The Beyond Boundaries Capital Campaign may have monopolized the attention of the Tufts Board of Trustees at its meeting earlier this month, but it was not the only item on the agenda.
The Board approved three new graduate degree programs, further specializing the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Tufts University School of Medicine.
The first, a Master of Laws Degree (LL.M.) in International Law, is a one-year program that will be offered in the Fletcher School, designed for non-lawyers who want to work in an international environment and have an understanding of international law.
It's for people that "deal with a lot of lawyers and want to be able to speak their language," Secretary of the Trustees Linda Dixon said.
The second program, also in the Fletcher School, is a Master of International Management degree. This program also hopes to teach individuals cultural knowledge in addition to business principles.
A graduate of this program will be "much more valuable to his or her employer" thanks to this extra background, Dixon said.
The final degree program approved is a Masters of Biomedical Sciences in the School of Medicine, which will help prepare college graduates for medical school and improve their chances of being accepted, Dixon said.
"Not everyone has the marks to get into medical school," she said. "[This program] is designed for people who are good, but don't quite make it."
These new programs are all intended to help future students, but another important issue brought up at the trustee meeting dealt with faculty needs. Office space, in particular, is becoming more of a problem as Tufts continues to increase its staff.
The Trustees heard about the comprehensive facilities plan that University Provost Jamshed Bharucha will be undertaking on the Medford campus.
He will look at "every inch of space on this campus to try and find every spare inch he can," Dixon said.
This entire process is estimated to take about a year.
Trustees also listened to student and faculty panels. Students from the School of Medicine and undergraduate and graduate students in arts and sciences sat on the student panel.
The students spoke about "their situation before applying to Tufts," Dixon said and discussed how financial aid offers from the schools they were choosing from affected their decisions.
"A very large number of undergraduate [students] receive some form of financial aid," Dixon said. "Hearing personal stories was quite terrific."
The faculty panel was made up of three professors who had been appointed endowed professorships, Dixon said. "They talked about what it meant to them [and how it] influence their decision to come to Tufts."
Endowed professors are sponsored by outside donors, giving life to the donors' academic visions through the professors and classes they choose to sponsor. Tufts' endowed professorships provide professors with salary for a number of years, the Beyond Boundaries Web site said, and "bring leading scholars and researchers to Tufts and invigorate the entire academic enterprise with their expertise."
One of the goals of Beyond Boundaries is to increase the number of endowed professorships here at Tufts. "[The panel] brought home to the committee the significance of endowed chairs to the faculty ... [and] how important endowed chairs are as a goal of the campaign," Dixon said.
