Collegiality, or goodwill among faculty members, is one of Tufts' strong points, according to its faculty and a 2005 study recently released by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
The survey also looked at six other faculty-related categories of institutional strength: clarity and fairness of the tenure process, the nature of their work, effectiveness of key policies, compensation, work and family balance and overall satisfaction. Nearly 5,000 faculty members at 42 colleges and universities completed the survey.
Tufts was rated as "exemplary" in the collegiality category, significantly higher than many of its peers.
This high rating did not surprise Tufts Provost Jamshed Bharucha. "Collegiality is a characteristic of the climate," he said. "People work hard and they strive for excellence, but it is, by and large, a friendly climate in which people really make an effort to be collegial."
Bharucha also made a distinction between the "healthy competition" that exists at Tufts, in comparison with other universities that have "battle lines between faculty."
Harry Selker, a professor at the medical school, agreed. "People come to Tufts to do their work rather than to kind of gloat about their work," he said.
This trend also extends to collaboration between departments and schools. Professor of Biomedical Engineering David Kaplan, for example, currently has projects in progress with the biology department, the veterinary school, the dental school and the medical school.
According to Kaplan, who is the chair of his department, such involvement is common among his peers in his department. "We tend to be very collaborative. We tend to do a lot of research that addresses the interfaces of several fields," he said.
Collaboration is also important for Selker. He recently led a group of about two hundred people, ranging from medical school doctors to computer science faculty, to apply for a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The grant will help research that goes from "bench to bedside, bedside to clinic, clinic to public benefit," Selker said.
For example, he said that if basic research finds something that stops heart muscles from dying in rats and dogs, the next steps are to find how it can help people, how it can be used in a clinic and how to best distribute to the public.
The grant would bring together "faculty who are involved in basic science research with faculty who are involved in clinical medicine," he said.
In the grant application, Selker highlighted the "culture of collaboration" here at Tufts a feature that will help him and his colleagues make good use of the grant.
"The tradition of friendly collaboration is treasured by Tufts faculty," he wrote in the application. "The Tufts community has a long history of cross-disciplinary projects and programs across all ... Tufts [schools] and Tufts affiliated institutions upon which this proposal builds."
But such cooperation is not exclusive to the sciences. Associate Professor of Music John McDonald, for example, has used music to reach out to other departments.
He has played at a variety of different events on campus, including the EPIIC symposium last year, and has written music for films made by Art and Art History Professor Judith Wechsler.
According to McDonald, reaching out other people and doing different types of projects is very important. "You can't stay within boundaries," he said. "You'd make the same music over and over again if you didn't seek outside influence."
In his experiences on campus, McDonald has found that the administration encourages this collaboration.
Bharucha said the administration also uses collegiality as a selling point for recruiting faculty.
"When we hire new faculty ... we talk about this aspect of Tufts," he said. "They get that sense as they learn about the institution."
Kaplan, the biomedical engineering professor, finds that students also motivate the sharing process. "The real catalyst for the process becomes the students involved and their desire to learn more," he said.
Tufts' small size also helps. "We don't have massive departments where you get lost in the fine print," Kaplan said.
But it's clear that students benefit, according Bharucha. "Students are the ultimate beneficiaries when faculty collaborate because then they get to see multiple sides of a complex problem," he said.
