The Elephant in the Room
Twenty-one years ago, the Mayor of Somerville named it.
“Tufts benefits from its location in Somerville and Medford, its tax-free status and significant government aid. Our community expects higher standards from such neighbors,” wrote Mike Capuano in a 1997 press release calling out the university for outsourcing custodial services.
Privatizing those jobs undermined job security and wages for people who had worked for the university for decades. That great free tuition benefit for themselves and their kids if they got into Tufts? Gone. The pension plan and health care coverage? Gone.
What was true then is true now.
Back in ’97 Mayor Capuano put it in a nutshell: “The forcing of lowest-paid workers to take pay cuts, while raising the pay for executives, is dividing American society.”
Twenty years later, Tufts continues to winnow away at the custodians — in 2015 five Tufts undergrads when on a hunger strike to protest the most recent round of layoffs. And that division in American? It continues to grow. Apparently, capitalism can be extremely efficient.
Between 2002 and 2016 Tufts increased the number of undergraduates by 500. And between 2002 and 2016 Tufts has build on-campus housing for 126 students.
The university’s solution to this shortfall is to buy houses in the area as they come on the open market for student housing. Which makes sense. If you didn’t pay taxes, had a $2.4 billion endowment, and got federal dollars to help you run your shop, who wouldn’t buy up real estate in Somerville?
But the university isn’t always on a buying spree.
In 2014 when Tufts decided, after 60 years, that it didn’t have the capacity to continue to run the Tufts Early Childhood Education Center. Outsourcing day care to a for-profit, national chain was familiar solution.
When our daughter was there, we felt that she was at the Harvard of day care centers. The rooms were supervised by teachers with masters degrees in early childhood education. The curriculum was based on research done by professors in the university’s early childhood education program. Children who would have struggled in most day care settings were supported and included, academically and socially. The Harvard-like tuition was offset by scholarships and rigorous fundraising. Tufts’ day care center had a long history of creating community. All over Somerville and Medford, you’ll find families that identify as alumni of “Little Tufts” years after the kids have left home.
But here a way to trim the budget just a wee bit more, and besides, a day care center — is that really a business that a university that offers a Ph.D. in Child Study and Human Development wants to be in? Nope — no synergy there. So the Tufts Educational Day Care Center became a link in a chain of a national, for-profit corporation.
How perfect then for Jumbo the elephant to be Tuft’s mascot.
Jumbo keeps getting bigger while the people of Somerville are left begging for peanuts.
