From Rochester to Tufts Posted on April 14, 2008 David Elkind (bio) recounts his move from John Flavell's group to the Department of Child Development at Tufts.

John Flavell had written his book on Piaget, and he was moving to Minnesota and the Rochester wanted a Piagetian. And so again the timing was right, and I went to Rochester and spent 12 years there and really continued in doing all the kinds of things I was doing.

But then they got a new administration, and when I was walking with the new president to the dining hall one day, and he said, “You know I can hire two assistant professors for what I pay you?" And that was a revelation, I thought, so I started looking around. And there was a position open at Brandeis, and so I applied for that. But there was also a position at Tufts at Eliot Pearson, which was a kind of educational thing, but one that - they had their own children’s program, and that appealed to me in a way. And I thought, “As long as I’m applying, might as well look at both places.”

Well, it just happened, this was 1978, and the snowstorm of ’78 happened just at the time I was supposed to go to Boston to do the Brandeis, and of course they had a number of candidates there that they had to put up for the whole week, which cost them their whole budget for bringing in candidates. So they couldn’t bring me in. Meanwhile, I went to Tufts and was really impressed because it was unique. It was a place that was not education. It was not psychology. It was development.

So it seemed to me that it was very in keeping with my interest of education and development, but it was combining what I saw, what I hoped would be a science of education, which would be child development. I believe that child development should be the basis of all education. I believe teachers should be, first and foremost, child development specialists.

So I had hoped that I would bring in and develop a program where we would have an educational, where we created a true educational science where teachers were both educators, but also knowledgeable about child development. That never worked out.

The people I brought in who were in education put into psychology, moved over into research and development. It’s hard because the reward systems still are not in that direction. We don’t reward people who are doing educational kinds of things and practical kinds of things, although we built a strong department. Now it’s very, very strong. And I brought through a Ph.D. program, and now we have two endowed chairs, we're internationally known, and so on. So it's a very strong department now.

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