Tufts remains one of few universities to offer reduced-rent housing to new faculty members, in hopes of attracting more professors to Medford and Somerville - an area notorious for its high living costs.
"This is an important national issue, and affects all universities and colleges in areas with high-priced housing," said Professor Steven Marrone, member of the Arts, Sciences, and Engineering Executive Committee. "Faculty members are reluctant to come [to those places] without special support."
Tufts' transitional program offers incoming faculty several two-bedroom apartments owned by Walnut Hill Properties and one to three bedroom apartments in the Hillside School in Medford, which was renovated into living space in 2003. All housing is within close proximity to the Tufts campus and is set just below the market rate. Faculty may reside in the transitional housing for three years.
The program also gives incoming faculty time to adjust to their new surroundings. "When I received this position, I didn't know Boston at all," said Awad Halabi, lecturer in the History Department. Halabi, originally from Toronto, Canada, has been living in the Hillside School since August 2003. "I appreciated this a great deal because it can take weeks to find a place, and that's if you know the city. This made it much easier to come here."
Margery Davies, Director of Diversity Education and Development for Arts and Sciences, contacts the 12 to 15 new Tufts professors each year and makes them aware of their living options. In the five years that the program has been running, Davies has managed to place every faculty member that expressed interest in an apartment. She estimates that about 16 new faculty members currently reside in transitional housing units, including the Hillside School.
"This program started because incoming faculty often had trouble finding a place to live," she said. "Currently the market is not as tight as it was five or six years ago, but it's safe to assume that it will tighten up again."
Since the purchase of the Hillside School in 2003, however, Tufts has made no other plans for appropriating additional faculty housing. In early 2003, Arts and Sciences faculty expressed interested in establishing a mortgage assistance program, but the program was never initiated.
This has not gone over well with new faculty. Many junior faculty members have expressed that Tufts housing assistance for new professors is "minimal" and "sub-par," especially in relation to other universities.
For new faculty, renting property through Walnut Hills in the expensive Medford-Somerville area is not always appealing, yet the University offers few alternatives, leaving them to conduct their own searches.
"Either they've got to pay us more or give us some sort of discount on housing, because it's very expensive here," said Evan Haefeli, assistant professor of History, who commutes twenty minutes to campus from Cambridge. "That's a big disappointment and a big problem with a lot of junior people."
As new options, Haefeli suggested subsidized housing and loan or mortgage programs, which are already offered at schools like Princeton and Columbia.
Other Boston area schools have made similar efforts to accommodate new faculty members. In spring 2003, Harvard University opened a Pleasant Street apartment complex, offering 203 units for faculty. Wellesley College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are both seeking to expand their mortgage programs. Like Harvard, MIT is also considering constructing apartments for junior professors.
These faculty housing issues are not just restricted to Boston. "My colleagues in New York City have invested extensively in housing to keep faculty coming there," Marrone said. "This has been a concern for the last decade... it's even more important for universities because salaries aren't so high."
According to the Tufts Off-Campus Housing Resource Center, the rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Medford ranged from $1100 to $1600 per month last year. According to the Boston Globe, the average single-family Medford home cost $323,000, which, while pricey, pales in comparison to the $587,500 average for a house in Cambridge. These rates are unaffordable to the average junior professor, who makes about $60,000 a year.
Unfortunately, professors that can afford to live near campus are deterred by poor public schools and the student party-scene. Avner Baz, assistant professor of Philosophy, currently rents an apartment on Sawyer Avenue and has been repeatedly disturbed by noisy, rowdy students.
This was particularly disappointing to Baz, who came to Tufts from the University of Chicago, where he enjoyed a close-knit relationship between students and faculty. Sadly, Baz says that he has experienced no similar sense of community at Tufts.
"In the Philosophy Department, I am the only one that lives nearby," he said. "I understood from other faculty that there have been attempts in the past to make the University area more livable for faculty, and that they have failed."
Haefeli said that once faculty get married or have families, they are even more likely to live farther away. "There's nothing really holding them here in particular," he said.
Disagreements over housing have also played a role in Tufts faculty retention. In a study conducted in the spring of 2002 by the Kaleidoscope Group, which studied race issues in faculty tenure, the primary issues of concern among faculty members hired between 1990 and 1996 were poor housing options for junior faculty, as well as inadequate salaries to compensate for high Boston living costs.
"New faculty coming into the Boston area find it very difficult to find a place, in part because the prices are so unbelievably higher than anywhere else," Baz said. "Any help and guidance that the University could offer would make a lot of difference for incoming faculty."
