Amherst or Tufts? (for law)

Jumbo’s stuffed remains were on display in Barnum Hall (on Tufts’ campus) until they were destroyed by a fire in the mid 1970’s. All that remains is Jumbo’s tail and a peanut butter jar full of his ashes salvaged after the fire.

The jar has been stored in the athletic department, waiting for this moment. Amherst’s generic, antiquated skeleton is no match. The Tufts CS department hacked Amherst’s computers to influence the outcome of the mascot vote. Amherst’s sports teams will now have no chance against Tufts…

No one was asking kids to cheer for George Olds, though.

I think a mammoth could kick an elephant’s butt but one did a lot better in the evolutionary process, I’'ll give ya that :slight_smile:

If we judged everyone by today’s standards, very few people in the past would receive a passing grade. I sure hope future people aren’t as harsh with us as we are with our forebears.

In sports, we judge the best players against players of their own generation, because the sports change so much through time – sports culture, technology, fan influence, marketing, conditioning, equipment, strategy. A player today is not playing the same game, in the same conditions, as someone who played it 50 years ago,

So why don’t we cut a little bit of slack to public figures of yore? They had no idea where we were moving culturally. Lord Jeff apparently did some pretty unsavory things. Well that’s bad, but maybe we ought to try to put ourselves in his shoes, back in the dark ages he lived in.

OP, sounds like you’ll be cheering for a pachyderm either way. hehe

One could make that argument but IMO Amherst students really didn’t feel like CHEERING FOR the guy. They made a great case that this isn’t a statue or a plaque to be removed, it’s a mascot, something the college is supposed to see as a unifying symbol to rally around. Asking,say, Native American students (but really ANYONE), to rally around someone who wanted to annihilate them and gave them small pox infected blankets, among other things, seems to me to be asking a lot.

You’ll note the town is still Amherst, the college is still Amherst, the history has not been “erased”. He’s just not the “Yay, Go Us!!” symbol at sporting events anymore.

Fair enough. I’m sure they exhausted most arguments before coming to that conclusion. You’ve gotta admit, that was a cool mascot though. I know I chuckled the first time I read it.

However, if those unsavory things were unsavory even when considered in the context of the time frame that he lived, that still casts him in a bad light.

Note that the Tufts community fully supports Amherst’s decision to change mascots. We welcome them as a new, but extinct member to our Elepantidae family. On the athletic field, though, it is survival of the fittest. Mother Nature has already spoken on this subject and the Jumbos are the clear winner. Of course Mother Nature was validated this past weekend when the Tufts Womens Lacrosse Team beat Amherst 11-7. The Jumbos emerged victorious despite the thermal advantages afforded by the Mammoth’s small ears and long hairy coats on the remote frozen tundra of Amherst’s home field.

@ohiomomof2 - For the record, Jumbo was an African Elephant claimed to be 13.1 feet tall at his death and he weighed 13,560lbs. The Columbian Mammoth skeleton at Amherst was found in Florida (not locally) and it is estimated to have been about 12 feet tall and weighed about 10,000 lbs.

Would you like to change your opinion? :slight_smile:

@Mastadon have you seen the tusks on the Beneski mammoth?

https://allosaurusroar.files.■■■■■■■■■■■■■/2017/02/beneski-museum-large-mammals.jpg

Let’s look at Jumbo’s tusks now: https://www.tufts.edu/about/jumbo

Jumbo wasn’t local either, nor did any of his bones ever reside in Medford.

And if we’re talking national champions… http://www.nescac.com/sports/wbkb/2016-17/releases/20170226mdg1s2

If the mascot change Tufts into the rival that Williams is, that will be fun :smiley:

@ohmomof2-

Tufts has an engineering school and a vet school, so the tusk problem could be easily fixed before going into battle.

The Mammoths tusks don’t look like very effective weapons to me - they are long, but turned in on each other!
All show, no go!

As far as recent team national championships go…

Soccer
Tufts - two
Amherst- one

Field Hockey
Tufts - one (plus one runner up)
Amherst - none

Mens Lacrosse
Tufts - three
Amherst - none

Women’s Basketball
Tufts none (runners up twice)
Amherst - one

Softball
Tufts - three
Amherst - none

Last year’s Directors Cup
Tufts #4 in D3
Amherst #7 in D3

This year’s Directors Cup (through winter season)
Tufts #3 in D3
Amherst #13 in D3

You guys started the Williams rivalry when you stole students and library books from them to start Amherst, so maybe your attempt to copy our beloved mascot will create another… :slight_smile:

LOL touche :slight_smile:

@Mastadon " For the record, Jumbo was an African Elephant claimed to be 13.1 feet tall at his death and he weighed 13,560lbs."

The key word here is “claimed.” PT Barnum was a notorious exaggerator - that was his most charming feature. Jumbo was actually between 10 and 11 feet tall (which is absolutely huge for an elephant). Barnum’s people first claimed that he was 11.5 feet, and when that was not impressive enough, gradually grew the story until he was over 13 feet tall.

Jumbo probably did weigh more than the Amherst Mammoth. Mammoths were lean, mean, fighting machines. Jumbo, in contrast, was a gentle soul who lived his entire life in captivity and got rather portly. :smiley:

@thankyouforhelp-

After saving Tom Thumb’s life Jumbo’s legend grew. He is at least 15 feet tall in the eyes of Tufts students - that is the benefit afforded those who live a life such as his. Nameless Mammoths are afforded no such benefit.

If you want to refute Barnum’s claim, then the burden of proof is on you - The skeletons are available for the measuring.

The Mammoth was not lean - it had large fatty deposits that served as an adaptation against the cold…
(By the way, the genetic sequencing of the Mammoth was probably performed on equipment invented by Tufts)
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-mammoths-idUSKCN0PC2LZ20150702

In fact, the Mammoths pointy head (and resulting extra height) is the result of a big fat deposit! :slight_smile:

Are they, though? We know the Beneski one’s is, but according to Tufts Jumbo’s skeleton was never on campus - only his skin, stuffed.

I know when we toured Tufts the only one we saw was concrete or something.

Jumbo has been upgraded since you last visited!

And we now have a second mascot as part of the recent School of the Museum of Fine Arts acquisition. If you mess with Jumbo, you will have to deal with him as well!
http://admissions.tufts.edu/files/dogwood/posts/img_3228.jpg

Jumbo’s skeleton resides in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, but it is only displayed periodically, so you will need to give them a call.
.
Cornell was given Jumbo’s heart, but they lost it. We are not pleased with that.

Real Jumbo
http://cdn-news.wgbh.org/s3fs-public/styles/half_width/public/800px_jumbo_and_matthew_scott__.png?itok=gPRSwZ2d

Stuffed Jumbo at Tufts (burned in the 70’s)
https://travsd.files.■■■■■■■■■■■■■/2013/09/jumbo2.jpg?w=450

Interim Jumbo at Tufts- A cement (Asian Elephant) statue purchased from Benson’s Wild Animal Farm.
https://images.vice.com/noisey/content-images/contentimage/no-slug/58bc9e6e0b6bcf51b0389825a12c6669.jpg

New Jumbo at Tufts- A bigger, more realistic, bronze (African Elephant) statue commisioned by an alum.
http://blog.cleanenergy.org/files/2017/02/Tufts-jumbo.jpg

Jumbo’s statue in St Thomas Canada (where he was hit and killed by a train) and Jumbo’s skeleton in NYC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_viS_Ge1dU

I’m sure I’d have seen it, that was my favorite class-skipping destination as a kid. (Mom if you’re reading this, I’m kidding. I never cut class to go to the Natural History Museum, even if you saw all the little colored metal lapel pins in my drawer. I just collected them, that’s all).

I think i saw the Asian elephant statue when we visited. It was summer of 2014.

You saw the “interim” Jumbo (who was in place for almost 40 years). The new Jumbo is certainly more impressive, but the interim Jumbo was kind of cute. He arrived on campus a little before I did and departed a little before my daughter graduated - so our family identifies more with him…

It is probably a good time to shift the conversation from extinct mascots to the related topic of law school admissions.

When evaluating undergraduate programs…

One cannot perform a “per capita” calculation by just taking the number of students from a particular undergraduate school that are enrolled at a particular law school (or set of law schools) and divide that by the total number of students at the undergraduate school and come up with a meaningful number. This is because the number of students that apply to law school in general varies strongly by major, so the mix of majors at the school impacts the total number of students applying.

As an example, if we compare the most popular majors for law school between Amherst and Tufts we get:

…Amherst…Tufts
Law…13…0
Poly Sci…27…56
English…39…56
History…29…34
%of Grads…25%…10.6%

So a simple per capita calculation comparison is going to be heavily biased in favor of a school (like Amherst) with a high percantage of typical “pre law majors”. This is the same flaw in reasoning as comparing the average starting salaries of two schools without considering the mix of majors. Likewise for simple per capita Phd calculations.

One cannot just take a single ranking of law schools and assume that the number of students enrolled from a particular undergraduate school indicates some level of goodness. This is because the level of desireablity of a particular law school to a particular applicant can be a function of the law school’s perceived strength in a particular area of law, its geographic location relative to where the applicant would like to live after graduation as well as its cost relative to other options.

One cannot infer the probability of any particular candidate getting into any particular law school based on a per capita admission calculation for a particular undergraduate school. This is “lemming logic” and we all know what happens to lemmings. One would really need to know not only the number of applicants, but all the applicant’s attributes (GPA/difficulty of coursework, LSAT and related extra-curriculars) to try to determine if a particular school has an advantage.

I was able to find some data for Tufts that includes the number of applications/acceptances/enrollments per law school along with average GPAs and LSATs for the applicants. A quick analysis of seems to indicate that the most popular law schools for Tufts undergrads are the top rated schools for international law (makes sense given Tufts’ international focus), schools located in the cities of Boston, New York, and DC and schools that have special joint JD programs with some of Tufts’ grad schools. NYU, Harvard, and GTown are really popular, but Yale is not. BC, BU and Harvard have joint degree programs and cross enrollment with Tufts. Fordham in NYC and GWU and American in DC are also popular. Some midwestern and southern T14 law schools have high acceptance rates, but zero yield (i.e. no accepted Tufts students chose to enroll).

Here are the related links:

http://students.tufts.edu/sites/default/files/AASLawSchoolMatriculants2013.2014.pdf
https://www.ilrg.com/rankings/law/1/asc/Accept

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-law-schools/international-law-rankings

Come now, you are reaching pretty far to muddy up the water. Tufts has over 5200 undergrads, while Amherst has under 1800. You can’t be claiming that Amherst nevertheless has a huge number MORE people applying to law school than Tufts does, or the fact that Amherst has 18 students at Yale Law while Tufts only has one is because Tufts students don’t want to go to the top ranked law school in the country.

Objecting to the classification of Amherst’s Law, jurisprudence and Social Thought as a “typical pre law major.” Even Amherst’s catalog states emphatically that it is NOT a pre-law major. It is an intellectual study, not a pre-professional program. I grant you that a lot of people who are interested in it may go on to law school. But Amherst makes it very, very clear that that is not what the major is all about.

Tufts is great. But Amherst? A step above (as a Williams alum, I don’t say that lightly).