A group of faculty members inside Tufts’ School of Arts and Sciences Strategic Plan Committee, led by Kasso Okoudjou, professor and department chair of mathematics, and Natasha Warikoo, professor of sociology, is crafting a guiding statement for the School of Arts and Sciences that articulates its distinctive identity.
The committee is split into six focus groups in charge of planning different areas of the school’s future, with Okoudjou and Warikoo co-chairing one titled “School Identity.” They and other faculty are working to create a formal description of the school that, according to Dean of Undergraduate Admissions JT Duck, “would be recognizable to internal constituents and serve as an outward facing description.”
Warikoo added that although the mission of an institution like Tufts may seem to vary little over time, strategic planning is still an important activity to account for the changes that do occur.
“So that sounds very vague, but you know, on the one hand, you might think, ‘Okay, [a] university is pretty straightforward’ — but you know that society changes, the university changes, the student body changes, and so it’s important periodically to revisit: What is our identity? What is our mission? And how are we best organized to do that?” Warikoo said.
Okoudjou said this cycle of planning has been shaped by an effort to increase awareness of Tufts across the United States and to distinguish it from peer schools of similar caliber.
“If you ask ‘Do you know where Tufts University is?’ people will probably say no,” Okoudjou said, adding that other institutions in the Boston area are more widely recognized for signature programs such as Northeastern’s co-op system. “Even the people who know Tufts [will say] ‘Okay, it’s just a liberal arts school.’ So, I think we want to somehow differentiate ourselves.”
The first question the team faced was defining the identity of the School of Arts and Sciences — who had a stake in the school and what values they believed defined it.
“[The committee] first met, and then we decided the challenge was: ‘What are we?’ ‘What do we need in order to sort of come up with a statement?’ ‘Who are the stakeholders?’” Okoudjou said.
Okoudjou described the process the committee would use of collecting input from alumni, students and faculty as largely survey-driven, with the goal of identifying recurring themes.
“We looked at survey data from students who graduated: What is their perception of Tufts now that they’re leaving?” Okoudjou said. “We asked faculty how they would describe Tufts to some of their friends or family members.”
Duck, who serves as the Arts, Sciences and Engineering staff representative for the School Identity Committee, conceded that it would be difficult to distill the school’s mission into a single sentence.
“We haven’t tried to capture every distinctive element of the School in such a short statement - rather, we have focused on capturing, at a high level, what it is that the School does and how it does it,” Duck wrote in an email to the Daily.
Beyond messaging, the group has also examined post-graduation outcomes for Tufts students, weighing them against the cost of Tufts’ tuition.
“The strategic plan is looking into all the operations: Research, teaching, student life and outcomes,” Okoudjou said. “When we graduate students here, do they go out in the world to do what they were expecting to do? Do they earn enough money to justify the cost of education?”
The last plan of this kind was developed in 2015, focusing on similar themes of research and scholarship, updating the curriculum and increasing Tufts’ commitment to diversity.
Okoudjou also emphasized the collaborative nature of drafting the identity statement. He said the process involved collaborating with colleagues from departments across the School of Arts and Sciences as well as from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
“[The SMFA faculty] was not a group of people I have interacted with so much, so this helped me actually know more about the university,” Okoudjou said.
Okoudjou said the group plans to meet again in the next few weeks to finalize a proposed identity statement for the School of Arts and Sciences. He expects the final identity statement to be published on the university’s website and distributed to prospective students through admissions materials.
The committee also hopes its work will align with Tufts Beyond 175, a plan announced last year by University President Sunil Kumar to guide the university after its 175th anniversary in 2027.
“Our hope is that the identity statement we produce serves as a north star for the rest of the work being undertaken by the A&S Strategic Plan Committee,” Duck wrote.
