Vice Provost Monroe France Shares End of Year Reflections

Preview IIE’s key focus areas and reflections for the upcoming 2024-2025 academic year including strategic partnership, collaboration, and goal setting for advancing institutional inclusive excellence as well as the need for inclusive and restorative dialogue…

Dear Community,

Congratulations for making it through to the end of the academic year–especially to our recent graduates!

I want to also acknowledge that this has been a challenging year for so many members of our community, including for those leading and working to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and access (DEIJA). Despite the many challenges, this is not a time to retreat–this is the time for us to fully embrace and deepen our commitment to institutional inclusive excellence. The needs of our communities are shifting and require innovative, empathetic, and culturally relevant leadership techniques.

This means working across our intellectual, ideological, and identity-based perspectives; it also means leading with courage and authenticity. We know that when we lead innovatively, collaboratively, and with shared purpose, the work is better and we are better positioned to create an environment where all of us can thrive. This critical work is needed now more than ever and, in order to make the greatest impact, it is going to take all of us.

My team in the Office of the Vice Provost for Institutional Inclusive Excellence (IIE) will continue to call on and work with our student, staff, faculty, and alumni communities in the spirit of Tufts’ mission to further civic engagement, social impact, and to advance inclusive innovation. Guided and informed by the Institutional Inclusive Excellence framework, we will continue to anchor our work in strategic partnership, coordination, and alignment across the university. Our efforts will continue to focus on leveraging diversity and inclusion in the broadest ways possible to achieve excellence in teaching, learning, research, and scholarship. Our approach will continue to be grounded in joy, liberation, accountability, and transparency.

Key Focus Areas for Upcoming Academic Year
Our team will be busy at work this summer preparing for the upcoming academic year. Some of our key priorities include:

• preparing for new student orientation in partnership with our colleagues in student life across the university;
• partnering with our community to further develop our university-wide and school/unit level institutional inclusive excellence vision and strategic goals informed by the Tufts DEI campus climate assessment;
• expanding university-wide inclusive and restorative dialogue programs and frameworks (in partnership with Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering);
• developing trainings, resources, and other learning opportunities focusing on inclusive, equitable, intersectional, and global leadership, and;
• promoting policies and practices that center racial and gender equity, LGBTQ+ rights, engaging across differences, and the disruption of injustice, discrimination, and xenophobia (including antisemitism, islamophobia, as well as anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias).

Being part of an academic environment is not always easy, it comes with having our thoughts challenged with a multiplicity of viewpoints and sometimes there will be ideas that make us uncomfortable. We should strive to learn from our differences, find ways to engage with ideas that test our own beliefs, and respond with intellectual curiosity. We can and sometimes will disagree but this should be done with attention to power dynamics and acknowledgement of our collective humanity. Our diversity of experiences, perspectives, and identities is what makes us strong as a dynamic and complex academic community.

Let’s spend some time this summer reflecting on this past academic year, our shared purpose and priorities in the upcoming year, and how we can best come back together in the fall as a community. In closing, I would like to thank you again for the intersectional joy and the opportunities you have shared with me and my team this year. Please take a moment to appreciate our collective efforts in advancing inclusive excellence here at Tufts. Check out our 2023-2024 slideshow for a few highlighted events.

We will continue to be available via diversity@tufts.edu and will be sure to send out special communications to share timely information. Make sure to subscribe to our email listserv for future events, resources, and updates.

We hope you all have a restful, reflective, and restorative summer. We look forward to reconnecting soon!

In community,

Monroe France
Vice Provost for Institutional Inclusive Excellence | Professor of the Practice