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COVER
STORY
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College
Life Reconsidered
The Task Force on the Undergraduate Experience
takes stock
by Laura Ferguson
Photos by Robert
Schoen
Every day more than 4,000 Tufts undergraduates
transform the Medford/Somerville campus with collective chaos.
They go to class, hang out in Brown and Brew over a cappuccino,
research term papers at Tisch, log onto a PC at Eaton Computer
Lab, work out at the fitness center, rehearse with the university
orchestra. They ride the shuttle to Davis Square to catch the
Red Line to an internship in Boston. They race from basketball
practice to their poetry seminar, then huddle in the dorm for
studying relieved by a 1 a.m. pizza break.
“Every day is a crazy day,” said Lauren Peach, A04,
an American studies major who juggles classes with a work-study
job, varsity lacrosse, and volunteering with a peer hotline.
“But I wouldn’t give it up for the world.”
Many students, like Peach, are making the most of their college
years. But could the experience be improved? How, for example,
does a student shape a sense of identity out of their college
experiences? Could Tufts do a better job heightening intellectual
life on campus? How does Tufts instill a sense of community,
while planting the seeds of a lifelong relationship to alma
mater?
For the past year and a half, members of the Task Force on the
Undergraduate Experience have been asking these and other questions
as they relate to Arts, Sciences and Engineering (AS&E),
while also generating considerable response to their initial
proposals for change.
It’s been an ambitious undertaking: more than 20 Task
Force meetings and nearly 70 meetings with students, faculty,
staff, trustees and alumni. Outreach activities led to a round
of proposals, open to community feedback via a website. Part
I of an Interim Report, made public in December, provided initial
feedback with a first set of possible initiatives to promote
community and intellectual engagement on campus. In January,
the Task Force followed up with additional ideas, primarily
relating to the curriculum and research opportunities for students.
This dialogue has been as much about gathering information as
about the process itself—an open exchange of ideas with
the Tufts community, including offering the reports online and
posting a Task Force “Question of the Week” on tuftslife.com.
That feedback would help the Task Force refine their ideas and
present final recommendations to President Lawrence S. Bacow
in May.
“We were charged by the president
to present final recommendations in the spring that the community
has not only fully considered but also collectively endorsed,”
said Gilbert Metcalf, economics professor and Task Force chair.
“Given the discussion generated by the Interim Reports,
we can now hone in on ideas that achieve this broad-based support.
For instance, while there were objections to introducing a college
system at Tufts, we are finding some consensus for many aspects
of that system: reconfiguration of class deans, creating a “cradle
to grave” advising system, and doing a variety of things
that promote increased faculty-student interaction. We also
find that certain ideas such as need-blind admission, increased
support for research, and a four-year writing program strike
a chord.
“Some of the biggest impact we have seen so far is that
the intellectual climate could be enhanced,” he added.
“Just paying attention to that alone would bring a new
vocabulary and a new discussion to Tufts that will continue
well into the future.”
Bruce Reitman, A72, co-chair and Dean of Students, said that
the Task Force’s mission reflects a shift toward more
student engagement in the learning process, with the central
aim of building a strong sense of community among faculty and
students. Interaction among faculty and students should not
seem contrived but rather a natural part of the daily routine
of living at Tufts.
“When I was a Tufts student, we weren’t looking
for community,” he said. “In the late 1960s, we
were all going through something together: How not to be in
Hanoi. Now there is a lot more individual direction and there
is an expectation that we will create community and make everyone
feel safe—not only physically, but in terms of expression
of ideas. That’s why part of our goal is to create a community
of diverse people and opinions that sustains an active intellectual
community. There’s not enough of that interaction right
now. We have classes and residence halls and various student
activities, but the overlap is not obvious. Where the faculty
and students come together is not obvious and there is a real
hunger for that.”
It is a yearning that Charles Inouye, co-chair and Dean of the
College for Undergraduate Education, said can be creatively
addressed at Tufts, an institution with many strengths in place.
In fact, he’s quick to point out that while the Task Force
has necessarily focused on things to be improved, it is aware
of Tufts’ many strengths and seeks to enhance them.
“Tufts now takes its place among the very best universities
precisely because we build on a strong foundation,” said
Inouye. “Tufts is a lot of things that other institutions
want to be. We stress both teaching and research. We are international.
We are diverse and friendly. We are committed to engaged learning
and to giving back to the community. In many ways, this exploration
has reinforced these qualities, and our strategy for the future
is simply to help Tufts be more clearly Tufts.”
Fostering Interactions
The Task Force got down to business in the fall of 2001 after
President Bacow charged it to “work hard to achieve a
consensus for change” that would shape priorities for
undergraduate education in the next capital campaign. The 11-member
committee, in addition to Metcalf, Reitman and Charles Inouye,
includes Professors Frances Chew (biology and American studies),
Lee Edelman (English), James Glaser (political science), Karen
Panetta (electrical engineering), and Maryanne Wolf (child development).
The final three members are students James Blockwood, an international
relations major, Charline Han, an environmental engineering
major in the combined degree program with the Engineering School
and Medical School, and Rachel Rubenson, former editor of the
Tufts Daily and a political science major.
The Task Force set out to examine the strengths and weaknesses
in the curriculum and in teaching methods; residential and co-curricular
life; and how each undergraduate year contributes to students’
intellectual and personal growth. According to Metcalf, the
scrutiny was timely.
“The economic forces out there are such that when you
have college costs close to $40,000 a year, parents rightfully
want to know why they should send their children to Tufts rather
than to an online college,” said Metcalf. “Obviously,
we think we’re providing a terrific education, but we
ought to be constantly examining what we do to see what we can
do better. One question that drives us on the Task Force is:
How do we make sure that the rest of the students’ Tufts
experience contributes to their education? How can we improve
opportunities for the out-of-class experience to support and
enhance the in-class experience?”
The answers started coming last spring, as the Task Force met
with more than 500 students, faculty members, staff, trustees
and alumni at more than 30 sessions, reviewed existing surveys
of students from the Office of Institutional Research, conducted
a survey of faculty in AS&E, and collected information from
some 30 other colleges and universities. Three primary themes
emerged: community, climate (the intellectual, co-curricular
and social atmosphere) and coherence. Those themes led directly
to three goals that shaped particular proposals: academic excellence,
community building and a continuing commitment to diversity.
Of the proposals so far, the most radically new surround residential
life. Initiatives put forth in Part I of the report included,
for instance, constructing a Tufts College System comprising
four colleges that would create smaller, more intimate communities
in which all students could maintain a connection to a core
group of faculty, staff and other students throughout all four
years. Two colleges would be located uphill and two downhill.
The report also suggests “building community and strengthening
diversity” by completing Phase III of the Campus Center
to create an improved new social center—construction that
would add significantly to the building located conveniently
between the uphill and downhill campuses.
“The Campus Center was designed to be the social anchor
of the Medford-Somerville campus. I think it could be; I don’t
think it is yet,” said Metcalf. “But we have the
ability to create a vibrant social and intellectual center there.
Right now, there is no place that you feel confident that you
will see students on a daily basis. We’ve also proposed
a café in the library or—better yet—on top
of the library, something that is symbolically important in
that it merges social interaction and intellectual engagement;
it’s a powerful symbol of intellectual life at Tufts.”
Improving the physical space of Tufts, specifically, increasing
opportunities for students to congregate with each other and
faculty, said Metcalf, would foster connections that could have
enormous potential to shape a student’s college years.
No less important is providing more interaction between faculty
and students in a non-classroom setting. “Last year I
started inviting my students home for dinner,” said Metcalf,
“and one thing I found was that they immediately loosened
up in class and felt more relaxed and started asking questions
and responding. So here was a purely social event that had a
direct intellectual payoff. We heard from students that they
would like to see the faculty out of the classroom more, for
example, in the dining hall or at events in the evening.”
Educating Life-long Learners
As with the co-curricular and residential proposals, curricular
proposals put forth in Part II of the Interim Report were presented
to generate discussion. In short, those initiatives promote
“engaged learning”—intellectual engagement
in the classroom, in students’ independent or group study
activities, or in research opportunities that connect students
with faculty. “We wish to provide an environment in which
students will become enthusiastic lifelong learners, creative
producers of knowledge and effective communicators,” according
to the report. “The richness of dialogue, instruction,
experimentation and experience that Tufts provides will enable
our students to become leaders in the diverse and increasingly
interconnected world they will inherit. This is an ambitious
aspiration, but the intellectual transformation of young adults
is itself the ambitious enterprise at the heart of the mission
of the university.”
The report addresses aspects identified as key to a Tufts education,
including how to improve writing and oral communication skills,
enhance research opportunities for students, provide opportunities
for culminating academic experiences, enhance the intellectual
community, and rethink Tufts’ approach to curricular requirements.
The Task Force also presented “large-scale” suggestions
for ways in which the Tufts community can think about, among
other things, how to keep students from losing touch with the
academic community in their junior year, when so many of them
study abroad; how to integrate intellectual achievement into
the social life of the campus, for instance, a “World
Day” event in which juniors who have been away from campus
share their experience with sophomores.
“We know that in the first couple of years, students do
build loyalty and affection for Tufts, but then something happens,”
said Metcalf. “Part of it is because we send students
out into the world during junior year abroad. Part of it has
to do with our housing; we have difficulty housing as many students
on campus as we’d like. When they come back as seniors,
we don’t do as good a job of reconnecting them to campus
as we could.”
Planning for the Future
When asked about their impression of these and other ideas,
the student members of the Task Force agreed that the work carried
tremendous potential for changing how Tufts approaches undergraduate
education. “Students seem to understand the impact that
the Task Force efforts will have on the future of Tufts,”
said Rubenson. “Overall, the feedback we have received
has been very constructive.”
Many of the initiatives of the Task Force speak to the fact,
added Rubenson, “that we have a marketing problem. We
have a lot of strengths, but we don’t seem to be good
at telling students about the amazing projects that their fellow
students or professors are doing or the opportunities they have
to engage in academic and co-curricular activities. Proposals
like a World Day, Majors’ Day, and the research and internship
clearinghouses are aimed at solving that problem.”
Han agreed that the Task Force has set in motion ideas that
would change “the whole dynamic of the college. Greater
student and faculty interaction, for instance. We’re taking
Tufts’ strengths and accenting them and making people
take pride in them.”
Whether or not that message was getting through, however, was
doubtful, said Blockwood.
“Overall, the students probably don’t understand
the profound impact this report could have on Tufts’ possibilities,”
said Blockwood. “You have a few students who get it, but
I don’t think it’s at the point where the entire
campus says ‘This is what Tufts needs to be doing.’”
Another concern is the price tag that comes with whatever the
final report recommends. But because the Task Force has presented
proposals that range from being very expensive (requiring five
to ten years to bring about) to inexpensive and capable of being
put into place immediately (what the group calls “low-hanging
fruit”) the momentum from the Task Force’s work
can be carried over in subsequent years while the resources
are gathered.
“Our biggest challenge is the endowment,” said Metcalf.
“We need to pull together the resources for the kind of
education we want to provide. As we’ve gone about our
work, we’ve tried to create a compelling package of initiatives
that will be exciting to alumni and other supporters as we go
into the next capital campaign.”
Metcalf is encouraged, however, by the alacrity with which some
new ideas have already been taken up. The final report will
be made to President Bacow in May, but Bacow has already addressed
a recommendation concerning the enhancement of the campus intellectual
climate.
Daniel Dennett, University Professor and noted member of the
philosophy department, will host monthly dinners with colleagues
across the campus to compare notes on their research, heighten
intellectual exchange and promote cross-disciplinary discussions.
The administration will also soon launch initiatives aimed at
increasing opportunities for undergraduates to do research with
faculty across the University.
“I think the energy that President Bacow and Provost Jamshed
Bharucha have brought to Tufts, and their expectations for academic
excellence, are very exciting,” said Metcalf. “That
excellence is not only about faculty but our students as well.
What’s remarkable to me is the caliber of Tufts students
who matriculate every year. We need to take full advantage of
our students’ capabilities by offering them the exciting
and challenging experiences they need to make the fullest use
of their vast talents.”
For an online version of the Interim Report by theTask Force
on the Undergraduate Experience, visit the web at ugtaskforce.tufts.edu.
Feedback is welcome by email to ugtaskforce@tufts.edu.
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