Monroe France, vice provost for Institutional Inclusive Excellence, hosted Tufts University President Sunil Kumar for the first in a series of community webinar conversations with Tufts administrators on the “joys and challenges” of leadership in higher education on Nov. 20. The conversation touched on topics including recent university protests, the daily schedule of a university president and the accessibility of a Tufts education.
Kumar began by outlining a typical day in the life of a university president, using his schedule of the day to highlight his varied responsibilities. That day, he planned to meet with leaders of 25 student organizations and administrators from around the University, in addition to attending lunch with a major local cultural organization leader.
“Part of my job is being a civic leader in the city, part of my job is [being] a faculty member to the students and part of my job is to manage a complex organization with schools like medicine, and part of my job is to raise resources and invest them back,” Kumar told France.
When asked about what brought him joy in his work, Kumar spoke about the pleasure he felt observing students’ development throughout their four years at university.
“It’s a great privilege for us to watch and brag about what our alumni and our students have done,” Kumar said. “The thing I’m most proud of is eight of my Ph.D. students are tenured full professors at various universities in the country and one of them just became a dean.”
Kumar noted how he, and the university as a whole, respond to challenging moments. The way the university responds to moments of heated rhetoric is what seemed to concern Kumar the most.
“When the rhetoric is heated, we can live too much in the moment and too much in a defensive posture,” Kumar said, citing a recent question at a staff town hall to which he felt he could only give a defensive response.
“While it is important for us to defend our values, our history and our mission, we can’t lose sight of the fact that this institution, Tufts University, is 175 years old,” he said. “I have to leave a platform for my successor, where [for] the next 100 years, Tufts is on a good trajectory.”
France then asked Kumar to reflect on the campus climate in the past year, particularly the university’s handling of speech and conduct concerning the Middle East.
Kumar admitted it was a “learning year” and that the university could have done things differently.
“What I learned was it’s important to remind yourself what the mission of the university is and what our values are. And when they are in conflict, use your internal conscience to make a judgment call as to how you resolve that conflict,” Kumar said.
He explained that the university’s mission is to provide a conducive learning environment for all students and discussed the value of promoting freedom of speech. Kumar drew a distinction between free speech and disruptive conduct.
“[The distinction between speech and conduct] is when one person’s speech takes away the other person’s right to listen, to learn, to speak and to thrive,” Kumar said.
Kumar explained the university’s judgment calls on disciplinary measures were based on whether speech or action directly conflicted with the university’s mission. The measures, he noted, were handled by an independent panel, which he has no input or control over.
He drew a contrast between last year’s “tense” environment and this year’s mostly joyous one.
Looking beyond Tufts’ upcoming 175th anniversary, Kumar expressed a strong desire to ensure that Tufts fulfills its original mission of providing a quality education to students who may not otherwise have received one.
“One of the things that I worry deeply about is our ability to provide accessible education,” Kumar said. “We meet demonstrated financial need for any student we admit, but there’s a limit to how many students with deep economic need we can admit.”
He explained that of last year’s admitted students, 12% were Pell Grant recipients, a number he’d like to improve.
“It’s not enough to just provide access to the university; we have to make sure that the university is a driver of mobility,” he said.
France asked about Tufts’ decreased U.S. News’ “Best National University Rankings” position given the changes in their methodology, as it now gives increased consideration to the university’s opportunities for social mobility.
The rankings, Kumar said, provide useful information about the university’s objective metrics, particularly the economic diversity of the student body.
“One of the places where we don’t get a good score is on the economic diversity of our class,” he said. “That’s something we should work at fixing. It’s not just for rankings. From the perspective of our history and our mission, we should care about that.”
France and Kumar also talked about the importance of learning and working with diverse groups of people, the value of a liberal arts education in today’s economy, the adverse impact of an endowment tax on Tufts and ways to support student mental health.
Regarding mental health, Kumar discussed his intention to give a grant to any student who submits a proposal for a safe event open to all Tufts students with the sole purpose of having fun. In the past, the award was used to host a Tufts-only screening of — “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour Movie.”
