After 100 days in office, University President Anthony Monaco is ready to switch gears.
Across all three campuses and at alumni events in Washington, D.C. and New York City, the University of Oxford transplant has filled his days over the past three months with a crash course in the art of listening.
He has listened to lengthy Facebook messages, to Tweets, to students and alumni who fill any empty time slots in his daily planner with personal meetings. He has listened to crowds rallying outside his office inBallou Hall calling for improved treatment of the university's janitorial staff and to neighborhood residents at Community Day.
His inbox has become flooded with suggestions and concerns about everything from women's studies to Facebook pictures glorifying the use of alcohol, from issues of inclusion and the racial climate on campus to capital investments in the university's lab sciences facilities.
It's an experience, he says, that has both confirmed much of what he anticipated coming into the job and shed light on sensitive issues that run deeper through Tufts community than he could have imagined. His challenge is to craft a course for the university that addresses the innumerable and often contradictory views of a diverse community.
"All through this I am always trying to synthesize all the information," he said in a recent interview with the Daily. "I'm using the perspective of what I heard from others to focus and also change how I might approach the whole way forward strategically."
After all this listening, though, the university president is ready—and eager—to use what he has heard and begin crafting what will be the tangible impact he has on Tufts during his tenure.
"Listening is good," he said. "But you need to start doing something."
Learning from the past
Diving into one of the biggest responsibilities that comes with the post -- attracting funds from alumni donors has not posed any great challenge for Monaco. Fundraising was one of his primary duties as pro-vice-chancellor for planning and resources at Oxford, a position that charged him with capital development in addition to strategic planning and student enrollment.
"It's a large part of the [president's] job, obviously, to bring in the funds for financial aid, for capital projects, for programs for faculty," he said, explaining that at Oxford he was only responsible for raising capital funds, but that that the experience has been valuable as he now deals with the responsibility of fundraising for a wider variety of projects.
"I have tried to spend my time in the last three months getting to know our major donors and making sure they get to know me personally and understand my background and where I am coming from and what kind of things I would like to achieve for Tufts together with them," he said.
While Monaco must wait to develop stronger relationships with donors before expecting major contributions, he feels that a certain sense of urgency. Soon, he hopes to begin attracting funds for financial aid and faculty support and plans to make them top priorities.
"It's not going and asking them for money at this stage, obviously, but I think some of the things that are early wins [and] will always be important are things like financial aid, or the programmatic support of faculty," he said.
"The big lab complexes we need time to develop our thoughts on…there's different velocities at which these things travel and the financial aid to me is something that we shouldn't lose any momentum on from the previous campaign."
Addressing the undergraduate community
On issues affecting undergraduate student life, making the switch from a focus on listening to bringing about tangible change is easier said than done.
The learning curve for any new president is a steep one, but this is especially true for a Delaware native who has spent the past twenty years across a pond that is wider than he expected.
Nowhere has Monaco been more rudely awaked to the reality of the social differences spanning the Atlantic than by the rampant abuse of alcohol among undergraduate students on the Hill. Above all else, he said he has been appalled by the images on Facebook depicting out of control binge drinking and stories of emergency room visits after nights of excessive underage liquor consumption.
Monaco was cautioned by former University President Lawrence Bacow about the prevalence of underage drinking at Tufts -- "Larry warned me, he warned me in black and white," he said -- but he was still shocked upon his arrival on the Hill.
"I think it's because I've been in a different environment for the last 20 years," he said. "When I went to university we never went out and bought a bottle of vodka and set up shots -- I mean, we could drink back then because the drinking age was 18, but it was all a little beer and wine -- it wasn't this culture of binge drinking…that, to me, was a real eye-opener that things had changed."
Monaco has tackled this critical issue head-on, setting up an alcohol steering committee to coordinate preventative efforts that he hopes will ameliorate what he sees as a danger to students' health and safety. He has also taken a personal interest in the students he has found posting incriminating pictures "glorifying" alcohol use on Facebook, calling them into his office to better understand their motivation and to warn them of the dangers of binge drinking.
Another, less visible, example of an area where Monaco has found easy solutions harder to come by than he had hoped, is in the arena of diversity. He was surprised to learn -- from both students and faculty -- about the deeply rooted feelings behind calls for greater social and academic inclusion and integration of people of all identities on campus.
"Sometimes you enter into a situation and you think the solution … is simple and you feel that you've seen through it because you've seen it before," he said. "But then you enter a new community and you realize how complex that issue might be."
"I think the diversity issue is probably a very good example of where—not that I oversimplified—but…I didn't realize how deeply people felt," he said. This prompted him to organize a diversity council to analyze the current campus climate before taking any major steps towards altering it.
"It was important to make sure that we just didn't rush [in] … without making sure that we had heard different opinions," he said. "That's also what made me decide not to rush any kind of report and recommendation into implementation without allowing the broader Tufts community to reflect on that."
Monaco said one concrete way to move forward on diversity at the front end would, again, be an improvement in the university's financial aid offerings.
"I don't know if we're as competitive as we think we are against our peer institutions in being able to offer very good [aid]," he said. "If you're not as competitive as the other institutions, then they take students away from us that we would prefer to come to Tufts." Need-blind admissions is "a big ask," though, and one that may need time before it can become immediately feasible.
In that vein, Monaco said that he is also considering revising the orientation and pre-orientation processes and addressing concerns about administrative policy, and curricular offerings.
"There's a lot we have to get through," he said.
Bringing it all together
Though he has expressed confidence in his achievements -- "I haven't had anyone personally criticize me," he said -- Monaco foresees challenges in working across campuses to solve some of the world's most pressing issues in areas like health, the environment and human rights.
"How do you break down the barriers of traditional departments when the big problems that we are facing in society really do require interdisciplinary cross-school activity? Do you create new lab complex, which allows the different disciplines to come together, or do you just expect people to collaborate at a distance? I think that's a big challenge."
Monaco plans to address these questions through a series of meetings with key faculty and department heads to discuss an effective approach at all levels.
According to Monaco, transforming the study of a specific area—the study of cancer or neuroscience, for instance— into a cross-university affair is "at the moment …financially modeled, and that's the obstruction." This merits a shift in ideology, he said.
"It should be academically modeled and the finances should follow. We want to turn that around and think about ways of showcasing a program in neuroscience or a program in cancer [that] students see that on the web and want to come here because the opportunities are across the whole university."
A family affair
On a shelf in Monaco's office is a framed photo of his wife, Zoia, and his three sons. It's a reminder that the past 100 days have gone by while the rest of the Monaco family has stayed in England and out of the picture except for the occasional visit—and a lot of phone time.
"I think we miss each other a lot, but we've been doing a lot of Skyping," he said. The family will be together when Monaco goes to Europe for work at the end of the month and during a planned winter holiday ski vacation. "They're enjoying the back and forth," he said.
"I will make the effort"
Monaco says he has worked to demonstrate a commitment to accessibility and openness and that he believes his efforts have been well-received.
"The feedback I have gotten so far from individuals is that they appreciate the efforts I am making to get to know the students, the trustees, all of those kind of listening things."
"I think it was important for me to do that, not just come in and launch a bunch of initiatives without talking to anyone. I feel that I have accomplished what I had hoped to in the first three months—to reach out to four different constituents or stakeholders: the faculty, the students, the staff and the alumni and trustees—to gather that kind of perspective before you go ahead and try to… get momentum going behind new initiatives."
Monaco's assistant, Elise Renoni, is working to teach him to say "no," he explained.
"I will say yes to anything," he said, "in the sense that… I will try to see the play on Saturday night even if we have the trustees meeting all day. If it's raining, I still go down and watch the sports events with my umbrella. I will make the effort because I think the students and the faculty here deserve that from their president."
