Convisero: An overview of our community

AN ENDURING COMMUNITY

Throughout my almost sixty years of teaching, mentoring, and activism, I have been privileged to encounter wonderful people. Now in my Emeritus years, this is wonderfully continuing. I hope, together with you, to harvest the yield of these exciting decades in the ongoing creation of an already vital community, Convisero, as an essential and vibrant aspect of The Trebuchet.

I want us to continue to create distinctive collaborations, ever more capable of confronting your personal and the world’s challenges.

I want to welcome new generations of students from university campuses from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Chennai, India, and to continue the joy of mentoring the children of my alumni and friends.  

I want to continue to support you, to enable you to advance in your studies and careers, and to nurture our dynamic, interactive, intergenerational network.

Initially during COVID-19 exigencies, I envisioned and created us as an "extraterritorial" Institute, a human and intellectual incubator, a dynamic network that would reflect our vibrancy and engagement. I ran scores of programs annually, including webinars featuring many of my alumni and mentors to address pertinent, compelling issues, and to promote their work.

As events dictate, these webinars will be updated with links and pertinent information. One of the earliest webinars was with my friend Benjamin Pogrund on apartheid in Israel. Here is his most recent statement on Israeli apartheid.

I have temporarily ceased doing this regularly as I am concentrating on developing curriculum and colloquiums for the newest Indian liberal arts university SaiU, in Chennai, India. I am doing this at the solicitation of Convisero mentor and former Tufts Provost Jamshed Bharucha. 

Now my emphasis is on developing and integrating these goals under one banner, which I have called Convisero (Latin, “unite”). The name originated with Shaharris Beh, an EPIIC alumnus and founder of Hackernest, with whom we first began developing this vision when I became Emeritus. 

HOW CAN WE ACTUALIZE THIS VISION?

By connecting Convisero’s wonderful current mentors — academics, activists, adventurers, artists, athletes, civic leaders, diplomats, entrepreneurs, financiers, journalists, lawyers, military officers, musicians, physicians, public intellectuals, practitioners, and scientists — that I have engaged with over decades, we are able to learn from, sustain, and inspire one another.  

If you have joined Convisero at my invitation, you likely are a member of one, or multiple, cohorts, courses, colloquia, projects, teams, independent research, internships, The Trebuchet team, and the like, that I have helped create, facilitate, or participated in with you.  

You have volunteered for these enterprises and demonstrated what I have always looked for in my students and peers: integrity, eclectic intellectual curiosity, original thinking, empathy, passion and compassion, risk-taking, the ability to suspend your preconceptions, and to be at once independent, yet dedicated to collaborative action. 

You have already resiliently met challenges and confronted demanding circumstances, and emerged successfully, and I could not be prouder of the careers and trajectories that you have chosen and tackled, your personal priorities, and critically, the people you are.

Or, you are the delightful outcome of newer serendipitous meetings, whether on the beaches of Truro or in Remi’s dog park, a few steps from our Brookline home.  

If you are encountering this page and discovering us at my invitation to consider adding yourself to our community, welcome. 

Personally, this group will be a chance for me to learn from you and be challenged by your ideas, and to continue to create distinctive opportunities for the unique people that I know you to be. It will be wonderful to respond to your needs and assist your objectives, and so gratifying to learn of, and share your accomplishments.

Importantly, in these fraught times, it will be a forum for us to challenge ourselves individually and collectively. This is a nonideological space. I am privileged and honored to know you and have never witnessed you shy away from difficult circumstances or dialogues.  Hopefully in sharing our lives we will learn how together we are “breaking barriers and building bridges.”  

Currently (August 2023) there are about two-hundred and fifty wonderful people entered in our roster. Ultimately there will be hundreds more of you.

CONVISERO’S PROCESS

Currently I am your direct and only contact. At this stage of my life, I joke that despite being allergic to bees, I am a pollinator.

I advise many undergraduate and graduate students from my Boston University, Dartmouth, Emerson, Harvard, SaiU, Tufts/Fletcher, Wellesley and other eclectic advisory roles as a strategic advisor to the Human Rights Foundation and the Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development.

When a student or friend articulates a need or interest that I think aligns with you as a mentor I ask them to review the way you present yourself in Convisero. Remi, my pup, appears here. It is an informal beloved community, not a LinkedIn. If there is interest in you, and I think you will find it appropriate, I ask the student to provide me with their letter of interest and whatever supporting documents they wish to present.  

When you review their overture the responses, your can vary - appropriate; inappropriate; exciting, send the student(s) my contact information; interesting, but I have no bandwidth now, recontact me later; or, perhaps, I have a better idea for whom to refer the student to…or you ask for the student’s information to contact them directly. I ask that you keep me informed about at least the initial contact, but you are obviously free to pursue the subsequent in whatever way you wish. I hope you will consider me a rigorous gatekeeper. You will not be inundated with requests.

As I told many of you, you might well be a “sleeper cell,” activated only when there is a seemingly natural fit. Currently I am the hub of a spoked wheel. Ultimately it will be a searchable, transparent, interactive, site. You will find it easier to update me, interact with other mentors and your profiles independently.

Friends, it is you – your intelligence, your dedication, and your active participation – that are the core, critical components that will breathe life and significance into this effort.  

Thank you!

OUTCOMES

While this initiative began to ensure that “the elders” would pass on their wisdom to younger generations, sometimes mentors are also connected themselves. In 2020 and 2022 one of my veterans Dan Holmberg wrote seeking assistance connecting with people I might know in Libya, and I connected him with Jean Louis.

Dan’s overture

I’m involved in academic exchange programs. I am working on generating a list of Libyan Universities / academic forums / student organizations / civil society organizations etc for potential academic exchange programs with Universities in the U.S. and (inchallah) elsewhere. Universities / Colleges in the South of Libya would feature prominently as I assume they are underresourced for historical reasons of marginalization.

As I finished the email to Jean-Louis, I remembered that YOU are supremely knowledgeable about this topic in general and would have insights and connections falling out of your pockets. 😊

Please help me begin my journey in this new ecosystem of ‘how’ to systematically do this. How? Who (i.e. what schools) does these programs in earnest and would be interested? Where does the funding come from? What should be done in sequence?

Anything you’ve got will probably be a gold mine for me. Advice, connections, hyperlinks to your past work on such things?

I’ve also got another thing I want to write you about for the-trebuchet. Exploring the entirety of potential linkages and synergies between international and national stakeholders in Libya through convening of discussions in appropriate forums. The-trebuchet as convener for UN WFP on Libya.

EARLY MOMENTS FROM 2018 tO 2020 AND tHE MOST RECENT CONVISERO GATHERING iN 2023

The first of Lumay and Padden Murphy where I married two of my former students is an exemplar of the most appropriate intimate meeting of the community.

A Moment in Time and A Convisero retrospective provide detailed explanations of the linkages the community was enacting in 2020.