The Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service released a fresh strategy for active citizenship last month that aims to increase the number of students it reaches. But some students within the college say that important parties were not consulted about the strategy and question whether certain portions of it are appropriate.
"Going forward, we must find ways to effectively reach a significantly larger number of students," the strategy reads. "To ensure we have the resources and the focus needed to achieve our goals, we must prune some existing programs and reconfigure our efforts, while continuing to infuse active citizenship in the ethos of the University."
The college, whose core initiative is the Citizenship and Public Service Scholars program, which engages students in community work, also metes out a range of active citizenship grants to students and faculty members. Its existence was insured in perpetuity a year ago by a $40 million naming gift from entrepreneur Jonathan Tisch (A '76).
After the donation, the college wanted to take a step back and rethink its methods, as demand was far outstripping the existing programs, said Tisch College Director and Associate Dean Nancy Wilson.
For example, this year the college received 90 applications for the 30 spots in its Citizenship and Public Service Scholars program, and $300,000 worth of requests for the $90,000 available for its Active Citizenship Summer Program grants.
Also necessary to consider is the scope of the entire university. "Bear in mind, we're not just supposed to work with undergraduates," Wilson said. The college also wants to expand its presence in Tufts' graduate schools.
With active citizenship an increasingly prominent theme in Tufts' admissions materials, "you've just got more and more students coming to Tufts with the expectation that they'll somehow be able to get involved," she said. "We were really feeling the concern that we're going to have students arrive and say, 'I never saw [active citizenship], I didn't experience it, where was it?' We really felt a need to refocus on that 100 percent strategy, as we call it."
With the help of higher ed consulting firm Vista Consulting, administrators put together a strategy to focus intently on the budding field of research on civic engagement, cut down on red tape, and, in a move that has been controversial to many within the college, to refine the way community partnerships are developed.
Until the change in strategy, a full-time staff member, the community engagement specialist, worked to develop relationships with local organizations and pair students with projects. This method was used for many of the scholars' major, yearlong projects as well as other service undertakings. Per the changes, this position - occupied by Lisa Brukilacchio - will be eliminated.
Members of the Tisch staff, including Brukilacchio, did not respond to requests for comments. All of the requests were forwarded to Wilson.
Having someone who can maintain one-on-one contact with community leaders is helpful but it's "really hard to scale up and to reach many students unless we start adding more and more and more staff, which is not in the cards," Wilson said.
"We may have funding for the future, but we don't have an infinite supply to spend more and more any given year," she said.
As a result, the college wants to develop a more student-driven process. "[It's] a shift in operational process. Instead of one-to-one brokering, we focus much more on working with students and student groups to help them develop the skills to identify partnerships themselves," Wilson said.
This change was foreshadowed by three guides the college has compiled over the last few years to help introduce students to host communities and guide them into productive service opportunities.
Following the strategy decisions, top administrators presented the changes to scholars and faculty members in April to solicit input on how best to implement the new parameters.
But students were alarmed, they said, because they felt that the intensive one-on-one contact had been key in Tisch's success so far. Brukilacchio and Scholars Program Coordinator Ify Mora went out into the community every summer to stay in touch with organizations and scout out viable projects.
"The reason the projects are so successful is because they deliver a specific need the community has," matched exactly with "scholars' interests and ability," senior and scholar Sebastian Chaskel said.
With students brokering their own projects, he feared that project quality could be compromised, and that both student and organization capacities would be strained.
"Even though we provide a benefit, we can also be a burden," Chaskel said. "My fear is by doing this, we become more of a burden than a benefit. I'm very nervous about how it's going to work out."
Wilson did agree that this could be a concern. "The trick is to make sure that you do that in a way that is respectful of the time it takes for the partnership organization," she said. "[But] we think it's much more appropriate to work in that role of capacity-building, of facilitation, of being a catalyst."
Apart from their concerns about the conclusions of the changes, students are also surprised about the methods used to design them.
"We realized that the process by which [this was decided] had been a departure from the way decisions were usually made at Tisch," senior and scholar Allie Bohm said. "Previously when decisions have been made, everyone's been involved."
For example, students were heavily involved when the scholars program's mission and vision statements were rewritten this year. "I'm not saying that you have to consult every one of us, I'm just saying that Tisch has been a very transparent organization up until this point, and these decisions were not as transparent as previous ones," Bohm said. "So that was a surprise and a disappointment to some of us, and I think some of us found it hurtful."
Sophomore and scholar Mose Berkowitz echoed the sentiment. "We were afraid that the new changes would [undermine] the program that is very effective and extremely dear to us," he said.
Community members were not directly consulted on the strategy and were also rattled by the uncertainty surrounding the new brokering system. But several community partner organizations contacted did not respond to requests for comment, or said they had no knowledge of the changes or were unready to issue a statement given the ongoing process.
"From the first day on, [Tisch staff members are] always talking about how to reach a consensus and how to work with stakeholders," Chaskel said. "The stakeholders, the people the college was establishing relationships with, were not even informed of the changes."
Meredith Levy, the director of community organizing at the Somerville Community Corporation, a local development nonprofit group, spoke to the concerns of many of the partnering organizations.
"Everybody was caught off guard," Levy said of the changes. This lack of communication "surprised and disappointed" them, she said.
"With the restructuring, the community groups are really pushing to make sure that the partners are included in thinking about how to make the changes, that's something all the groups are united on," Levy said. "It's an important step not to be missed; it's essential for community to be part of that dialogue."
Wilson said, however, that the college hadn't had the chance to fully present the changes fully to people in the community before word got out.
"Certainly one of the things that happened was some of the community partners heard about it before we'd had a chance to articulate what the new way of working would be," Wilson said. "And so there was a bit of agitation. But we've met with them, we're continuing to meet with them."
Levy said a group of 12-15 organizations has been meeting informally among themselves, and will meet next week with Tisch College Dean Rob Hollister.
"We would like to see the decisions not be implemented until there's a process in place [such that] the group is comfortable that changes really reflect the community needs," Levy said.
Still, Leah Madsen (LA '06), who was involved with the Tisch College as an undergraduate, and now works at The Welcome Project, a Somerville nonprofit, said that some community groups were rattled. "Tisch was doing a really good job of networking and building trust," she said. "Trust was breached a little bit by this process."
Despite concerns, there are positive examples of student-driven partnerships benefiting organizations. Marie Cassidy, program coordinator for the Medford Family Network, had heard nothing of the strategic changes and had never worked with a community engagement specialist. Her organization's contact with the Tisch College came through senior and scholar Sarah Kohnstamm, who, "thanks to her initiative," brought an idea for a directory for community youth programs to the organization, Cassidy said.
After trying without success at several other host organizations, Cassidy said, Kohnstamm "walked in my office and said, 'I have this great project.' I admire her greatly for that."
Cassidy said that she has been very pleased both with her intern and with the ongoing partnership with the college that has brought her into contact with Tisch staff members. "I've had nothing but good experience with the college at all levels of my involvement," Cassidy said. "I've felt very supported - not only supported, but [I] felt like I was really a welcome partner."
Regardless of inner controversy, Tisch is still serious about its commitment to reach out to more students and has undertaken several initiatives to demonstrate this.
For example, it partnered with the Alumni Association to distribute a book on active citizenship, "Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder, to the freshman class this year for discussion. Next year, there will also be residential programs: Haskell Hall will be designated an active citizenship dorm with several Tisch Residential Leaders (TRLs) who will implement service programming. Some TRLs will also be in Tilton Hall.
Initiatives like these, Wilson said, are "conveying the message [to incoming students] that this is part of who we are at Tufts: People thinking about big problems."
Aside from Brukilacchio's post being eliminated, a number of personnel changes are also taking place. Mora will be leaving the college for graduate school, and Molly Mead, the Lincoln Filene Professor at Tisch, is leaving the college for a position at a brand-new community engagement center at Amherst College.
Melissa Russell, the alumni coordinator for Tisch, is also leaving to get married, and the majority of the programs she handled will be turned over to the alumni office.
"We haven't had any personnel turnover in a couple years, and it's kind of a lot all at once, but each one makes sense in its own way," Wilson said.
Despite reservations about the broader strategy, scholars said they knew that many of the implementation details are still undecided and that they are hoping for the best. "It's very early in the process, and a lot of things were unclear to us," Bohm said. "We won't really have a sense of what this all means until it's more fleshed out. So I'm concerned, but trying to reserve judgment."
