Adele Fleet Bacow, wife of University President Lawrence Bacow, is an often-overlooked member of Tufts' leadership. This article is the first of a two-part series on her life, work and role at Tufts.
Adele Fleet Bacow is curled up on an armchair in her light-filled sitting room. She wears a funky gold necklace and a cleanly tailored leather coat, which complement her constant smile.
This is Gifford House, one of the few buildings at Tufts that many students pass every day but rarely enter. It is a building that exudes tradition and demands respect, a place to which students rush when the Red Sox win the World Series and where they might get to dine during one of the university's senior dinners.
It is also where Bacow has been living for the past seven years, ever since her husband assumed his current job as university president.
But though her role at Tufts is not as public as her husband's, Bacow is more than just a first lady. As she tells her life story, she reveals a remarkably accomplished individual who is a published author, a mother of two, the president of her own community development firm and a representative face of an elite university.
Bacow spent her childhood in the mid-sized town of Jacksonville, Fla., in a house that her family sold after owning it for 57 years. During her childhood, she garnered a love of the arts, formed strong family bonds that are with her to this day and picked up the faint Southern accent that plays at the edges of her speech.
"Growing up in the 1950s, [it] was a very different era than it is now," she said. "I think at the time, it felt like, 'Gosh, this is a little boring; I'd like more excitement.' But I appreciate that sort of surroundings and the kind of love and warmth that I got from my family."
When it came time to figure out where she wanted to spend her college years, Bacow knew that she was looking for a greater diversity of people and ideas than she had seen in her childhood. She chose Boston and enrolled in Wellesley College, not yet knowing just how different her school years would be from those of her childhood.
"Part of it was just that era, but coming from the South to a very intense intellectual environment where there were different expectations and people with different role models was extremely liberating," she said.
But despite her high expectations, Bacow found that no program at Wellesley really met her academic preferences. She had strong roots in art history and math, but knew that she didn't want to graduate with a degree in either. What truly inspired her was a course on urban sociology that she took in her first year at school.
"Taking the urban sociology course gave me a very different view of what society can be than my very traditional upbringing had given me, and I wanted to learn more about it," she said.
Through a newly begun exchange program with MIT, Bacow was able to take courses in architecture, urban design and planning, and eventually designed her own major that focused on urban planning and community development with courses taken from both schools. Bacow had created for herself an education that matched her interests perfectly while allowing her to fully experience what was becoming a unique era for college students.
"At MIT, it was the days of feminism, war on Vietnam, revolution in every dimension that you could imagine on college campuses," she said, explaining that, in contrast, Wellesley was very pastoral. "To have those sort of extremes was fortuitous."
After graduation, Bacow spent a few years working and trying to decide what she would do with her life, and it was during this time that she met a young man named Lawrence, who would become her husband a few years later, on a blind date.
Soon, Bacow realized that community planning was her calling and enrolled in a graduate program in city planning at MIT.
"I think I wanted to be in an environment where there was more day-to-day contact with people in a community, as opposed to sitting at a drafting table, and [city planning] was more multidisciplinary."
After earning her graduate degree, Bacow began applying her knowledge with a job at an agency of the state government of Massachusetts that was responsible for the renewal and reuse of former military bases. Among other projects, she helped to redevelop a former naval hospital and worked to reinvigorate a 4,700-acre military site.
She then went to work for the consulting firm Policy and Management Associates and, in the mid-1980s, took a job at the State Arts Council, creating a new program that fused design and city planning projects for Massachusetts. She would design specific projects herself and combine forces with other state agencies to make them happen. The experience allowed her to work on bridge design, highway landscaping and main street design, along with other projects.
Her job was part of an emerging fusion of city planning and aesthetic design that was unprecedented at the time. Just like her undergraduate studies had required her to forge new ground and design her own area of study, she found that her job with the State Arts Council required a comparable level of entrepreneurial spirit.
"Whenever we'd cook up an idea, the first thing I would do, being a good student, was to go to the library and see if anyone else had done it," she said. "I couldn't find much, and so we would just make it up."
She later received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to write a book documenting the lessons she learned from her endeavors. The State Arts Council program had been cut when Massachusetts was hit by a state budget crisis in 1990.
So in 1995, Bacow published "Designing the City: A Guide for Advocates and Public Officials," which detailed her experiences and the innovative methods she used.
"It was actually very cathartic to [write the book] in the sunset of the program," she said.
After the arts council program was cut, Bacow returned to Policy and Management Associates and found that, more than ever, her job had become a fusion of her two passions: arts and community planning. She found herself writing speeches advocating the connection between arts and community development in Los Angeles and designing a regional conference on the topic in New England.
"It was so exciting, because the fields were really coming together," Bacow said. "We were just starting to understand the similarities between arts and community development, which since the late 1980s had just mushroomed."
In 1996, Bacow started her own firm, Community Partners Consultants, Inc., which fully combines community development and the arts. Within her firm's work, Bacow maintains the spirit of creativity and problem-solving that she observed when the arts and community planning were just beginning to combine in the 1980s.
"That spirit and the values from [those days] I think are carried forward in the work that I do now."
Bacow said she's especially proud of a project that she did in Worcester, Mass. with a consortium of 25 businesses in which she and her firm developed a master plan and an economic development strategy for the city's arts district.
"It was a big project," she said. "Very complicated, very rewarding and the city and other organizations really rolled up their sleeves and are making it happen."
While her passion lies with her firm, deep in the fusion between development and art, Bacow is perhaps unintentionally a figurehead at Tufts. Tomorrow, in Part 2, the Daily will examine her role at the university and her unique window into how the school is run.
