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Getting to Know James M. Glaser

Opportunity doesn’t always come wrapped in a bow. For James M. Glaser, it came in the form of a struggling art school. 

A decade ago, the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was failing. Despite its innovative “no-major” curriculum and acclaimed alumni including painter Ellsworth Kelly, filmmaker David Lynch, and photographer Nan Goldin, the century-old institution lacked the contemporary university infrastructure to attract and keep students.

Rather than risk closure, museum leadership contacted neighboring institutions like Tufts University, where Glaser served as dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, about keeping the prestigious school running. While some deans might’ve seen deadweight in SMFA, Glaser saw potential. 

“Acquiring an arts school wasn’t part of our strategic plan, but sometimes an opportunity serendipitously comes on your radar that can really help the university,” explains Glaser, who joined Santa Clara as Executive Vice President and Provost last July. “It had the potential to add a vital component to Tufts and introduce a different kind of intellectual to our educational environment, which was artists and creatives.” 

Taking on SMFA wasn’t as simple as signing over ownership. The two schools were quite different; one a small institute of a couple hundred students and the other a larger research university. Not only were there logistical accommodations—everything from Tufts taking over recruitment efforts to simply getting students to and from each campus—but Glaser also wanted to ensure the identities of the two institutions remained and thrived, together. 

Glaser asked his administration for two things: time and a little patience. He got both, and SMFA delivered on its promise. While San Francisco Art Institute—another of the only three remaining museum schools in the country—shuttered its doors in 2021, SMFA has tripled its applications and, in 2023-24, was in the black for the second straight year. 

“Even though it was a small school, it was a massive project,” Glaser says. “But it absolutely made Tufts better. It was better for the students. It was better for the faculty. It was better for the museum. It required investments of time and money, but it was a beautiful thing for the University.” 

As a political scientist and former professor, these are the types of projects that get Glaser excited. Just like a city planner can improve the lives of constituents with the right policy, a provost can positively change the direction of a university with the right project. 

“So much of this job is about making the school a better place,” Glaser says. “It’s exhilarating and I find a lot of fulfillment in that.” 

At Tufts, Glaser was able to make an impact beyond the classroom. In his role of dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, he not only supervised the academic operation but financial aid, admissions, student affairs, the library, and more. All told, Glaser oversaw roughly $535 million in budget and an organization of close to 1,300 faculty and staff. 

In his first few months at Santa Clara, Glaser has met with people across campus to learn about the work being done and to find opportunities to build on the strong foundation of California’s oldest university. 

Kicking off our interview series with leaders at Santa Clara, Glaser sat down to discuss the state of the University, his leadership style, and the lessons he has learned as a professor, scholar, and administrator. 

What made you decide to come to the West Coast after three decades in Massachusetts?

First off, Santa Clara is an incredible institution. I’ve never seen a more beautiful campus. The emphasis on student learning and experiences is fantastic. The location in Silicon Valley is an enormous asset. The Jesuit spirit of this place and how it informs how we think, approach problems, and build community is impressive to me. I loved my previous institution, but I think this is a gentler place. The opportunity to work with President Sullivan was also really important to why I came here. I see her as somebody who embodies the spirit of Santa Clara but also has ambitions for it. I wanted to be part of that. 

On a more personal note, I went to undergrad at Stanford and got my Ph.D. at Berkeley and had a glorious, wonderful time. California is where I met my wife. I grew to love New England but the idea of coming back was very attractive to us. My son also lives in Oakland after going to architecture school at Berkeley. At Welcome Weekend, a parent asked me if I was “following the sun,” as so many do, and I said, “Almost. We followed our son.”

The executive vice president and provost position is new at Santa Clara. What type of leadership style can people expect from you?

I consider myself action-oriented. If you want somebody to give a lecture on the big ideas, then I’m probably not your person. I like identifying discrete opportunities and carrying them across the finish line. Sometimes they can be big. Sometimes they can be modest. Sometimes a bunch of modest projects adds up to a big project. There are people who might view that as a checklist mentality, but I like to be able to say, “These half dozen things happened because we paid attention to them and you can see a difference in our process and what we’ve accomplished.”

One project I was really proud of at Tufts was the creation of our Department of Earth and Climate Sciences. That started when we had a number of retirements in our geology department. We lost a lot of very accomplished people, which was difficult, but it created an opportunity to rethink our approach. Early on, I remember speaking with a faculty member in geology who was a climate scientist. Our conversation highlighted how much our students cared about this area of study and how relevant it was to so many societal problems. It became clear that the department needed to reflect that. So from those initial conversations we created a new department and major, but we also thought about how we could bring different disciplines together to enhance this work. We moved the new department into the same building as the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, which is right next door to the engineering school. That way all these disciplines can work together as discoveries are made. Even though I’m not at Tufts anymore, I’m proud of what that’s grown into. I hope one of my successors will develop a Ph.D. in this area.

How do you decide what projects to take on when you start at an institution?

It’s important to build on your foundation and listen to people so their perspectives can shape change. You don’t want to make changes at an institution and lose what’s right about a place. One of the biggest things we got right with the SMFA acquisition at Tufts was we kept its identity. That was important. We didn’t move it. We kept it across the street from the museum. We kept the same name. We kept its curriculum and unique pedagogical model with no majors and an emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach. So we kept what was precious about the old school and its reputation and brought it together with the strength of a university. 

Coming from an outsider’s perspective, I can see there’s a lot that’s right at Santa Clara, but of course, there are always areas for growth. In my conversations with faculty and staff, I’ve already heard about some things at Santa Clara that might be holding the institution back. I mentioned one at Convocation—and it’s turned into a big buzz—which is moving from the quarter system to semesters. I’m not saying we have to do that, but I understand that quarters create challenges for study abroad, for students getting jobs, for building programs across schools, and for staff having to do things three times a year instead of two. I’m sure that there are good things associated with quarters—which is important to consider—but the implications are real, so we’ll want to consider those. 

In addition to your work as an administrator, you’re an active political science scholar and you wrote two books about politics in the South. What sparked your interest in that region?

I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, which is Southern in a lot of ways. You can drive about 15 min and suddenly you’re no longer in Missouri but Missour-ah. The area is very conservative and the racial politics are interesting. It’s the location of both the Dred Scott case and Ferguson and Michael Brown. A lot of the history of St. Louis and a lot of the current problems have to do with issues of race and race relations. So when I was making decisions about what I was interested in, that blend of topics was interesting to me. 

Then when I was in graduate school in the ’80s, the South was realigning. People think about the South as this Republican bloc, but it was a Democratic bloc up until 1980, and it took an additional 14 years to really transform. So there was an interesting story to tell and I told it in a couple of books. I don’t think of myself as a Southern politics scholar. I would say the South is my laboratory and it was an interesting place to test ideas about politics and how people think and act. 

Your upcoming book is about compromise. What does compromise mean to you from a research perspective?

I mentioned earlier that I like getting things accomplished. To me, compromise is essential to getting things accomplished. Compromise allows you to bring different, sometimes competing, but often important values into your process. I’m interested in both the politics of compromise and how you can encourage people to think about accepting compromise. In our increasingly divided and polarized world—and I’m not talking about 911±¬ÁÏÍø, but the world—being able to encourage compromise and have compromise inform where you go seems important to me. It’s not just functional, but it has moral value as well.

What has your research taught you about your work as a college administrator? 

A lot of my work in leadership is about presenting choices and understanding how people react to choice. I wrote a piece 20 years ago about school bonds in Jackson, Mississippi, which had been rejected by voters over and over again. One reason was they required a 60% approval and the city was 45% white and unfortunately white people in the area weren’t supporting the school bonds because they weren’t sending their kids to the schools receiving those bonds. 

So the local superintendent wondered if he put a checklist in front of voters—instead of an all-or-nothing—if there would be a difference. Voters would be able to say, I support putting air conditioning in schools or renovating the gymnasiums or buying library books or computers or whatever. They had a list of 10 things and gave voters control over exactly how their tax dollars were allocated. Ultimately voters passed three of the 10 items on the list. Those three items happened to be the three most expensive and constituted about half the money they were hoping to raise. It wasn’t a 100% percent victory, but a 50% victory is a lot more than 0%.

We looked into why the checklist ballot resonated with the voters. Was it control over how money was distributed? Was it the specificity of the items—because we were voting in June and it’s 195 degrees and how can anybody learn without air conditioning? The answer was that it was both, but it was more control than specificity. 

That lesson I learned about aggregating or disaggregating choice applies in my job today. I often ask myself: “How can we present this to people in ways that will make people feel like they have some stake in it?”

You clearly still have a passion for your scholarship and for teaching. What do you find fulfilling about working in administration?

If you’re going to do this job well, the work has to be about everybody else and I get a lot of satisfaction from that. You have to have good ears and listen to what people care about. As a political scientist, I think about managing relationships and the interpersonal things required to bring everybody along. 

When I first started in leadership at Tufts, somebody said to me, “Oh, gosh, you’ve gone to the dark side!” I remember thinking, “What are you talking about?” Being a university leader is about being there for the students: How can we enhance the experience of students? How can we make faculty and staff more effective for themselves and for their students? So I never viewed it as the dark side at all. As I’ve grown in the job, I’ve learned about all these different domains and it’s given me a lot of satisfaction to understand everything that goes into making a college campus thrive. 

You spent three decades at your last institution. Is it strange waking up 3,000 miles away on a different coast, in a different job? 

It’s very weird! You know these jobs are 60-80 hours a week jobs. I knew everything that happened at Tufts—every crisis and every celebration. I cared so much about what happened minute to minute, every drop in the budget. Then you walk away, and it’s not my institution anymore. I still care a lot about those people, I owe them so much, but at the same time, I’m fully embracing Santa Clara. I’m all in. This is my place. I’m super excited to be representing Santa Clara. This place is fantastic and I think there’s a real opportunity to grow and progress, too. I’m excited to be a part of that.