New York Times publisher and Tufts alum Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. will deliver the inaugural speech in the Tufts Leadership Forum on Tuesday in the Cabot Auditorium.
Sponsored by the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, with the help of schools and groups across the university, the new lecture series will bring a high-profile speaker to campus every year.
Tisch College Dean Robert Hollister believes Sulzberger's experiences in the business world make him the ideal person to kick off the series.
"He runs one of the most powerful mass-media companies in the world [and] he has a challenging public leadership role," he said.
Sulzberger, whose tenure at the helm of the Times has seen the paper win 28 Pulitzer Prizes, graduated from Tufts in 1974 and from Harvard Business School in 1985.
He started out at the Times in 1978 as a Washington Bureau correspondent, before eventually taking over from his father the positions of publisher and of chairman of the New York Times Company. His grandfather, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, also served as publisher of the Times.
Sulzberger's speech will come at a time when the newspaper industry is facing increasing pressures from emerging online outlets.
Hollister said that Sulzberger anticipated some of these problems when he spoke at Tufts several years ago and that his innovative style of leadership equips him with the ability to offer "forward-looking visions."
Foreshadowing this focus, Sulzberger named his speech "Leadership Lessons from the Future."
Meanwhile, the Tisch College is also preparing to unveil two other initiatives. The first, which is tied into the speaker series, will be monthly meetings between faculty members who teach or are interested in teaching courses dealing with leadership.
They will begin in mid-November, well ahead of the next year's unveiling of a leadership studies minor, and will seek to cultivate partnerships between the various schools across the university, almost all of which have leadership focuses.
Combined with the speaker series, these meetings will "make more visible a common thread that's somewhat hidden at present," according to Hollister.
"What those pair of initiatives seek to do is to reinforce the impressive [activities] of several parts of the university and to call attention to the fact that leadership studies is a hallmark of education in different parts of Tufts," he said.
Hollister feels that Sulzberger is acutely aware of the importance of this field.
"He's a very thoughtful student of leadership and someone who is very familiar with literature about leadership," Hollister said.
The Tisch College is also working on a third effort, to be unveiled on Monday with the first annual Tufts Civic Engagement Research Prize Lecture. Like the Leadership Forum, it has university-wide support and sponsorship.
This year, it will bring Robert Wuthnow, the chair of Princeton's sociology department, to campus to receive an award from University Provost Jamshed Bharucha and to offer some remarks on the impact of religion on civil society.
During the event, Susan Ostrander, a sociology professor at Tufts, and Peter Dobkin Hall, a public policy lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, will join Wuthnow and discuss his views.
While Wuthnow could not be reached for a comment by press time, Hollister said that his lecture will be neither exceedingly enthusiastic nor overly discouraging about the role of religion, and will rather "let the chips fall where they may."
"It's a balanced account," he said. "It's really fresh information. I'm very much looking forward to it."
According to Bharucha, Monday's event will highlight important commitments shared by the Tufts community.
"We are interested in models by which civic engagement can be incorporated into teaching and scholarship in innovative ways," he said. "This award recognizes someone whose scholarship is intrinsically civically-engaged."
