Vice Provost Monroe France Shares Fall Welcome Message

Read about IIE’s key priority and focus areas for the academic year including the launch of ELEVATE, a multi-year campaign centering inclusive excellence at Tufts, and an invitation to the Oct 23 fall welcome reception…

Dear Tufts Community,

I hope everyone is taking great care, both as individuals and as a community of compassion. I am reaching out on behalf of the Office of the Vice Provost for Institutional Inclusive Excellence (IIE) to share a belated warm welcome to the 2024-2025 academic year. There has already been a collective sense of energy and excitement after welcoming the class of 2028 last month and, also, a renewed sense of shared community as many of us have made our way back on campus!

While I encourage us to embrace and celebrate these new beginnings, I also want to take a moment to acknowledge that this is a deeply reflective time for many of us. The current election season, ongoing social unrest and, furthermore, the grief and pain from the impact of continued global conflict and humanitarian crisis is top of mind for many in our community.

Joined by my incredible IIE team, we are eager for the many opportunities ahead of us to collaborate, strategize, dialogue, and learn together in the spirit of Tufts’ mission to further civic engagement and social impact. We continue to call on our entire community to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and access (DEIJA) and to develop a culture of inclusive excellence at Tufts. This includes working closely with our student, staff, faculty, and alumni communities in addition to our school deans, university senior leadership, and our inclusive excellence cabinet (Assistant/Associate Deans for Diversity and Inclusion).

Key Focus Areas for Academic Year
To help prioritize and align our collective efforts, we articulate and implement meaningful change through four key pillars, which include: developing people and leaders, informing and advancing policies and practices, creating and expanding resources and research, and designing community-targeted educational programs. Using these pillars as a framework for operationalizing DEIJA and for informing our institutional inclusive excellence work, some of our key priorities this year include:

• developing education and development opportunities for students, faculty, and staff focused on learning, growth, leadership development, and community building;
• 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);
• 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, and also anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias);
• conducting a study to evaluate the accessibility of our outdoor spaces on the Medford Campus; and
• expanding support for employee affinity groups, for faculty cluster hiring and faculty visioning across the Provost’s office, as well as continued engagement with student and alumni communities and their respective leadership.

In addition, we are excited for the launch of a brand new collaborative initiative this semester. As you might have read in the announcement earlier this week, ELEVATE is a multi-year campaign which aims to mobilize transformative and sustainable change through community engagement and collective action. In deep partnership and collaboration with the entire Tufts community, this initiative will guide the development of university-wide goals for advancing institutional inclusive excellence. Learn more by visiting the ELEVATE website and stay tuned for more information, including forthcoming community engagement sessions where you will be invited to share your input, perspectives, and feedback.

Invitation to IIE Fall Welcome Reception
This academic year promises to be dynamic, robust, and full of opportunities to learn, grow, and work together. In anticipation of this work, and in celebration of all we have already accomplished together, we are hosting a fall welcome reception next week on October 23 at 4 p.m. Join us in-person on the Medford campus for food, music, and good conversation! During the presentation portion of the event, which will be live-streamed, we will share updates from the IIE office regarding key priorities and strategic vision for the year as well as a formal introduction to the ELEVATE campaign. Save your spot by completing the IIE Fall Welcome Reception RSVP as soon as possible!

Earlier this year, I asked everyone to reflect on our shared purpose and how we can best come together as a community. As we move through this fall semester, I encourage all of us to continue this reflection and to think about the many ways in which we can take action on a daily basis to achieve inclusive and transformative change at Tufts. In the words of my favorite author, James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Once again, welcome to the new academic year, please continue to take care of yourself and others! I am excited to be in community with you in the weeks and months to come, including at next week’s IIE Fall Welcome Reception.

In community,

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