The role of a dean at a prestigious university is perhaps surprisingly akin to the role of a politician.
“Being a dean is a very political job. … Politics is who gets what, when, where and how. And deans are responsible for allocating the ‘whats’ to the various ‘whos,’ whether they’re faculty or students or alumni or staff,” Dean James Glaser, the current dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, said.
Like a politician, deans manage the interests of many people, trying to allocate funds in ways that can please a constituency. It is therefore only fitting that the man who has been at Tufts for 33 years — and held three different deanships over the course of 21 years — has devoted his life to the study of politics.
Glaser will be leaving Tufts at the end of this academic year.
Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Glaser, inspired by his father, was imbued with a love of politics from a young age.
“I have memories of watching election returns with my father or talking about politics at the dinner table with him. He was interested in it,” Glaser said. “He vociferously read the news every day. And he was just very much in touch with what was going on in the political world. So it was part of what I absorbed as a young person.”
Although Glaser always enjoyed politics, it took him trying a few different majors while in his undergraduate years at Stanford University to settle on political science as his final career path.
After Glaser graduated from Stanford in 1983, he decided to move to Washington D.C. for a year in order to take a job at the Supreme Court. He worked in the administrator’s office, primarily writing speeches and articles regarding the bicentennial of the Constitution.
“In Washington, everybody works for somebody interesting, and everybody’s from somewhere else. And so they’re all very motivated to make friends,” Glaser said. “It was a pretty wonderful year. I loved it.”
Glaser loved the way he could absorb so much information from some of the most important political power players in Washington, often through snippets of conversation between the court clerks he picked up while playing basketball with them.
“People were kind of loose-lipped around me because I was so unimportant,” he said.
Following his year at the U.S. Supreme Court, Glaser returned to California to get his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
“I studied electoral politics and political behavior and southern politics and parlayed that into what has been my political science career,” he said.
Glaser was hired at Tufts University and began work in Medford in January of 1991. Though he had previously worked as a teaching assistant, teaching at Tufts was his first time in charge of his own class.
“I feel sorry for the people who were in my class that first semester because I was just dog paddling as fast as I could to keep my head above water,” Glaser said.
Slowly but surely, Glaser learned from his mistakes and developed both his skills and a love for teaching.
“I tried to take advantage of my natural talents and bring them to my pedagogy, but the fact is that, at the beginning, I was not very good,” Glaser said. “And I’m glad that Tufts was patient with me in the first year or two as I got my feet wet and tried to start to figure out how to do the job. But, after a while, I think I got pretty good at it.”
While teaching and continuing to conduct research Glaser rose in the ranks. He became the chair of the Department of Political Science in 1999 and remained in that position until 2003 when he first began his move into academic administration by becoming the Dean of Undergraduate Education for Arts, Sciences, and Engineering.
“I was gloriously happy being just a political science professor, teaching classes, doing research, writing books and articles,” Glaser said. “I could have spent my whole career doing that, but at some point, I had an opportunity to move into the administration here.”
The opportunity came in the form of a vacancy in the deanship under former President Lawrence Bacow. So, from 2003 to 2010, Glaser became the “Dean of Dowling.”
“I sat in Dowling, and I was responsible for advising and study abroad and student life and athletics,” Glaser said.
But in 2010, Glaser’s daughter was admitted to Tufts, and as the Dean of Undergraduate Education, Glaser knew he would have too much influence on his daughter’s college experience.
“If she makes the dean’s list, I’ll be sending myself a letter of congratulations, because we send a letter of congratulations to the parents of students on the dean’s list,” Glaser said. “Dear Dean Glaser, congratulations on your daughter. Signed, Dean Glaser.”
Right as Glaser was looking for a change, he was offered the opportunity to interview for the position of Dean of Academic Affairs for Arts and Sciences. This career move allowed Glaser to pursue a growth opportunity while simultaneously removing him from the uncomfortable position of being Dean of Undergraduate Education and simultaneously the father of a Tufts student.
Glaser remained as Dean of Academic Affairs for four years until the former Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Joanne Berger-Sweeney left to pursue another position. Glaser became the Interim Dean in 2014 before being awarded the full position in January 2015.
“I’ve been doing this basically since June of [2014],” Glaser said. “When I finish it will be June of 2024. So it really will be 10 years, actually, to the day that I sat in this position.”
Dean Glaser has enjoyed his time as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, saying that the role suits his skills and background.
“My political science training actually was useful to me in thinking about the kinds of things that university leaders have to do, in persuading, designing ways of where we should go, or formulating where we should go and generating support for the plans that we make to grow and improve and change,” Glaser said. “I would argue that being a political scientist has been a great asset to me in my leadership capacity here.”
Aside from his very first year as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Glaser has continued to teach at least one class a semester.
“It’s a source of pleasure [for] me to be part of students’ experience and expose them to politics for the first time and to be in the room when people’s light bulbs are going off. It’s an enormous pleasure,” Glaser said.
Glaser also makes teaching a continued priority because he wants to have a finger on the pulse of undergraduate education. When making decisions affecting students and professors, he wants to understand people’s wants and needs firsthand.
It was particularly important to him to teach a class during the COVID pandemic, when he was asking professors to teach in-person and utilize technology they may not have encountered before.
“It gave me credibility when I asked other people to do things, like teach in person during the COVID crisis, because I was teaching in person, so I wasn’t asking anybody to do anything that I myself wasn’t doing,” Glaser said.
Reflecting on his experience as a dean, Glaser is immensely proud of the progress Tufts has made, including acquiring the School of Museum of Fine Arts, opening new buildings, adding new housing opportunities through Community Housing and creating new departments like Community Health and Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies.
“Seeing the tangible changes that we’ve been able to make to improve the student experience, to bring great knowledge-creators to the institution [and] to hire impactful faculty, … I’ve gotten enormous pleasure from being part of that,” Glaser said.
This summer, Glaser will be concluding his time on the Hill to become provost and executive vice president of Santa Clara University in California.
“I’m at a stage of life where I think I have another chapter in me,” Glaser said.
The move to California is particularly desirable given that both Glaser’s son and in-laws live in the area. Still, leaving Tufts and his colleagues, after three decades, is bittersweet.
“As excited as I am for the next step, … leaving Tufts is going to be really hard,” Glaser said. “I care so much about this institution, and I care so much about the people here, and I am totally invested in all the things that we’ve done and are trying to do. … I have cried a little bit, and I will cry, I’m sure, again”
Above all, Dean Glaser hopes he leaves a legacy as a catalyst for positive change at Tufts.
“If people remember me that’s very nice, but for the most part I hope that they really appreciate the things that we’ve accomplished,” Glaser said. “I hope those things continue to resonate into the future, that the SMFA and the new departments and the new programs we’ve created will serve generations of students and faculty for years to come.”
