President Lawrence Bacow spoke to students in the Bridge Program yesterday afternoon, responding to questions on topics ranging from his day-to-day life to the future of Tufts' financial aid policies.
"I'm really interested in hearing what's on your mind that perhaps should be on mine," Bacow said during a luncheon in Metcalf Hall.
The speaker series, which Experimental College lecturer and organizer Ronnee Yashon began in the fall of 2006, is a major aspect of Metcalf's Bridge Program. The talks are meant to serve as a "bridge" between the faculty and students.
Students inquired several times yesterday about fundraising and financial aspects of the university. "We've established becoming need-blind as our highest priority," Bacow said. "We've made a tremendous amount of progress."
He detailed how Tufts was already admitting students on a need-blind basis. Last year, he said, "we didn't have to pull offers of admission because we were over the budget."
He emphasized the importance of using all possible financial resources to make Tufts need-blind, and therefore accessible to a new group of qualified students who otherwise would not apply to or attend Tufts.
Bacow panned the idea of awarding merit-based scholarships. "No, as long as I'm president we won't do it," he said. "We have an obligation to take those resources and invest them [in] people who really need to go to college."
Bacow explained that it does not seem fair to divert funds away from students who would not otherwise have access to college in order to woo students who will probably receive a university-level education regardless of whether they attend Tufts.
When a student asked about how he has been so successful in fundraising, Bacow diverted the credit to "having very generous donors."
"If I can succeed in making my problems [the donor's] problems," Bacow said, then he is more successful. "I'm giving them an opportunity to make a difference."
The president was also asked about the merit of standardized tests both for college admissions as well as for post-graduation evaluations. Bacow called post-college standardized testing "a dumb idea."
"I spent the first 24 years of my career at MIT, and I spent the last seven here at Tufts. I cannot imagine one test that you would give at both institutions that would properly measure what students were supposed to learn," Bacow said.
In terms of using standardized testing in college admissions, Bacow said that it "is useful information, but it's noisy information ... it's far from a perfect predictor, but to say that something is imperfect [doesn't mean] you don't use it."
Bacow said that standardized testing is especially helpful when students apply from schools that do not usually send students to Tufts. The tests help admissions officers measure the aptitude of a student whose high school grades are not a clear indicator, he said.
One student asked Bacow what the university's greatest weakness was. "We're still under-resourced relative to the schools we're competing with," the president responded. The field of schools Tufts competes with has changed dramatically over the last three decades, according to Bacow.
While students who applied to Tufts in the past had mostly applied to other NESCAC colleges, today's "overlap" schools include Brown, Dartmouth, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown, among others.
Bacow described ways in which the university plans on growing, referring to the changing preferences of students. He was asked several questions about Tufts' progress in terms of research space, tenured professors and undergraduate research opportunities.
"What our students are telling us," he said, "is that you want to be at a university as opposed to a small college."
While he does want to increase support for university-type research and faculty at Tufts, Bacow adamantly opposes expanding the university in terms of student body size or campus size because he thinks this would detract from one of Tufts' most valuable features.
"We are among the smallest of the nation's major research universities. We are small enough so that nobody ever gets lost but big enough so that nobody ever gets bored," Bacow said.
"We will be building a new laboratory building on Boston Avenue for engineering and biology," Bacow said.
The move, he said, will free up halls such as Barnum that now house biology and engineering research. They could then be used for humanities and social science programs.
Bacow said he is committed to balancing advances to the university's science and engineering programs with those of the humanities and social sciences.
"I'm proud of the fact that the first academic building we opened on my watch is for the arts ... the Granoff Music Center," Bacow said.
He also cited past renovations to the Tisch Library as a way of improving facilities that are not related to science and engineering.
On a more personal level, one student asked if the president planned on teaching again any time soon.
"No. I thought about it," Bacow said. "I am on the road virtually every week someplace, so it's really hard to commit to a class schedule."
However, the president gives guest lectures from time to time. He also takes student advisees every year because those meetings are more flexible and easily scheduled.
