Tufts University is a private research university incorporated in the municipality of Medford, Massachusetts, United States. A charter member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC), Tufts College was founded in 1852 by Christian Universalists who worked for years to open a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. For more than a century, Tufts was a small New England liberal arts college until its transformation into a larger research university in the 1970s.