When University President Lawrence Bacow announced in February that he would be stepping down at the end of the 2010-2011 school year, the search for his successor began almost immediately. The Presidential Search Committee was formed to vet appropriate candidates and determine who would be tasked with building on the progress made during Bacow's tenure in the areas of Tufts' reputation, endowment and admissions competitiveness.
The search committee is comprised of 13 members, including university trustees, professors, administrators and one student, senior Sarah Habib. While the search committee declined to comment on the search process and progress thus far due to confidentiality agreements, it posted an official position description on its website, presidentsearch.tufts.edu. The position description outlined the qualities the committee deems essential in the next Tufts president.
One such quality listed in the description is a commitment to diversity in all forms, in line with Tufts' continuing commitment to attaining need-blind admissions.
"Both faculty and students appreciate that diversity adds in every dimension to the richness of the educational experience," the position description states.
Diversity, both of the student body and of the presidential applicant pool, was an issue emphasized in open forums that the committee hosted and in an open letter to the committee authored in the spring by Lucy McKeon (LA '10).
Tufts Feminist Alliance Co-Chair Cory Faragon, a junior, hopes that the committee will keep women's issues at the forefront of its discussions.
"Of course they'll be assembling a pool of diverse candidates but let me underline this — female is important, feminist is essential," he said. "We can't accept anything less than a president for whom feminism is a guiding principle."
While dealing with on-campus issues makes up a great deal of a president's responsibilities, the search committee emphasized that the next leader of Tufts must also be dedicated to active citizenship in the world at large and in local communities.
Sophomore Rosario Dominguez commended Bacow for his efforts to integrate Tufts with its host communities.
Dominguez referred specifically to Bacow's support for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, a Congressional bill that would increase immigrant students' access to affordable education.
"I think he's done a great job promoting the partnership, if you want to call it that, between Tufts and the immigrant communities of Somerville and Medford," Dominguez said. "That's what I look for in the next president — to keep Tufts on that path so that it's not above the community and doesn't seem like a pretentious institution."
The search committee also called for the next president to build unity across all Tufts campuses and between students and staff.
One hot-button issue centers on Tufts clerical workers' attempts in recent years to unionize, which has been rebuffed by administration officials. The Jumbo Janitor Alliance (JJA) is calling for the next president of Tufts to maintain neutrality on this issue and to let the clerical workers decide for themselves whether the formation of a union would be helpful at this juncture.
Alana Epstein (LA '10), a member of the JJA's labor task force, said that the administration's openly negative views on unionization are intimidating because the livelihoods of the clerical workers are in administrators' hands.
"Many of the people who would benefit from unionization — people who have worked at Tufts for years and support their families — see that Bacow thinks this union is bad, and they don't want to risk their jobs by defying what their bosses think they should do. It's coming from an unfair balance of power — it's kind of intimidating to be told it's a bad idea to unionize by your manager."
JJA Co-Chair and senior Phil Bene mentioned that the new president could foster a better sense of community on campus by treating Tufts less "as a business with a bottom line of costs and profits" and more as the non-profit university that it is.
The next president, no matter what his or her focus, stands to inherit a healthy and diverse institution from Bacow. Twenty-seven percent of the incoming Class of 2014 is of color, and Tufts' Beyond Boundaries capital campaign is on track to raise $1.2 billion by the end of 2011, according to the search committee's website.
"No matter who gets chosen, students need to hold our next president accountable to the values students hold at Tufts," Bene said. "While we can hope for a university president who will respect Tufts workers, have concern for student interests and promote greater community, the most certain way to achieve that is for students to hold the administration accountable to those values."
