tufts universitytufts magazine issue homepage
contact us back issues related links
 
Discover Act Create ConnectA Fraternity of Firsts Big Brother, Little Brother Phantom of the LibraryTufts on the TNewswire Designed for CollaborationTufts DaysFinancial Aid InitiativeThe Big Day Departments

Joyce and Bill Cummings
Photo: John Soares

Tufts on the T

New academic building will be constructed above planned public transit station

Back in 1987, Bill Cummings, a Massachusetts real estate developer, proposed a radical plan to transform the Medford/Somerville campus. If Tufts could secure rights to the airspace above the public transit tracks at the busy intersection of Boston and College avenues, the university could construct a new building on College Avenue and then build a footbridge that connected it to the Hill.

“From the time I was a student to my many campus visits as an alum, I was constantly aware of the dangerousness of that intersection,” says Cummings, A58, H06, J97P, M97P. As a new university trustee, he brought schematic plans drawn up by his senior architect to then-Tufts President Jean Mayer, who responded enthusiastically. But another senior administrator at the time “was very pessimistic about our ability to acquire the necessary air rights,” Cummings says, and so the plans were shelved.

He continued to believe in his idea, however, and now his patience has paid off. Tufts is planning to construct a 100,000-square-foot academic building above the site of a proposed new MBTA College Avenue station, along with a footbridge connecting the facility to the campus—at the same location Cummings proposed nearly three decades ago.

He and his wife, Joyce Cummings, J97P, M97P, have made the new building possible through generous support from their Cummings Foundation. In addition, a public-private collaboration involving the City of Medford, the MBTA, Tufts, and Cummings Foundation is expected to enhance the MBTA Green Line Extension project with public spaces that the university will maintain. The planned public transit project would extend the Green Line from its current terminus at the Lechmere Station in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a new station at Tufts.

“When we learned that the MBTA was moving forward with the new station, it seemed like a great time to reprise the idea,” says Cummings, a trustee emeritus and a former member of the medical school’s board of advisors.

Preliminary designs for the new building include classrooms, meeting and seminar rooms, offices, and conference and teaching spaces. Some facilities will be available for community use. There will also be retail space.

Tufts President Anthony P. Monaco says he envisions the new building as a home for “outward-reaching” academic endeavors that will benefit from being near public transportation. He noted that it will foster greater collaboration between faculty and students on the Medford/Somerville campus and those on the health sciences campus in downtown Boston.

“Bill and Joyce Cummings have been wonderful friends to Tufts and to the greater community, and their philanthropy has been vital to many of Tufts’ schools and programs,” Monaco says. “This visionary project will enhance public spaces for community use and also help knit together our campuses.”

The Woburn, Massachusetts–based Cummings Foundation has also endowed the Cummings Family Chair in Entrepreneurship and Business Economics, designed to help students develop the talents needed to run a business, and committed $50 million to what is now Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts. And through the foundation’s subsidiary, Cummings Institute for World Justice, it has funded the Cummings/Hillel Program for Holocaust and Genocide Education, which supports a student volunteer trip to the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda and an annual lecture by a witness of genocide.

Cummings, a self-made entrepreneur who started out as a sales trainee for Vick Chemical Company, makers of Vicks VapoRub, and then spent three years with Gorton’s of Gloucester, grew up in Medford’s Haines Square. He fondly recalls his Tufts days as a commuter student, walking down College Avenue to class. He majored in business administration through the economics department and remembers eating “an awful lot of cheeseburgers” at the student hangout known as the Kursaal in the basement of Curtis Hall, just across the street from the future MBTA station.

“Joyce and I have always wanted to do more for Medford and for Tufts,” Cummings says, “and this project is the perfect opportunity. We are thrilled to support a project that better integrates the university with the surrounding neighborhood. The new train station will eventually serve as a stunning, key entryway to the university, and the building will certainly provide Tufts with more visibility.”

Cummings is also pleased that the project will fulfill another personal goal: naming a building for his wife. Joyce Cummings is a graduate of the University of Alabama, but she has formed a strong connection to Tufts, he says. It would be hard not to in a family with three Jumbos—Bill and their two daughters, Marilyn Cummings Morris, M97, and Patricia Cummings, J97.

“Being a modest, down-to-earth person, Joyce was reluctant on previous occasions to be honored in such a public way,” says Cummings. “But we, as a couple, would not be in the position to do the things we are doing now if we had not spent the past fifty years together, with her supporting me so much and for so long in my work.”

After graduating from Alabama in 1962, Joyce Cummings headed north for a dietetic internship at Massachusetts General Hospital. She crossed paths with her future husband at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. Bill had recently purchased a Medford company that made fruit punch concentrate, and the hospital was a customer.

“Bill tricked me into our first date in April 1965,” recalls Joyce. He invited her to an evening event at the new Prudential Center. “Other women were in ball gowns, and there I was in my hospital whites—I was mortified. But when he dropped me off at home, he asked me to go out again on a real date. I thought, Why not give it another chance with street clothes?”

The couple, who will celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary next year, are committed philanthropists. “Joyce and I have all that we need and want,” Bill says. “How we enrich the lives of others is the real measure of our wealth.”

Cummings Foundation, which they established in 1986, has grown into one of the largest philanthropic organizations in New England. They were the first Massachusetts couple to join the Giving Pledge, founded by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage the world’s wealthiest individuals to give most of their money to charity.

For now, they are eager to see the new academic building and footbridge take shape. “I am gratified that our initial idea has not only survived but grown, thanks to a collaboration between private and public institutions,” says Bill. “Partnerships have always been important to my own success in business; ideas are always made stronger when they are shared.”

 
  © 2015 Tufts University Tufts Publications, 80 George St., Medford, MA 02155