The Tufts Daily THE
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Thursday, April 16, 2026
VOLUME XCIII, ISSUE 10
ResLife pushes housing placements for all rising sophomores in the random housing pool to May 8 Zahra Brady Staff Writer
On Friday, Tufts’ Office of Residential Life & Learning sent an email to all remaining students in the random housing pool informing them that they had not yet been placed for the 2026–27 school year. Students will now have to wait until May 8 for updates on their fall housing situation. Sara Swamy, a rising sophomore who originally planned to aim for a triple but was forced to enter the random pool after triples filled up, expressed concern about the delay. “It’s a little frustrating that I still don’t know where I’m going to be living, and most people do,” Swamy said. Due to the limited number of triples available, Swamy and her friends were unable to form a group of three. Rather than being given a chance to re-form different groups for doubles, they were each instead automatically entered into the random pool. “We tried [forming a triple] and then, because it happens
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West Hall is pictured on the Academic Quad. at the same time as doubles, because we didn’t get the triple, we automatically got put into random housing,” Swamy said. In the email, students were given the option to request to live with specific students by emailing the associate director
of residential operations, Perry Doherty, by April 17. “It was clear that we could try to room with people that we want to room with, but it’s not set in stone,” Swamy said. Another rising sophomore, Rosalie Tavernese, had planned
to enter random selection. She said ResLife provided comparatively less information and guidance to students who were choosing random placement and that she wasn’t aware that lottery numbers no longer matter within the random housing pool.
“I wasn’t really sure what I had to do as I was going random, because the email, it kind of only focused on the group formation,” Tavernese said. “Unless I missed info, [which] I could have, but [I would’ve liked] maybe just a little more information regarding people who are going random, because I didn’t know that my lottery number doesn’t really do anything anymore.” More generally, for all students, the number of each dorm type available — apartments, doubles, singles, triples — was not given for most of the duration of the housing process, with specific figures being absent on both Tufts’ websites and communications. It was only on March 23, the day that the first group formation session began, that ResLife officially released the numbers of each dorm type. “I think that was definitely not the best method to give that information. I think it would have been helpful to have it a lot earlier,” Swamy said. see HOUSING, page 2
Tufts ordered to pay nearly $4 million in damages for breaching tenure contracts with School of Medicine faculty, state court rules Anika Parr and Julian Glickman Deputy News Editor and Executive News Editor
Originally published April 13. A state court ruled in favor of eight Tufts School of Medicine basic science faculty members earlier this month in a lawsuit over compensation plans that were determined to have violated tenure’s promises of “economic security,” ordering the university to pay nearly $4 million in damages. After a 12-day trial that ended in late January, Justice Hélène Kazanjian found, in a pointed April 2 ruling, that Tufts had imposed compensation plans for the tenured basic science faculty that cut their salaries and fulltime status based on external grant funding requirements that did not exist when they received tenure, including retroactively for tenured faculty who had been granted tenure before the plan was enacted. Tufts passed the compensation plans in 2017, revising them in 2019, which required the faculty to
generate 50% of their salary from external grants, with salary cuts of up to 10% per year if the benchmarks were not met. Kazanjian wrote that the plans imposed conditions “not contemplated at the time Plaintiffs were awarded tenure” in ruling that Tufts had breached its contract on grounds of economic security. The university said it was “considering the decision” and declined to comment further. The Middlesex Superior Court had ruled in Tufts’ favor in February 2023 in a summary judgment before the Supreme Judicial Court — the state’s highest court — reversed the decision and sent the case back to the Middlesex Superior Court for trial. The plaintiffs argued that, despite the salary cuts, several faculty members were required to work full-time under the 2017 plan, leading to violations of the Wage Act. Brent Cochran, a School of Medicine professor in the Department of Developmental, Molecular and Chemical Biology and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said
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Tufts University School of Medicine is pictured on Sept. 30, 2021. Tufts tenured professors have faced challenges securing grants, leading to pay cuts since the compensation plan was enacted. “I’m making less than the starting salary of a first-year postdoc despite 40 years of experience,”
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“The Drama” drops the
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Cochran said in an interview with the Daily. Any other basic science faculty member at the School of Medicine who received tenure before 2017 and had their salary cut under the compensation plans could
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Baseball falls to MIT
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potentially bring the same claims using the ruling as precedent. The court’s ruling was significant in defining “economic security” and holding that tenure see BREACH, page 3 News Features fun & Games Arts & pop culture opinion Science Sports
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