Alex Levin is a junior at Tufts University majoring in international relations.
His submission is part of a new Globe Opinion section called College Town. You can sign up for College Town’s free weekly newsletter here.
If you are a student at Tufts University in the spring, besides participating in the inebriated Patriots Day festivities or (most likely) entombing yourself in a dark library, you might see an ice cream truck drawing attention to the elections for the Tufts Community Union senate, our version of student government.
The fact that you can get a SpongeBob Bar with your ballot isn’t the only unusual thing about the election. The Tufts student senate also has several “community senators” — seats for members of identity-based groups, including Black students, Hispanic students, LGBTQ students, and those with Southwest Asian or North African identity. In fact, 11 of the 39 voting senators — nearly 30 percent — are supposed to represent a racial, ethnic, sexual, disability, or other identity-based or affinity group.
These rules are in the Tufts Community Union senate bylaws, which were developed by students. The senate matters because it allocates over $2 million for student activities on campus — a fund supplied by a fee of $408 per undergraduate. The senate has control over student organization funding and recognition. It also initiates projects and writes resolutions, which are supposed to represent the will of the Tufts student body. (Additionally, the Tufts senate passed a resolution in 2022 stipulating that the university will pay community senators $150 each semester if they submit a written report to the senate’s diversity officer and “work together on a semester-long project that highlights the diversity and intersectionality of the student body.”)
Curious about the seemingly blatant quotaism of having seats for members of certain ethnic groups, I reached out to several legal experts about it. I learned that the Tufts student government structure likely violates federal nondiscrimination law.
“Many courts would probably find such an arrangement to be illicit,” said Randall L. Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School.
Tufts’s student government structure is unique among Boston-area schools. Neither Harvard nor Boston University has student government assembly seats designated for certain identities. Northeastern’s Student Government Association senate stipulates that senators must represent an academic constituency and a community constituency. The community constituency, however, is inclusive — it extends to all student clubs, cultural/spiritual centers, and fraternities and sororities. Tufts would view a frat representative on the student government akin to a Manchurian candidate. Boston College has student assembly representatives who represent special-interest cohorts, but it does not have seats designated for highly specific identity groups. For example, there is one seat reserved for a member of the AHANA+ Leadership Council, which represents all African, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian and Native Americans at BC.
The Supreme Court decided in 2023 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that the 14th Amendment prohibits most race-based school admissions policies. The Department of Education is interpreting that ruling to apply to more than just admissions. It says the decision prohibits schools “from using race in decisions pertaining to … all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.” This applies to Tufts even though it is a private school, because it receives federal funding.
Tufts spokesman Patrick Collins defended the student senate’s practice by saying that “it has always been the case that any full-time undergraduate student can run for any open [senate] position regardless of how that person self-identifies.”
“We respect the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and are committed to ensuring compliance with the law,” he said in a statement.
Collins may be right that the community senators are not explicitly required to belong to a specific demographic category, but in practice, they always have done so. I confirmed that by looking through the archives of the Tufts Daily student newspaper to find available records of student elections since 2010, when the community senator arrangement began.
In the latest academic year, the Tufts senate rescinded a policy that was effectively allowing campus affinity groups to vet candidates for community senator positions. (The bylaws explaining this policy were taken down from the TCU senate’s website on June 25, shortly after I began making inquiries for this story.)
Collins says the rules governing these seats were changed to “ensure there was no ambiguity that all undergraduate students are eligible for them.”
But despite the suggestion that anyone can run for any seat on the student senate, Cornell Law professor William Jacobson, the president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, said the very descriptions of race- and ethnicity-specific community positions appear to violate federal civil rights law because they dissuade members of other groups from applying.
He compared them to signs on store windows forbidding patrons of certain races or nationalities.
“That’s a violation of law, right there, regardless of whether you physically turn away a Black person,” Jacobson said.
Having seats in the student government meant for students of particular races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations may be in accordance with the orthodoxies of DEI doctrine, but it violates the spirit of equal-protection and nondiscrimination principles established in the US Constitution and federal law. Further, the arrangement is based on the premise that students of a particular identity somehow represent the views of everyone with their identity, a demeaning proposition.
If we believe that the academy is a core institution in American civic life, it is thus accountable to the moral principles on which American democracy lies. If Tufts itself believes this, it has several compelling reasons to end the practice.