From your experience, how would you describe the student body?
My impression is that the school is very liberal, though not as overtly progressive as say, Oberlin or Reed. A Trump teeshirt was seen in one of the dining halls the day after the election.
Extremely liberal. Very activist-oriented. Very vocal. There have been going ongoing discussions this semester about whether or not the student body in general is open to dissenting opinions.
There is a small (but active) contingent of conservative students on campus (or at least there were when I was there), especially those involved with “The Primary Source.” The most recently elected Republican senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown (who won election after Ted Kennedy’s death and lost his seat shortly thereafter to Elizabeth Warren), is a Tufts alum, too.
Overall most students are on the liberal side and many tend to be vocal and activist (as @qwerty568 notes) but there is not always agreement between different groups of liberal students (e.g. when I was on campus the students in SJP were very outspoken, openly disrespecting the ambassador from Israel to the USA on his visit to campus, and often clashed with liberal pro-Israel students).
@hebrewhammer I do think the Israel vs Palestine debate is a rather unique one on campus in its divisiveness, largely (imo) due to the large Jewish population on campus. I think other issues tend to be much less controversial among the student body.
Check out the post election issue to get a perspective
interesting website:
@Qwerty568 yeah, perhaps that one is an extreme example but I remember a few issues on campus while I was at Tufts (and in the few years or so afterwards) that seemed blown out of proportion by the more liberal students (such as the hunger strike - but I may not have been following it closely).
As far as the Israel/Palestine “debate,” that seems to be a big issue on many liberal campuses (which typically have proportions of Jewish students far above the US as a whole), with Jewish students on both sides in many cases. I’m glad that the debate at Tufts hasn’t become as extreme as it has in some places (such as UCSC and UCLA) so as to border on true anti-semitism. I would disagree that the debate is any more contentious at Tufts because of the large number of Jewish students, though - if you’ve followed any of the national discussions over the last several weeks regarding the UN resolution and Trump’s proposed ambassador to Israel it’s clear that Christian conservatives are far more likely to take an uncritical view of Israel’s actions than American Jews are.