The Tufts community earlier this week received an email announcing the launch of a search committee to find a permanent replacement for outgoing Provost and Senior Vice President Jamshed Bharucha. As white students, we have found from our own experiences that the Tufts community generally avoids race as a topic and therefore chooses to actively ignore how race operates within all of our lives at Tufts. Currently, we see the social and academic climate at Tufts characterized by a defensive and hostile racial environment resistant to change. With the arrival of a new president and the ongoing search for a new provost, the administration has the opportunity to shift the campus to one that actively engages racial issues.
We call upon the provost search committee to prioritize candidates who will fight to make the racial climate within this university one that is supportive of all members of the Tufts community. In order to make our feelings clear to the administration, we will be sending a letter with similar sentiments to the provost search committee, as well as to incoming President Anthony Monaco and other university administrators.
University President Lawrence Bacow and Bharucha, who have served together since Bharucha's appointment in 2002, have moved Tufts forward as a premier academic and research institution, promoting active citizenship as a guiding philosophy at Tufts. While we acknowledge the progress Tufts has made in this regard, we believe that the university still falls short of its espoused commitment to active citizenship due to its avoidance of engaging or improving racial issues on campus.
As sophomores reflecting back on our first two years, we feel Tufts has not lived up to its mission statement, which advertises "a commitment to humanitarianism and diversity in its many forms." Looking forward to the fall of 2011 and the years to follow, we see enormous opportunity for Tufts to take action long overdue in the direction of achieving racial equality on this campus. In the coming years, we would like to see a strong commitment not only to greater diversity among the student body and faculty, but also a focus on shifting the racial climate to one of openness and discussion.
This year, a large number of high−level administrators from across the university will be leaving. The significant number of vacancies in the Tufts administration presents the university with an opportunity to hire new administrators who bring fresh perspectives that allow for greater focus on racial issues. We strongly urge President−elect Monaco and the search committee for the new provost to make it a top priority to hire someone with a proven commitment to improving race relations. He or she should have a track record of tackling these issues and addressing them with action.
In both social and academic spheres, the campus climate is hostile to students of color. We define racism not only as individual acts of aggression but as a system deeply ingrained in institutions like Tufts that leads to the subordination of people of color as well as the privileging of white people. Racism of both forms, both individual acts and institutionalized, exists at Tufts. There are more blatant acts of racism on a consistent basis than the average white student may be aware of, such as racial slurs directed toward students of color. There are also many ways in which racism is invisibly integrated into the university, such as the white, Eurocentric focus of the undergraduate curriculum. According to the Department of History website, for example, there are six core faculty members in the history department who specialize to some degree on Europe, versus one who focuses on Latin America.
For us — three white students — the environment is conducive to learning and growth in ways that are not available to our friends and peers of color. Throughout our time at Tufts, we see white students benefiting from multiple privileges that are out of reach for students of color. We are never called upon to speak on behalf of our entire race in both social and academic contexts, we are never stopped late at night by the Tufts University Police Department (TUPD) and asked for our student IDs, and we never have trouble seeking out an advisor of our race — in any department. According to the "Retention of Faculty and Students of Color at Tufts University" task force in 2009, Tufts has the largest disparity between students of color and faculty of color by percentage among peer institutions.
The choice of provost will set the tone for other hiring decisions and therefore for the university climate at large. The provost has a multitude of responsibilities related to faculty and curriculum, and whomever the committee appoints will have a large part in directing the priorities of the university. In addition to the provost's role of contributing to faculty hiring decisions at all 10 schools, in the coming year he or she will play a prominent role in the hiring of the deans of the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service and the Friedman School of Nutrition. Prioritizing the hiring of a diverse group of administrators and faculty would be a significant step toward creating a campus climate inclusive of all community members. The new provost will also have the opportunity to revitalize the Office of Institutional Diversity, whose director position is currently vacant. This could provide accountability in creating a racially supportive campus environment.
If improving racial climate is made a university priority with programming and curricular changes, students will be forced to think about the effects their actions have on the overall campus atmosphere. One of the difficulties in getting students to examine their own roles within the system of racism is that there is currently no impetus for such reflection. Finding a provost who is committed to racial diversity and exploring racial inequities will lead to the hiring of faculty who will more actively engage with the issues of race in all disciplines. This constant engagement with race will prompt a deeper reflection among members of the student body on their own behaviors and racial locations.
In the matriculation address to the class of 2013, Bacow said, "Try to make a difference during your time here and beyond." We must start that change here and now. We are at a critical point in Tufts history. The choice of provost and his or her future decisions will determine the future of the university. The decisions this leader makes need to acknowledge and improve the current racial environment. We call on the university to choose leaders who open and engage in dialogue about race. Let's start holding our university accountable to the mission statement to which it subscribes.
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Josephine Herman, Howard Levine and Elizabeth Shrobe are all sophomores. They are majoring in American studies and art history, Americans studies and peace and justice studies, and psychology, respectively.
