Tufts University is a private research university incorporated in the municipality of Medford, Massachusetts. Tufts College was founded in 1852 by Christian Universalists who worked for years to open a non-sectarian institution of higher learning. Charles Tufts donated the land for the campus on Walnut Hill, the highest point in Medford, saying that he wanted to set a "light on the hill." The name was changed to Tufts University in 1954, although the corporate name remains "the Trustees of Tufts College." For more than a century, Tufts was a small New England liberal arts college. The French American nutritionist and former professor at the Harvard School of Public Health Jean Mayer became president of Tufts in the late 1970s and, through a series of rapid acquisitions, transformed the sch