CHOOSING A NEW PRESIDENT. As soon as Hallowell submitted his resignation in 1975, an intensive search was begun for a successor which lasted nine months and involved consideration of almost 400 candidates. A trustee ad hoc presidential search committee was promptly formed, consisting of Alexander McFarlane, chairman of the board; Charles F. Adams, Matthew J. Burns, Allan D. Callow, Neil L. Chayet, Carol R. Goldberg, Robert W. Meserve, and John J. Smith. The majority were alumni. In addition, nine trustee-appointed faculty members and other individuals served on a university-wide advisory committee. They were Lydia Haber (classics), T.J. Anderson (music), Frederick Nelson (engineering), and Albert Ullman (sociology), all representing Arts and Sciences; Joseph Evans (dental school), Uri Ra'anan (Fletcher School), Seymour Reichlin (medical school), Henry M. Hubschman, Jr. (Parents Council), Franklin Parker (New England Medical Center Hospital); Maurene Golden and Maxwell Burstein (alumni); and three students. In order to broaden faculty representation and to increase their involvement in the evaluation process even further, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences elected four additional individuals from their ranks. They were to participate in the final interviews and relay their conclusions and evaluations to their colleagues on the search committee. Those elected were Lynda Shaffer (history), Daniel Ounjian (economics), Jack Tessman (physics), and Graham Wootton (political science).

For the first time in Tufts history there was formal student representation on a presidential search committee — one from Tufts, one from Jackson (both sophomores at the time and both active in student affairs), and one from the dental school. They were William O'Reilly, Ellen Steuer, and Jenny Grunberg, respectively. More than 200 names had been submitted by the end of September 1975, and the number rose steadily thereafter. An ad hoc committee of the Alumni Council submitted six names. The presidential search committee had some twenty-five candidates under active consideration

The individual who became the tenth president of Tufts was a man of cosmopolitan background and interests who had led an exciting life as a French Freedom Fighter during World War II after having escaped from his German captors at Dunkirk. In civilian life after the war he had established an international reputation as a nutritionist and expert on the problems of world hunger.

Born in Paris, France, in 1920, he was the son of Andréand Jeanne Eugenie Mayer, both distinguished physiologists. The new president of Tufts had received from the University of Paris two bachelor's degrees (B. Litt., summa cum laude in philosophy and a B. Sci., magna cum laude in mathematics). These were followed by a master of science degree in biology, also from the University of Paris. After the close of World War II he rounded out his formal education with a PhD in physiological chemistry from Yale and a Dr. es Sc. in physiology from the Sorbonne. He had meanwhile married an American, Elizabeth van Huysen, and he became an American citizen in 1956.

His first full-time teaching post was at Harvard, beginning in 1950. At the time he became president of Tufts, he was Professor of Nutrition in the Harvard School of Public Health, member of the Center for Population Studies, and lecturer on the history of public health, with other teaching responsibilities at Harvard, including the medical school. He was also the popular residential master of Dudley House at Harvard.

With the outbreak of war in Europe he had joined the French army as a field artillery officer and went on to serve another four

By the time he became president he had received six honorary degrees in recognition of his extensive work in the field of nutrition and public health, and his related service in the federal government. He had been Special Consultant to the President of the United States and chairman of the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health in 1969. He served six years on the President's Consumer Advisory Council, and had received a total of five Presidential and Congressional appointments as a consultant on various food and nutrition matters, as well as participating in a number of technical missions. He had been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1963 and had been elected a Foreign Member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1976. Many more honors were yet to come, besides the eighteen (excluding honorary degrees) he had received by 1976. He had already become widely known for his extensive work with the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization of the United Nations. He had done seminal research on the etiologies of obesity and the regulation of food intake, and produced more than 500 research papers, reviews, and non-technical publications by 1976, together with five books, the most recent of which had been A Diet for Living, published in 1975. He was also responsible for a nationally syndicated newspaper column dealing with nutrition, beginning in 1971. Mayer had "an interest in all things" and, as a colleague at Harvard expressed it, was "the Renaissance man of the twentieth century."

With a network of international contacts, innumerable non-professional activities in addition to his scholarly work, and with a heavily loaded lecture and consulting schedule, he was indeed a busy individual. Fired with seemingly inexhaustible energy and drive, he plunged immediately into the various tasks and challenges related to his new position. One Tufts dean said immediately after Mayer's arrival that he sensed in the institution a feeling of "renewed confidence" in the future. Here was an individual "with a world view, contagious enthusiasm, and unbounded interests."

The organization with which Mayer became associated in 1976 was on a fairly even keel when he arrived. It had righted itself

The inauguration of Jean Mayer, attended by some 3,500 individuals, took place in a steamy Cousens Gymnasium on the morning of 18 September, driven inside by the threat of rain. Among those present were delegates from 103 academic institutions, including Jean Roche, Rector of the Sorbonne, and 35 professional and learned societies as well as representatives from various Tufts classes and organizations. A new university tradition was established with the presentation to Mayer of the Presidential Chain, a symbol of his office consisting of a sterling silver cast of the university seal which hung from a chain whose links bore the names of Tufts' presidents. It was intended to be worn by Tufts presidents at all formal university functions. In November 1976 the Presidential Medal was established by the trustees, to be awarded to individuals the university wished to honor in a special way but for whom an honorary degree was not appropriate. The Medal has been awarded particularly in recognition of accomplishments in public service and contributions to Tufts. The first recipients were the mayors of Somerville and Medford who had been present at the inauguration.

In his inaugural address Mayer called attention to the "extraordinary fragmentation of human knowledge" and the tendency to specialize. But, desirable as it was to concentrate on one area, breadth was as important as depth in acquiring some understanding of "the great professions of mankind - for those students who do not plan to enter them." He singled out for special mention the fields of agriculture, law, and medicine. But "even this broadening of the concept of liberal education ... is inadequate." Students must know how to synthesize and act on the knowledge they gain by learning how to make and carry out decisions intelligently and to formulate policies in a reasoned, responsible, and ethical way.

The incoming president made it clear to the faculty that teaching and research could never be separated and called for "vigorous effort on research." He also promised to expand greatly the activities of the

Even while in the process of familiarizing himself with the school as a candidate for the presidency he had been struck by two things in particular: the fact that Tufts was a very good institution; and that it suffered grievously from an inferiority complex. This had been manifested in a tendency over the years to underestimate its own strengths, underplay its accomplishments, and to adopt an undeservedly defensive position, seemingly threatened by the presence nearby of such schools as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a consequence, Mayer believed that the creation and dissemination of a much stronger and more positive image was indispensable to the future of the university. It had not only to strengthen its reputation but to make its presence known in the educational world to a much greater extent than had ever been the case.

He announced that his basic and long-range goal for Tufts was "to raise our University from excellence to greatness." As he wrote to the alumni later in 1976, "Tufts is a first-rate university. We are now ready to be recognized as a great national university." This was to be his principal challenge in the years ahead.

Like most university presidents, Mayer worked on several levels. One was to articulate, in more or less generalized terms, the objectives and goals of the institution as he perceived them as its chief administrator. Another was to translate the goals into action and to give them concrete form. At still another level, by becoming involved in day-to-day operations and internal affairs (and problems) that seldom made headlines but required much attention, he helped to shape the character and direction of Tufts. It was characteristic of the new president that, rather than concentrate on one project or problem at a time, he tackled a whole host of them almost simultaneously. The rapidity with which he sought to bring about change sometimes resulted in strong differences of opinion with some members of the administration he had inherited. Faculties often moved with glacial speed at the same time that the president wanted immediate action. Of course there was continuity as well as change, and many of the interdisciplinary and interschool programs to which Mayer was

President Mayer almost immediately undertook a review of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It indicated unequal and uneven quality. Departments ranged from those fulfilling their educational mission "excellently," and making significant research contributions, to those, among them some heavily tenured, which were "at best adequate teaching departments without scholarly brilliance." Still others required "considerable strengthening." Some scientific departments conducted all too little research; this was reflected, in Mayer's estimation, in "the decline of the quality of their teaching." All told, the task was to bring the level of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences up to that of the best departments in the professional schools.

What were among the solutions to this problem of uneven quality? One was to extend the system of Corporation Visiting Committees which followed the model of those established earlier for the Schools of Medicine and Dental Medicine and the University Libraries. Three — on Engineering Education, the Arts, and Religious Life and the Chaplaincy — met soon after the inauguration. Mayer considered establishing similar committees for the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences and mathematics.

Another device to strengthen the faculty was to build up the Office of Government Resources on the Medford campus, under the far-sighted leadership of Carla Ricci, to improve ways of informing faculty members about the availability of government or foundation grants and contracts, and encouraging them to submit proposals. (The Office of Government Resources for the Boston/Grafton campuses was under the astute leadership of Joseph Byrne.) The substantial increase in the number of proposals in 1976-77 over those of the previous year was significant, and new records were set almost every year in terms of both the number of applications and actual awards. The university total of almost $42 million in sponsored research grants and contracts for the fiscal year 1984-85 exceeded the totals of previous years by a wide margin. Equally significant was the fact that between 1976 and 1985, total awards increased by 247 percent. In Arts and Sciences (which includes Engineering), awards

Indicative of the president's desire for increased faculty productivity was the addition to Dean George S. Mumford's administrative title of "Dean for Research and Interinstitutional Programs," the reactivation of an annual bibliography of faculty research and publication activity, and the creation of a new advisory standing Committee on Research and Scholarship. Membership was obtained in the University Press of New England, the publishing arm of the Universities of Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and Dartmouth, Clark, and Brandeis. It was a latter-day and much enlarged version of the old Tufts College Press which had operated on the campus between 1901 and World War II and had published everything from the undergraduate newspaper to reprints of scholarly articles written by Tufts faculty members.

A third solution to the problem of improving faculty quality was to raise even higher the standards both for employment and for promotion and tenure, with a premium on both quality of teaching and quality and quantity of research. At the graduate level a review of programs, using the criteria of faculty excellence, the meeting of graduate student needs, and marketability, was expected to result (as it did) in the phasing out of some doctoral programs and the strengthening of others. One-of-a-kind programs for both graduate and undergraduate students, already introduced into the curriculum, were to be encouraged for exceptional students, and the College of Engineering was encouraged to develop a two-year post-baccalaureate professional degree program as well as an undergraduate engineering management curriculum (as promised in Mayer's inaugural address).

One of the president's plans (also mentioned in his inaugural address) was put into almost immediate operation. A team-taught interdisciplinary course in decision-making was introduced in 1977. It started with six core faculty from four departments and seventeen students and rapidly became popular among undergraduates. One by-product was a pioneer textbook on the subject.

Cooperation with other institutions also strengthened the humanities within Arts and Sciences, and was fully endorsed by Mayer.

[] For a biographical sketch of his father, see the article by Jean Mayer, Journal of Nutrition 99 (September 1969): 1-8.

[] Percy H. Hill and others, Making Decisions: A Multi-Disciplinary Introduction (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1979; 2d ed., 1980).