One university president. Five deans. A provost, an associate provost and the chief executive of a teaching hospital. All are stepping down this year or have left their positions in the last year and a half.
As the presidential transition draws near, a significant number of senior administrators are moving on from Tufts, some in concert with University President Lawrence Bacow's departure and others by coincidence.
Administrators and faculty members have voiced hopeful anticipation of what the next president and provost might bring to the university, and many said they were convinced Tufts' culture would remain constant, its institutional memory left unscathed by the winds of change.
Even as the deanships of half of Tufts' schools change hands, administrators said that the trustees who selected University President-elect Anthony Monaco, set to move to the Hill this summer, signaled that they wanted a continuation of the positive trajectory many have come to associate with the tenures of Bacow and Provost and Senior Vice President Jamshed Bharucha.
"The new president gives every indication of being very committed to the defining strengths of Tufts," said Rob Hollister, who will step down at the end of next month after a decade as the founding dean of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. "The job description around which he was hired very much is a game plan for sustaining and continuing the legacy of the Bacow and Bharucha years."
A sense of sadness, unease
Moments of transition often usher in periods of unease, and faculty members and administrators alike expressed hope that a variety of initiatives from recent years would continue.
"There is a sense that there is a lot of alteration, things are in a bit of a limbo," Ayesha Jalal, a professor of history, said, adding that many faculty members are concerned about what all the turnover may bring with it.
Many of the administrators and faculty members interviewed for this article expressed sadness over the end of the Bacow era.
"There's an ineluctable sense of loss," said Professor of Child Development Maryanne Wolf, who directs the Center for Reading and Language Research.
From a focus on strengthening graduate studies and improving cross-school collaboration to a close relationship between the School of Medicine and Tufts Medical Center, some said they were optimistic that Monaco and his new provost would soon come to understand Tufts' strengths.
Wolf said the "inspired choice" of Monaco as president could ensure that Tufts continues to combine excellent research with top-notch teaching, particularly since Bacow and the incoming president share similar backgrounds in both the classroom and the front office. Monaco, a geneticist who worked at Oxford University as both a professor and researcher, leaves England after nearly two decades at the institution, serving most recently as one of its top administrators.
"I think the choice of someone who has been highly successful as a faculty member, as an administrator and as one of the most successful researchers in the field of genetics is a fabulous combination for us to move incrementally into the future," Wolf said. "So I think what we have is more of a bridge than meets the eye."
Either way, Sol Gittleman, the Alice and Nathan Gantcher university professor and a former provost of Tufts, said a new president and all the other administrative changes were not enough to push Tufts in a new direction.
"The fundamental nature of Tufts cannot change" with just a presidential turnover, said Gittleman, who served as provost from 1981 to 2002, under three different presidents. Unless the trustees decide to invest a large amount of money in drastically expanding Tufts' research activities, he said, Tufts will at its core remain "a teaching university where everybody does research."
"The search committee is made up of trustees with memory," Gittleman said. The current amount of administrative change is not particularly out of the ordinary, he added, and the university will undoubtedly move on.
"People come, people go," he said.
The view from MIT
This year's transition is not the first Bacow has experienced. A look back at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) about five to 10 years ago sheds light on the possible impact so much administrative turnover could have on Tufts.
When Bacow stepped down as MIT's chancellor in 2001 to come to Tufts, he was just one of five MIT administrators over the course of a decade to leave the Cambridge school to lead a major university.
Later, when Susan Hockfield became president of MIT in 2004, the university faced a situation similar to Tufts' current circumstances. At around the same time of Hockfield's arrival, the deans of four of MIT's five schools turned over, as did the provost and a number of vice presidents, according to Kirk Kolenbrander, vice president for institute affairs and secretary of the corporation at MIT. Kolenbrander advised Hockfield on building her new team and was involved in selecting Bacow's replacement as chancellor.
Picking a popular provost from among the MIT faculty pleased and reassured longtime members of the faculty, Kolenbrander told the Daily. At the same time, he added, they understood the benefits of bringing in new people.
"The MIT community recognized that change was something that's helpful and necessary," Kolenbrander said. "It's always a balance of valuing the heritage and the memory with embracing new ideas and thoughts that folks from other institutions can help bring to the community. So it's a balance that needs to be struck and can be struck."
Daniel Hastings, dean for undergraduate education at MIT, said that while it is essential that universities from time to time gain new energy, ensuring that institutional memory remains in place is also key.
"One hopes that enough of the other people are around who can remember why decisions were made," Hastings, who joined the MIT faculty in 1985 and has served in its administration for 10 years, told the Daily. "You need to have that."
Losing an entire leadership team will inevitably have an impact, according to MIT Chancellor Eric Grimson, although he added that this loss can be mitigated by the fact that much corporate memory at MIT resides in those who serve just below the deans, many of whom have spent years at the university.
"I don't recall a huge disruption," Grimson told the Daily, referring to the turnover at MIT in the 2000s. At that time, Grimson served in various administrative positions in the university's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
"Obviously when you have new senior officers, things do change as they take on new initiatives and bring a new style to it," Grimson said. "But I don't have any recollection of any hiccup or really any major disruption."
Ensuring a smooth transition
Administrators at Tufts have been working to ensure that those who are staying behind have a central role in any transition process.
At Tisch College, Nancy Wilson, the director and associate dean, will take over as interim dean when Hollister steps down. Wilson has been at the college for seven years and has worked closely with Hollister on setting strategy. Most of the senior staff, she said, has been in place for a long time, too.
"The new things that we do won't be so much because I'm new and we want to take it in a completely new direction," she said, "but mostly because circumstances and opportunities at the university change."
Similarly, the interim replacement for Eileen Kennedy, the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Robin Kanarek, has significant experience at the school she will soon head.
Joanne Berger-Sweeney, who assumed the deanship of the School of Arts and Sciences last summer following the departure of then-dean Robert Sternberg, said she has benefited from catching the tail end of the tenures of the outgoing administrators. Real change will occur, she said, when a new provost comes to Medford and works with the new president to impart a fresh vision and energy upon current operations, although that process could take time.
"New faces always means to me new opportunities," she said.
Berger-Sweeney served in the administration at Wellesley College before coming to Tufts, and she said a similar presidential transition there — complete with significant administrative turnover — brought the remaining senior staff members together, empowering them and sharpening their leadership skills.
For their part, Bacow and Bharucha maintain that the presidential transition will take place seamlessly.
"It's fairly common for there to be turnover when there's a change of presidency," Bharucha said. "It's healthy for the institution."
And Tufts has an advantage over many other schools that might face a similar threat to their institutional culture or memory, according to Bharucha: its ability to adapt.
"It's entrepreneurial," Bharucha said of Tufts, "in that it's able to adapt to change more than at many other universities where the culture is much more hidebound."
Institutional memory lies more with the trustees and longtime members of the faculty anyway, Gittleman said. And, a number of administrators noted, Tufts has been around for a while.
"I don't fear for the culture at Tufts," said Associate Provost Vincent Manno, who is leaving the university to serve as provost and dean of faculty at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass. "It's a culture that's taken a century and a half to establish itself."
At a March town hall meeting on Tufts' Boston campus, discussion about the administrative turnover dominated part of the discussion.
"We will work through these transition issues," Bacow told staff and faculty members, adding that the university has done well with change in the past. "There's always a hard time with uncertainty, but it will be resolved."
The fact that the trustees see eye-to-eye with the administration and that most of the senior central administration will stay intact will make the transition easier, he said.
"There will be no fall off," Bacow told the audience, "because the important work of the university is not done by the people at the top but by the faculty who are still here teaching and researching."
Ellen Kan contributed reporting to this article.
