Introduction

The goal of a university education should be to prepare today's generation of university students to become the new leaders for a changing world. Indeed, this is the vision and message explicitly adopted by Tufts University. Our goals in Arts and Sciences are oriented toward the question of how we can produce this new generation of leaders.

A signature strength of Tufts, today and in the past, is its emphasis on the application of scholarship to civic engagement and active citizenship. Tufts genuinely cares about producing citizens who will be concerned about the world in which they live and who will do what they can toward the common good of the human and natural resources in that world. Our emphasis, therefore, is on producing leaders who exemplify the elements of leadership: the creative skills and dispositions to generate original and appropriate solutions to the problems of a changing world; the analytical skills and dispositions to determine whether these solutions are good solutions; the practical skills and dispositions to implement their ideas effectively and to convince others of the value of their ideas; and the wisdom to ensure that the ideas they produce are for the common good, rather than just for their own good or that of those with whom they identify. These skills, of course, should be applied not only to one's own ideas, but to others' as well.

To this end, we have established task forces to ponder the question of how Tufts can optimally synthesize the resources it already has, as well as create new resources, to develop the leaders of tomorrow. Tufts has many existing resources that help develop effective leadership, such as the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, the Institute for Global Leadership, the Entrepreneurial Leadership program in the School of Engineering, the Fletcher School, various leadership courses, the Leonard Carmichael Society, and the like. Tufts also has a cadre of people interested in how leadership goes wrong, as in corrupt companies or governments, wars, and genocides. The challenge is for us to integrate these resources and add new ones in order to render the whole more than the sum of its parts. This will entail a collaborative effort across various schools. We believe that bringing together the academic and service sides so that students can learn how the academic disciplines can contribute to real-world leadership will help Tufts capitalize on its signature strengths.

The leadership mission is a long-term goal. Several steps are needed to reach it. Three of these more near-term steps pertain to admissions, instruction, and research.

Admissions Initiative

In order to produce the leaders of tomorrow, we need to admit the very best students we can obtain. Such admissions require optimization of both the academic excellence and the diversity of our pool of accepted students. Our research at the PACE Center has shown that academic excellence and diversity are two sides of the same coin. By choosing students not only for their grades and scores on traditional tests, but also by looking more broadly at qualities of leadership, including creative and practical skills and attitudes as well as analytical ones, we can improve college admissions. Our data showed that, through the use of the new assessments administered to a national sample, we could double predictive validity for freshman year grades and a substantial reduction in ethnic group differences. During the 2005-2006 school year, in collaboration with Dean Coffin and the admissions staff, we piloted assessments of creative and practical skills to determine whether these measures could be used to identify gifted potential leaders. We found that the measures did indeed identify potential leaders not otherwise identified. During the '06-'07 school year, we introduced into the Tufts-specific application assessments of creative and practical thinking to supplement the more traditional assessments. We believe we can become the leading institution in the country in forward-looking admissions procedures that optimize selection for academic excellence and diversity.

Financial Aid Initiative

Even if we admit the best and most diverse students, they will not be able to come to Tufts unless they can afford it. The President's initiative of Tufts reaching the goal of need-blind admissions is thus an essential part of educating the leaders of tomorrow. Many future leaders cannot afford to come to Tufts. Unless we provide them with the financial aid needed to attend, they will go to other schools that perhaps focus less on leadership development than we do at Tufts. The financial-aid initiative is not just about recruiting the best future leaders. It is also about providing a climate that promotes leadership development. We must provide the diversity in the student body that is necessary in order for students to have the kind of educational experience that enhances their leadership skills.

Teaching and Learning Initiative

Once we accept students who represent diverse strengths, we must ensure that we teach them in a way that enables them to capitalize on their strengths and to correct or compensate for their weaknesses. Our research has shown that teaching for leadership--teaching for analytical, creative, practical, and wise thinking as well as for memory--improves student achievement for all students, especially those who do not learn best in traditional ways. A task force proposed a program to be implemented by the Tufts Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT), which opened on July 1, 2006. The program will enable teachers to receive either a course reduction or an honorarium in exchange for a one-semester seminar on improving teaching skills for reaching diverse learners. We hope to improve our teaching of students with all learning and thinking styles, so that Tufts becomes the best university in the country at teaching to diverse styles for acquiring and utilizing knowledge. It is important not only to enhance instruction, but also assessment, so that assessments of student achievement fully reflect the learning that students do. And it is important for students not only to learn how to solve problems, but also to recognize problems as they occur, learn how to define them, and be able to judge how important the problems are.

Bridging Initiative

Because students from diverse backgrounds often do not have preparation that provides sufficient background for them to "hit the ground running" when they arrive at Tufts, we need a "prep" program that will provide students with the scaffolding and bridging that will enable them to succeed at an optimum level. We are therefore planning to create a comprehensive program for students of diverse backgrounds that will provide tutelage in the week before the freshman semester begins, and that will continue through at least their first year at Tufts. This program will help the students make their transition to the Tufts environment as smooth as possible.

Leadership Minor Initiative

A further way to enhance instruction for leadership is through the creation of a leadership minor. As the result of a task force recommendation, we have constructed a proposal for a leadership minor to be offered at Tufts. The proposal is being refined and will be presented to the faculty in the '06-'07 school year. The proposed minor will consist of three tiers-(a) courses on leadership, (2) wide-ranging courses in the liberal arts and sciences that touch upon topics of leadership, and (3) a supervised practicum that will serve as a capstone experience and that will require a reflection paper on how principles and research on leadership were applied in the practical experience.

Value-Added Initiative

How does one know whether one's efforts to develop leadership have succeeded? We plan to construct a "value-added" evaluation that will enable us to evaluate our leadership-development program, as well as our students. We are in the process of creating an assessment, to be given at the beginning of the first year and the end of the fourth year, that will measure broad leadership skills - critical/analytical thinking, creative thinking, practical thinking, and wise thinking - in order to assess the efficacy of our program.

Faculty Excellence Initiative

Finally, leadership in a university means providing students with access to the scholars who are at the cutting edge of their fields. In large part, students learn the skills and attitudes of leadership by role-modeling faculty mentors who are excellent teachers and researchers. Contrary to the sterile but popular misconception that teaching and research are somehow opposed to each other, the two actually complement each other. The most outstanding teachers are often the best researchers--ones who can convey to students their excitement and enthusiasm for, as well as ways of thinking about, the important problems in their fields. Excellence in teaching and scholarship go hand in hand. No university can establish a leadership position without having excellence in scholarship.

Conclusion

We in Arts and Sciences therefore join with our President, Larry Bacow, and Provost, Jamshed Bharucha, as well as many others, in working to make Tufts an even better institution for scholarship than it has been in the past. It can be an institution that prizes research, but that never lets go of its mission to provide the finest possible education to undergraduate and graduate students alike.

In summary, our goal is to work with all stakeholders at Tufts to create a preeminent institution for developing the leaders of tomorrow. We can establish for ourselves a niche that no other institution fills quite so well.