Alaina Macaulay Named Vice Provost for OIIE

Alaina Macaulay, who has served as the university's assistant vice provost for inclusive excellence and leadership for two years, has been named vice provost for Tufts' Office of the Vice Provost for Institutional Inclusive Excellence.

Macaulay has led the office in an interim capacity since last summer. During this time, she provided strategic leadership for ELEVATE, the university's inclusive excellence vision, and launched the ELEVATORS and ELEVATE Liaisons programs.

Macaulay will now provide strategic leadership to integrate inclusive excellence into the university's academic mission, policies, practices, and organizational culture. She will work collaboratively with schools, central units, faculty, staff, and students to strengthen institutional capacity to foster an inclusive and thriving academic community.

Macaulay will report to Provost Caroline Attardo Genco.

"Alaina has strengthened cross-school engagement and created clearer pathways for schools and central units to advance their inclusive excellence priorities," Genco said. "She also played a key role in guiding the university's response to a rapidly evolving higher education landscape, while building strong relationships across Tufts-relationships grounded in listening, partnership, and shared purpose."

Macaulay's contributions at Tufts build on her experience as senior director for inclusion and strategic engagement at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she led initiatives aimed at fostering an inclusive campus environment. She is currently completing her PhD in higher education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is active in national conversations on inclusive excellence leadership as well as in using scholarship to fuel her practice.

Tufts Now sat down with Macaulay to learn more about her inspiration for her work and her plans for the future of the OIIE effort.

How do you describe your work to someone unfamiliar with it?

I'm an educator who leads institutional efforts towards inclusive excellence. That means I think about our hearts and minds and the systems of how we move inclusion from something that we value to something that we consistently practice. I also think about how those practices reinforce our values as an institution.

Consistent practice requires a commitment to infrastructure and sustainability. There's a metaphor we used at my prior institution that has stuck with me as I think about this work: When all the frogs in a pond are dying, ask what's wrong with the pond. We're tempted to focus on what's wrong with the frogs, how to diagnose and treat the frogs. But we need to look upstream, too; it's more appropriate to consider how to repair the pond.

Treating the symptom is not enough; we have to treat the system. Programming, trainings, and individual touch points all matter, and at the same time, how are we shifting our policies? How are we permanently changing our collaborations and our infrastructure to make this work durable and sustainable?

How do you reflect on the recent work of your team?

When we were presented with the need to develop the university's inclusive excellence strategic vision-what ultimately became ELEVATE-we understood that, before we could ever say what our community needs, we needed to know our community.

Macaulay and members of the institutional inclusive excellence team at a Boston Health Sciences campus Tufts Table event in December 2025. Photo: Dave Green

We built a robust, inclusive, community-driven process for developing that vision. We engaged students, faculty, and staff, across units and departments, through steering committees and community engagement sessions. The community responded in droves; we had over 400 participants across all our campuses. We even partnered with Dining Services during a daylong closure so all our dining employees could participate in an engagement session.

From there, we've developed nine recommendations and have educated over 150 community members through our ELEVATORS program. On the systems level, every school and many administrative units have designated liaisons to develop goals for their areas. We built from early adopters to a steady and continuing commitment, all informed by what our communities told us they needed. I'm so proud of ELEVATE and everything we're now able to build from that.

How will you measure ELEVATE's impact going forward?

When we posed questions of the attendees at our focus groups and our community engagement sessions, we didn't ask them to define inclusive excellence. Instead, we asked our community to consider what it would take to ensure everyone feels they are welcomed, valued, and respected members of the Tufts community.

Ongoing assessment is critical. Through ELEVATE, we hope to build metrics to track our progress towards our nine recommendations. At the broadest level, we are trying to understand our community's sense of belonging. Our climate survey was an early chance for us to identify where we were and were not living up to our standards of inclusion.

Now, in partnership with Institutional Research, we're leaning into the Belonging Barometer to assess how students feel when they first arrive at Tufts and then again at different milestones in their career. We're also looking at ways in which we do similar assessments for our staff and faculty, including instruments like pulse surveys and focus groups.

What else is on your roadmap?

There's a common misconception that our work is about persuading other people to believe what you believe. This work is not about your conforming to what I believe so you can be accepted in this community or your needing to hold the same identities as I do in order for you to belong. It's about my need to acknowledge somebody else's humanity and then accepting them fully in that.

Inclusive excellence is about understanding what other people believe and holding space for nuance and complexity, for acknowledging the richness of lived experience.

Key to this is dialogue. Dialogue isn't about persuasion. Debate is for bringing somebody closer to your side; dialogue is about holding space for the various perspectives that exist while creating mutual respect.

We're in builder mode for our dialogue work. Dialogue has long existed at Tufts, and we are thinking more intentionally about ways to pull this work together so it's coordinated and we can amplify its value. We've created a community of practice around dialogue, we've hosted our Tufts Table series, and this year, we piloted a new program called Dialogue for Change, first with graduate students and then with athletes.

We're thinking, too, about not only the occasions to bring speakers to campus on complex issues but also about opportunities for sustained dialogue. In a world with increasing polarization, how are we bringing people together in community to have long-term conversations on challenging topics?

We're also mapping dialogue programs that already exist across Tufts. And we're thinking about scale: What would it mean to take meaningful and intentional programs that are able to engage only eight to 10 people at a time-and do them at scale?

We've got some things to figure out, but I'm excited about building and deepening the skills of our community to be able to be in dialogue with one another when challenging, hot-button issues arise. And I'm proud we have so many institutional leaders who strongly support our efforts in this area.

Who do you do this work for?

On one level, everyone. The work is to create the best places for everyone to feel connected to our mission-and to ensure we're living up to our mission for every single person. We have an obligation to everyone who we invite into our community to make certain the system supports their ability to do what they came here to do.

On another level, I do think about my three children. I think about the kinds of educational and professional environments I want them to experience … spaces where they don't have to question whether they belong or wonder if the system was designed for their success, where they can be supported in their full humanity, where they can contribute everything they want to contribute and there aren't systems in place to impede their ability to do that.

I'm inspired, too, by my grandfather. He was the union president of AFSCME in Milwaukee; I lived with him most of my childhood. He instilled in me the idea that when you're facing something difficult, the best choice is to throw yourself into community. Maybe that community already exists or maybe you need to build it, but community is something that makes us all stronger, especially when we're going through challenging times.

What would you like your legacy to be?

I deeply want to build systems and culture at Tufts in ways that endure beyond my time here. It's not important to me that people know that I was the person responsible for anything I build. When I leave Tufts, I would love to feel that people have a positive experience from work that I've done. On a day-to-day basis, do students, faculty members, and staff members feel like they can be themselves and that we have given them all the tools and resources to grow and thrive here? I hope so.

I also hope that we contribute to the field. Tufts is a leader in this space in so many ways. I want us to continue to lean into our responsibility to be a model for what this work can look like for other institutions as well, to be that light on the hill.