Welcome: Mission and Vision
Welcome to The Trebuchet, a nonprofit education and activist initiative I created upon becoming Founding Director Emeritus (1985-2016) of the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University.
I chose the name The Trebuchet, (an enhanced, historic catapult-like siege engine), and its tagline, "Breaking Down Barriers / Building Bridges,” to resonate a lifetime of challenging fortress-like insular and ideological thinking. I wanted to penetrate silos of allegedly unassailable paradigms, to confront preconceived biases, and to enable my community to confront both iniquity and inequity.
I want Trebuchet to help create distinctive educational opportunities and non-partisan policy forums for ethical global engagement and citizenship.
I have sought for decades to enable educators and students to interact with world-wide experts to understand, collaborate and confront seemingly intractable global issues. These efforts were recognized, honored and supported by world leaders, Nobel Prize Winners, Right Livelihood Winners, Pulitzer awardees, The Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Ford, MacArthur and Rockefeller Foundations, the U.S. Department of Education, and other highly notable organizations, individual donors, and most importantly, my alumni.
Employing pedagogy and innovative interdisciplinary instructional practices that I have honed over decades, reinforced by an intergenerational, highly interactive, cross-disciplinary human network, Convisero, I believe enables Trebuchet to uniquely spread its model of transformative education and mentorship for ethical global engagement.
Convisero, (Latin, “To unite”) is the Trebuchet’s most personal and dynamic aspect. It is dedicated to uniting, nurturing, deploying, and valuing a community I have built now over nearly six decades of mentorship and activism.
Personally, recording this site has allowed me to reflect on the continuity, flow and trajectory of my intellectual and activist life.
The word Trebuchet itself arose from a wonderful conversation I had years ago with James Rosenau, the renowned professor of International Relations and Foreign Policy. I greatly valued his insistence on “jail-breaking” out of conceptual boundaries, his insistence on complexity, and his rigorous methodological approach describing the dynamics of turbulent change and continuity in international relations and foreign policy.
I invited James to spend a day with us at Tufts. He appreciated the Institute’s EPIIC colloquium and used the word to describe the power of our pedagogical process.I later enjoyed working with him in our common friend, Vice President Al Gore’s National Security Adviser, Leon Fuerth’s in developing his unique Forward Engagement.
Upon the news of Tufts University’s myopic decision to “disband” the Institute for Global Leadership and extinguish its independence in 2022, six years after my departure in 2016, Convisero, capturing the inextinguishable spirit and vitality of the Institute, has become all the more meaningful - and urgent. Its current roster of highly accomplished alumni of the Institute will grow exponentially.
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I loved the spirit and imagination of Leonardo Da Vinci. In my youth I was taken by his illustrations and sketches, among them his radical civil engineering ideas for warfare and infrastructure. I always talked about the intentionally intense demands of the Institute, admiringly described by Tufts President, Larry Bacow, (recently retired as Harvard’s President) as “an intellectual boot camp,” ultimately created an ideal springboard for my students to advantageously catapult into the world. I imagined that DaVinci’s rendering of a catapult would be an ideal logo for my Emeritus initiative, Trebuchet.
Upon my leaving Tufts my wonderful son, Nathaniel surprised me, finding a craftsman to make a museum quality model of Da Vinci’s catapult.
Well, I had mistaken a catapult for a trebuchet. Fortunately for me, Jerome Krumenacker who worked with me closely for four fun years to establish Trebuchet, gently alerted me that I would destroy any credibility I might have, if I chose that rendering.
I love the model, as I love my boy. Nathaniel inscribed it, “For all the boundaries and borders crossed - and the barriers yet to be broken down.”
Its mantra and charge fit perfectly. Enjoy perusing this site (my students know the actual dictionary definition of peruse as opposed to how it has been transmogrified :)). I dedicate this site to Nathaniel and the future generations who will assume the challenge.
Postscript - the saga continues as Nathaniel has gifted me this intricate model of a Trebuchet that we will build together! A summer Truro project. It will actually project!