Residential life at Tufts has enacted a policy that would prevent members of culture houses from living in their house for more than one year. This would affect special interest housing, including the culture and language houses, as well as the Arts Haus and the Crafts House.
This petition is in opposition to that policy, as it would prevent us from carrying on our traditions and building our community, as well as interfering with the operation of the Crafts Center.
For many of us, Crafts house was our home at Tufts. It provides a safe place on campus for vegans and vegetarians, for LGBT students, and for activism and art. The other culture houses likewise provide a refuge for students seeking a community. By preventing students to live in their houses for consecutive years, you prevent us from building and growing our communities. I think it is also of note that many/most of these houses provide communities for minorities and LGBT students.
The members of Crafts House work continually to improve the house, including creating new ways to welcome students into our community, and to improve the crafts center. This would be impossible if students could not return for multiple years. Additionally, there are many traditions that crafts house has that would be lost if members were not allowed to return.
Perhaps the most important reason that preventing students from returning would hurt the Crafts house community is that living in Crafts House is a serious time commitment. You commit to cooking and eating meals with house members, running workshops at Crafts Center on Saturdays, and you commit to running the Crafts Center during the week. Running the Crafts Center could NOT be done by a group of students who are entirely new to Crafts House. It involves teaching crafting skills that we have learned from each other, and helping students to use complex equipment. These things would not be possible without the leadership, oversight, and training from students who live in Crafts House for consecutive years, and these skills are obtained largely through residence in the house.
I lived at Crafts house from my sophomore year to the end of my senior year at Tufts. I would consider the people who I met at Crafts House, and my experiences there to have been among the most valuable of my life. As demonstrated by the fact that alumni return to Crafts House annually to celebrate thanksgiving with current and past Crafties, I know that am not alone in this feeling, that the loss of the Crafts House community would devastate me. This change in policy would deal a very severe blow to the community and culture of Crafts House.
It is a credit to Tufts to have this welcoming, creative, and active community, and an absolute abomination to destroy it with this policy that effectively turns Crafts house, and all of the other culture houses, into nothing more than dorms.
-Jenna Reece, Alumna 2010
