issues Courts residents have raised. In a statement to the Tribune, Tufts Executive Director of Media Relations Patrick Collins said the university is “aware that there have been a number of concerns raised by residents of the Courts concerning mold” and that Tufts Facilities, “in partnership with Environmental Health and Safety, is working to determine if there are underlying issues at the Courts that go beyond common sources of mold.” For now, though, “there are no plans to construct a new building at the Courts.”
What responsibility, then, does the university have to ensure the cleanliness of housing facilities like the Courts? Although students enter into a housing contract voluntarily, there are still health and safety guidelines that the university is required by law to meet. According to the Massachusetts Department of Health, “every owner of a residence shall maintain all buildings” to be “free from excess moisture or the appearance of mold.” When these standards are not upheld, residents can request inspections, go to their city’s board of health with concerns, and in some cases, withhold rent payments until concerns are properly addressed.
“In Massachusetts, whenever somebody is renting a space, the landlord has a responsibility to make sure that the environment is clean and healthy,” Bayuk said. Although on-campus housing is not necessarily a “landlord-tenant” relationship, similar guidelines still apply under a legal doctrine known as “implied warranty of habitability.”
Having worked on many mold clean-up projects, Bayuk recognizes the angst these situations can cause residents. However, he believes they can be best resolved when students avoid becoming combative.
“The best approach is to work with the university, explain the issues, and not be confrontational,” he said. “The best we can do is just say, ‘there is a problem in this location, please address it,’ and then they should do that. Most of the time, [the university] does the best they can.”
While the university has offered some temporary solutions to the mold problem, such as installing dehumidifier units in each of the three courts, it can be more difficult to do away with the issue altogether. “These things can be addressed, but once you have mold, it’s growing, and it’s not going to go away,” Bayuk said. According to him, “the most effective way of getting rid of mold that you can see is a one in 10 mixture of bleach with water,” but total removal can often require replacing structural components.
At the core of students’ frustrations, though, seems to be the feeling that a university should be working harder to guarantee safe and high-quality housing—especially at Tufts, where the housing fee is more than $10,000 and tuition now exceeds $71,000, making it the eighth most expensive university in the U.S., according to Business Insider.
“The fact that there have been visible signs of mold and mushrooms growing in bathrooms is, frankly, not okay, especially considering how much we’re paying to live here and how much we’re relying on [the university] to live in a dorm,” Polish said, reflecting a common sentiment among the Courts residents the Tribune spoke with.
From hanging out with friends in the common room to resting in bed after a long day, college dorms play an important role in shaping student life, especially for newly-arrived first-years. Living in what was intended to be temporary housing while peers have access to more traditional living affects not just physical living conditions, but students’ emotional experience as well. Students can learn to make do in an unconventional living space, but high financial investment does raise expectations for what types of dorms should be offered—and what standards they ought to comply with.
Students in the Courts recognize that, like Bayuk noted, subpar living conditions are not the result of anyone’s malintent, but rather an example of administrative inaction that begins at the top. In the survey, one student mentioned that the “cleaning staff clean[s] very well” but that they simply do not have the resources to deal with underlying issues. Another respondent commented that “the daily cleaning during the week is nice, but it’s clear there are more extreme problems than can be handled in the few hours the one cleaner comes every day.”
It is not clear what measures might be proposed to deal with such “extreme problems.” With the university expressing no plans to construct a new building on the Vouté Tennis Courts any time soon, it is likely that future Tufts first-years will be forced to contend with similar issues to the ones currently facing students living in the Courts. And while Tufts has taken the first step of recognizing that issues exist, it remains to be seen whether the university has a long-term plan to deal with them.
Photo by Morgan Zhang, April 10, 2026