The Little Magician Who Could: How Former Tufts President Jean Mayer Made the Friedman School Appear Out of Thin Air.
By Sol Gittleman
Not so long ago, I saw a small group of Tufts undergraduates examining a bust near the entrance to Tisch Library. “Jean Mayer,” read the inscription, “President, Tufts University, 1976–1992.” When I joined the group and asked whether anyone knew who this bronze head belonged to, I was met with silence. There are certain virtues about growing old. If you hold onto memory and neurons, you can remind later generations of what has been forgotten and needs to be relearned.
Before letting the students escape, I asked about the courses they were planning to take in the upcoming semester. Two had signed up for the introductory course on human nutrition, while another had secured a spot in an anthropology course titled “New Food Activism.” Yet another, an upperclassman working toward a major in environmental studies—specifically food systems, nutrition, and the environment—said she was trying to beg her way into “Food Justice: Critical Approaches to Policy and Planning,” a seminar in the graduate Department of Urban and Environmental Policy. None of these students had any idea that, standing next to that bust, they were in the presence of the man who made every one of these courses possible. None of them had ever heard of Jean Mayer. Why should they? After all, he had been dead for more than twenty years. How were they to know that this was the visionary who, without expectation or preparation, built academic bridges that connected every school of the university—or that what crossed those bridges was the wholly unanticipated field of nutrition.