Our Mentors / Sponsors
Our mentors - friends, interdisciplinary allies, alumni, are people deeply interested in supporting and investing in the next generation, in “passing the baton.” They are unstinting in sharing their knowledge and their wisdom born of immersive experience, and providing access and distinctive opportunities.
They are forward thinking, dynamic risk-takers, who understand that horizons are always changing, rather than falling victim to what one among them, Philip Bobbitt, has coined “Parmenides’ Fallacy.” And as wonderfully said of another of them, Juan Enriquez, by former MIT Media Lab Director Nicholas Negroponte – “he will change your view of change itself.”
This initiative is dedicated to a friend, Michael Hawley, whose interdisciplinary breadth inspired me, and the way I tried to expose my students to the world. He was one of the very first people I approached about this community and would have been an extraordinary mentor. Mike is sorely missed and my in memoriam can be found here.
There are other significant people I am deeply thankful to who have inspired and mentored me over many decades. There is an in memoriam page in progress acknowledging and honoring such good friends, Eqbal Ahmad, Les Gelb, Anne Heyman, Ambassador Jonathan Moore, Henry Rosovsky, and my high school teacher Estelle Witzling who saved me from from too thoroughly being immersed in the culture of the Queensbridge Housing projects. . Immediately, however, I want to acknowledge Vartan Gregorian who sadly passed in April 2021. He was an astonishingly humane person and the quintessential teacher and educator. My last three years at the Institute were generously underwritten by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Originally a two-year grant, he extended it for another year with a magnanimous presidential discretionary gift. And then Vartan came to Tufts to deliver this talk and exhortation in honor of the Institute’s 30th anniversary and my becoming Emeritus. I particularly enjoyed this passage.
Gregorian: [laughing] I lived a vicarious life. So, when I say teachers, [and] I hope I don't offend you [here], students don't fail, teachers fail. You have to be able to do something out of a human being entrusted to you, to reach and pull all the strings––emotional, intellectual, social, anthropological––in order to make him or her see themselves in a universal norm, as somebody unique for the first time in the history of humanity. Somebody has created somebody like you, and no one like you is going to come back again in the entire history of the universe. So in your unique moment in history, I've always told my students, you have to decide whether you like to be a dot, a letter, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, chapter, whole book, or blank, and it is miserable if you choose to be blank, because so much has gone through evolution to result in you, and you owe it to your parents, your society, to become someone, or knowingly reject, but never be indifferent. That's the philosophy I learned from childhood on.
Our mentors are all modest and humane, and most importantly to me, they exude decency in a world too often bereft of that quality. What has been wonderful to witness is the natural evolving interaction between the mentors themselves.
I was recently contacted by one of my wonderful alumni, Jeff Golden who will enter Convisero. He sent me a copy of his first book , Reclaiming the Sacred, which won the Grandmaster 2023 Nautilus Award. In one of his citations there is this poignant poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, Widening Circles
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
Click here to explore the total roster to date.
Alphabetically ordered, this roster will grow and be updated regularly. Squarespace’s restrictions have only allowed for 250 entries before we were obliged to start again alphabetically starting in the year 2023.
