As his second year at Tufts comes to a close, University President Anthony Monaco sat down with the Daily to discuss his views on a range of topics including diversity at Tufts, the divestment movement, the university's financial situation, the Tufts: The Next 10 Years (T10) strategic plan initiative.
Tufts Daily: You once said said the solution to diversity in the undergraduate curriculum had to have two things: It had to be something that the faculty supported and it had to enhance the educational experience at Tufts. Do those things apply to the Critical Studies in Disparities and Diasporas program?
Anthony Monaco: As you know, the diversity undergraduate working group has put out its draft report for comment. In there, they [not only talk] about curricular changes, but [also give] recommendations about social justice, about helping our faculty have more competence in teaching to a diverse student body and how we might achieve that. There [are] also recommendations about the co-curricular activities. There [are] recommendations about financial aid, but not only getting students here, but [also] thinking about how we make their time at Tufts successful and satisfactory. So there [are] a lot of recommendations that go across a lot, and so the curricular piece is one part of that. I think the [Critical Studies in Disparities and Diasporas] C2D program has been well thought through and got off to a cold start. I do think the program is headed in the right direction. It needs to evolve, it needs to have the faculty eventually vote on it and support it, but at the moment there have also been a number of very, very good hires in the faculty of Arts and Sciences to support this program, and we're very excited about that.
TD: In terms of the program, how would you address concerns of students, particularly the students who have been very involved in pushing for the creation of this program and the development of it, that there has been a lack of transparency or ability to work well together?
AM: I had asked Joanne Berger-Sweeney to try to create a number of ways in which students could intersect the work of the faculty and I think she has delivered on that. There was the ability for students to come to certain meetings and discuss with the faculty where they were and what was happening. The issue is really that the faculty has to develop the curriculum and then the students can give their perspective on it, but I don't see why that's not considered a transparent process, and the faculty have to work through it and the students have been given several chances to intersect the process and give their perspectives.
TD: Two years ago, former University President Lawrence Bacow told the Daily that the university's endowment was bouncing back from the recession and that Moody's and Standard & Poor's bond ratings were doing well. Is that still true?
AM: Yes, our endowment is in good shape. I think what we're really looking at going out is all the uncertainty about returns from the endowment ... There's an effort going on at the moment which is called [Tufts Effectiveness in Administrative Management] TEAM which is [studying] the effectiveness of the administration. About 50 percent of our teaching costs are in administrative support - IT, facilities, operations, all the administrative support of the libraries. This is all core to our business but we are taking a fresh look at how it's organized not only within schools, but [also] across schools.
TD: Where does Tufts stand financially now, and is the university still suffering any effects from the recession?
AM: We want to make a surplus so we can build up reserves to invest in capital projects. I think one vote of confidence that we had from the markets about Tufts was the ability to raise $250 million last March for our capital improvements [and] all the deferred maintenance that's going to happen. There were renovations and deferred maintenance of Cohen Auditorium that will happen this summer. You'll come back and see a lot of things worked on over the summer. That type of investment requires us to have a cash reserve as well as borrowed money.
TD: Do you think need-blind admissions will come back anytime soon?
AM: The way we're looking at this at the moment is where we sit amongst our peer group. We are in the lower quartile of our peer group for what they call the "discount rate" ... We're well below that, and despite all the efforts of the last campaign to raise money for financial aid, we find ourselves in a not-as-competitive position as we would like to be. So our goal over the next five or six years is to raise money and find money in our operating budget to put more into financial aid and come up to that mean. If we could do that then need-blind might be within striking distance ... I'd hate to right now say our goal is need-blind when we're still struggling to be competitive in our peer group. Once I feel we're being competitive and we've reached the mean level, I'd like to then address how many more percentage points in the discount rate we'd need to get to be need-blind, whether that's a goal of the next campaign.
TD: As you're looking for money in the budget, what's going to get cut?
AM: We're not in a crisis, and I think that's very important. If we can find savings and provide a better service, then we won't have to go in and cut that program or that program. We also leave many of the decisions up to the schools; they know their programs well. It's really not up to the central administration to make decisions like that. We respect the way they manage their schools, their departments. Everything gets reviewed. They go through all their programs every five to seven years and they decide if things are strong or weak or can be improved, or they will wind something down as they wind something else up, so that's kind of the process they do. We're quite interested in developing more cross-school initiatives and developing an administration through this effort that will really allow those financial and administrative hurdles to cross school appointments, cross school graduate programs and cross school research collaborations. That's something that's really come through the strategic planning exercise loud and clear, that we have to many of these hurdles and if we can overcome them, we could have a much bigger impact and that's one thing we're focusing on.
TD: What, in your view, is the future of the Committee on Student Life's policy allowing religious groups to apply for exemption from the university's nondiscrimination policy?
AM: I was really looking to use our processes to deal with this community rather than trying to intersperse my own personal opinion on this matter. As a standing committee of the faculty with elected students - given that it was a unanimous decision and I thought a thoughtful decision to try to balance both sides of the argument - I was willing to support that.
I also was willing as chair of the AS&E faculty meeting to have it discussed among the faculty if there was enough interest to do so. I understand that no faculty members officially brought it to the agenda setting committee to put it on the agenda, but that doesn't mean next semester that couldn't happen and that discussion could go on.
... The faculty can't vote and overturn it. We would vote if there [were] no strong consensus, but it's not like a bylaw that we're voting on. It's really taking the perspectives of different faculty members who want to speak and discuss[ing] it during the meeting, and then decid[ing] if there's enough interest for the CSL to reconsider. It's not a repeal and not really a vote because most of the voting occurs on the different bylaws. I think what the CSL did was realize there was a void in our policy - that there wasn't a real written policy to deal with this situation, and so that's why they put a lot of thought into what kind of policy would help steer us through this difficult area where you have strong feelings on both sides about nondiscrimination and about religious doctrine and criteria for leadership in a religious group.
TD: What's the actual likelihood that the Board of Trustees will seriously consider divesting the endowment with all of the logistical issues? Is it financially viable?
AM: [Tufts Divest] came to us and asked whether they could do a presentation to our investment committee. It was a very thoughtful presentation, and they gave us a paper which was very detailed and, we thought, very well-written. The investment committee then discussed that, went away and did some work to understand what divestment in fossil fuel industries would mean ... given our mixed portfolio of assets - we don't invest in particular companies, they're managed funds. Although less than around five percent of our holdings are in the 200 companies they would consider fossil fuel companies, they're held by 75 percent of our equity, so to change our portfolio to get rid of those five percent means changing over 75 percent, and that's something that would be very complex, very expensive and the trustees were really not willing to do that.
I would like to go forward in a more positive vein, and we've met with the divest group representatives several times. I've asked Laurie Gabriel, the chair of the [Board of Trustees'] investment committee, to chair a [new] committee to make a report ... The first is if we were to divest, what are the hurdles, what would we have to go through ... The second thing is whether we could do something very positive and more immediate to create a fund that would be a socially responsible, or a "green" fund, that would have no investments in these type of companies and that would allow us to offer our alumni and donors a possible option if they gave us donations knowing that their donation would not be invested in our holdings that would be with the five percent of fossil fuel companies.
The third is to explore what other areas students and the Tufts community can influence policy in this area because we are very committed to sustainability as a goal, not only our campus sustainability. We would like to work the students to understand how we could do more and also how people could influence policy or these companies at the same time. I hope that we would have something to say probably by next semester.
TD: What do you specifically hope that T10 will accomplish? What do you want to get out of that?
AM: We want to know where we think Tufts should be in five to 10 years and what we need to do to get there. A lot of that is not only about making our teaching and our learning and our research and scholarship the best it can be - we want it to be innovative, we want it to be paradigm-shifting. A lot of that is a commitment to active citizenship and our global perspective, but there's a lot more we could be doing in entrepreneurship, spitting out companies, licensing, all different ways in which faculty contribute to the impact on society.
