T HE T UFTS D AILY

Monaco, Genco field questions at deIJ town hall

by Arvind Pillai Staff Writer

The Tufts Community Union Senate held a school-wide town hall regarding the diversity, equity, inclusion and justice efforts at Tufts on Feb. 3. The event featured University President Anthony Monaco, Provost ad interim Caroline Genco and other senior administration members.

A central focus of the town hall was to engage panelists by fielding questions on ways to increase the diversity and inclusion of the student body, staff and leadership.

The first question, directed at Monaco, asked about the university’s progress following its 2020 commitment to become an anti-racist institution. Monaco responded by bringing attention to efforts made by the Office of Admissions.

“The previous dean of admissions and the current dean [JT Duck] have made a lot of efforts to recruit students from areas that we were not traditionally recruiting from,” Monaco said. “[We are] also partnering with organizations that bring students to our attention that Tufts would be a good fit and might not have known about us or we might not have known about them.”

Monaco also cited the university’s undergraduate admissions test-optional pilot, which it recently extended for another three years, as an example of progress.

“In admissions, [we are] keeping a focus on our holistic approach, not relying on test scores and GPAs so much as the entire picture,” Monaco said. “Particularly, focusing on the particular context and nuance of the challenges that those students overcame or put forward for themselves as an academic challenge and how they did in that area.”

“We’re always making absolutely sure we have good balance in our search committees,” Monaco said. “We’ve been tracking the applicant pool diversity and comparing that to the diversity of the employees we have and then saying, well, what is that gap? Of course we want the applicant pool to continue to get more diverse, but we really want to close the gap.”

The university originally allocated $25 million to support DEIJ efforts last year, in accordance with the July 2020 commitment to anti-racism. Monaco said that the resource allocation for the initiative was recently doubled from $25 million to $50 million.