Nothing in the previous 124 years of Tufts history could have prepared the university for the coming of Jean Mayer. He officially assumed the presidency on July 1, 1976, five years before I joined his administration as provost. That half-decade was, arguably, the most tempestuous, chaotic, adventurous, and exciting period in the history of Tufts University. At the center of the whirlwind was Jean Mayer, obsessed with a vision of personal triumph that he intended to transfer to this university. He was consumed by his own optimism and the certainty that he would eventually succeed in attaining anything that he wanted. In 1967, he had been passed over as a candidate for the presidency of Tufts in favor of Burt Hallowell. Nine years later, he was back again as a candidate, and was once again rejected in favor of Harry Woolf. Then, as if by an act of fate, Woolf withdrew, and the Board of Trustees turned to Jean Mayer, finally. He had attained his first goal: the presidency of a university in the Boston area that had a medical school. No one on the Board of Trustees suspected what he had in mind, and I doubt if any of them understood the complex personality who had assumed the leadership of this somewhat unassuming and underfunded small university in Boston. Within a very short period of time, they would learn.

It is no wonder that the risk-averse search committee would have passed over Mayer as their first choice. There was nothing in Jean Mayer’s background that would suggest similarities to previous Tufts presidents. He was born in Paris on February 19, 1920. His father, Andre, who was forty-five when Jean was born, was a famous physiologist and had an early interest in nutrition. He was also a French patriot, served in World War I, and undoubtedly communicated his dislike of the Germans to his son, which he actively nurtured for the rest of his life. Mayer came to science from both of his parents. His mother had been a laboratory assistant to the eminent Professor, who married her. She was a practicing physiologist in her own right. As an undergraduate, Jean first studied history, and then went on to the Sorbonne. World War II interrupted the family’s life and Jean’s education after he had completed his undergraduate studies. The family left for America, but Mayer returned to Europe to fight against the Nazis with the Free French. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the field artillery before being captured by the Germans in 1940. Mayer shot a guard, escaped from the prison camp, and joined the French underground. He was on DeGaulle’s staff, attained the rank of major, and received fourteen decorations, including the Croix de Guerre with two palms, the Resistance Medal, and the Legion of Honor. Here was considerably more glory and adventure than one encountered in your typical New England college president, perhaps with the exception of Bowdoin’s Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who anchored the right flank at the Little Round Top at Gettysburg with the Maine 20th Regiment and has gone down in heroic history. Mayer had married before leaving for France, then returned to complete his graduate work in the United States in physiological chemistry at Yale, where he received his Ph.D. He took some time off in Paris to acquire his D.Sc. in physiology from the Sorbonne. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1950, serving as Professor of Nutrition in the School of Public Health, Lecturer in the History of Science in the Arts and Sciences, member of the Center for Population Studies, and Master of Dudley House. When he came to Tufts, he had been on the Harvard faculty for twenty-seven years. In the eyes of his Harvard colleagues, he seemed cut from a different, more dashing and adventurous model. One called him affectionately “the Little Prince.”

The idea of “academic entrepreneurship” was a notion very few people in higher education had heard of. Businessmen might have understood the psyche of the visionary who is absolutely convinced that he cannot fail and who fearlessly takes risks in the face of dangers he dismisses. These high-stakes gamblers, when they encounter rules and obstructions, will ignore them, because their optimism and certainty have convinced them that the vision they see is the only goal. For Jean Mayer, Tufts was an instrument placed in his hand, at the right time and in the right place, and he knew he would triumph. To speak to those people who knew him best before he came to Tufts and to those who dealt most closely with him in those early years, one encounters a picture difficult to get in focus.

He was alternately described as infinitely charming, witty, duplicitous, ambitious, brilliant, intellectual, opportunistic, generous, vain, slippery, loyal, possessed of an inner standard of excellence, and charismatic. Although he had spent most of his adult life in higher education, Mayer was singularly unwilling to deal with any of the trappings of traditional academic decision-making, either as a faculty member or as an administrator. He wanted autonomy. He was accustomed to it in the laboratories that he ran in the public health school at Harvard; and he did whatever was necessary to maintain control over the enterprise he now led. To be sure, he had a Board of Trustees of more than thirty members, but he felt accountable only to a small number on the Executive Committee, and he successfully orchestrated them, at least at the outset, before they came to realize that this was no ordinary American college president. He had no intention of being weighed down by search committees. Not two months after his assumption of the presidency, he wrote to Henry Kissinger:

(August 27, 1976)

Dear Henry:

Rumor has it that at sometime in the not too distant future, and whatever the outcome of the national election, you may decide that you want to lay down the mantle of Secretary of State which you have worn so successfully in the past years. In this connection I am writing to ask you whether you might be at all interested in the Deanship of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy…. I am sure that should you be interested we could arrive at an agreement on such matters as salary and administrative help.

Sincerely yours,

Jean Mayer

This kind of independent action was typical of what became “the Mayer Style of Management,” which was generally marked by disinformation or non-information. He was often the only person who knew what he was doing. There was only one chain in his chain of command: his own.

No one could have predicted the impact on American higher edu-cation that the meeting of two relatively obscure young Washington staffers had when they first encountered Jean Mayer in 1969. Mayer, after nearly twenty years on the faculty of the School of Public Health at Harvard, had established a reputation as one of the leading figures in the field of nutrition and public policy. He had learned how to deal with the seats of power in the nation’s capital, and it was no accident that Richard Nixon appointed this lifelong Democrat as Chairman of the first White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health. This “conference” was not intended to be a weeklong academic event. Mayer expected that it would continue for years, in order to advance a serious agenda dealing with the nation’s health and preventative medicine through nutritional policy, something all very new both for the vast United States Department of Agriculture bureaucracy and a medical establishment with very little interest in prevention and nutrition.

The conference was well organized, and Mayer met two smart, young staff members who had experience in the often unfathomable maze of USDA programs, considered by many the most confusing and complex department of government in all of Washington, D.C. One was a lawyer, a recent graduate of Cornell, named Gerald Cassidy; his associate was Kenneth Schlossberg. Mayer soon discovered that Schlossberg and Cassidy had remarkable insights and access; their knowledge of the workings of the USDA was very impressive.

In 1976, when now President Jean Mayer of Tufts University was contacted by the recently established consulting firm of Schlossberg & Cassidy Associates, he had already come to appreciate the brains and energy of these two entrepreneurs, who shared the same capacity to move things that Mayer did. Mayer had assumed the presidency of Tufts only days before the call from Gerry Cassidy.

They had a proposition. With their knowledge of the USDA appropriation process and their connections within the agency and with congressional delegations who they worked with on agricultural issues, the consultants could identify vast sums of money, and with congressional connections reaching as far down as their personal relationships with staff members on Senate and House committees, they could direct large grants of dollars to a specific institution—or university—via a line item appropriation, directed by a congressman who would order USDA to make this targeted appropriation.

It did not take President Mayer more than a moment to realize what an opportunity lay before him and his new university, more resource-poor than any he had ever encountered. He saw that in an instant Tufts could move from the list of also-rans and have-nots in higher education. He believed that he had ideas that were indeed marketable, but that, given the way federal dollars for colleges and universities were appropriated and awarded, Tufts simply was not competitive. He knew that the rich only got richer, and the poor were left outside the gates. There was no way that Tufts University, even with the academic innovations he was planning, could compete successfully for peer-reviewed grants with the giants of the land grant universities or with the private research universities of the Ivy League. He knew how the game was played at Harvard and at the other resource-rich universities, and he knew that Tufts simply could not play on the same field, with the same rules. So, as he did so often, he decided to make up his own rules. When he saw the opportunity presented by these two young entrepreneurs, he jumped at it.

They had started a consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., one that would cater specifically to the needs of universities that normally did not have access to peer-reviewed grants. Would Tufts be their first client? Without hesitation, President Mayer said yes.

Mayer assumed the presidency of Tufts on July 1, 1976. He met with the Executive Committee of the Board for the first time that summer. At that meeting he presented a proposal to contract with the consulting firm of Schlossberg & Cassidy. The Executive Committee’s approval proved to be their most important affirmation of the Mayer presidency during his entire term as Tufts’ leader. Nothing played a larger role in the transformation of Tufts under Jean Mayer’s stewardship. As usual, it was a high-risk venture; the Board had no idea what was at stake.

Mayer’s association with Schlossberg & Cassidy represented the historic beginning of what was to become a huge academic industry and opened a conflict that continues to this day in higher education research. The journalistic establishment reduced and simplified the issue and identified it with one word that indeed had some agricultural flourish to it: Pork. Jean Mayer was the first university president who saw the potential for the development of worthwhile programs that would never see the light of day if they had to compete through the established peer-review process and traditional funding provided by predetermined budget commitments. But, Mayer saw another path: with leverage from congressional delegations, the agencies could be told that the money should be earmarked for a certain university. Mayer realized that, regardless of agency reluctance, once the Congress placed its muscle behind a project and insisted that the project be funded, no agency would risk the wrath of an appropriations committee chair, or the committee staff, for that matter. Both Schlossberg and Cassidy were exceptionally wired into these critical committees.

Some years later, the partners had a falling out, and Schlossberg & Cassidy Associates became Gerald Cassidy Associates, the most influential lobbying firm for universities in the country. Gerry Cassidy and Jean Mayer were kindred spirits. For as long as Jean Mayer was president of Tufts University, Cassidy remained a grateful friend. The ultimate beneficiary was Tufts, but the debate concerning what are now described as academic earmarks will continue. The amount of money allocated by this method rose from less than $17 million in 1980 to nearly $1.7 billion in 2001, by which time these earmarked funds represented nearly 10% of all federal funding for academic research.

The creation of a veterinary school at Tufts University might be recorded as Jean Mayer’s most risky roll of the dice. It was his greatest act of defiance, and he did it against all odds. Massachusetts was not a player in the evolution of veterinary education in the United States. . . . The most productive effort to that time came with the establishment in 1938 of Middlesex University, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, which had as its main academic focus a school of veterinary medicine. It graduated 243 veterinarians before closing in 1947.

Clearly, there did not seem to be much of a future for veterinary medicine in Massachusetts or New England when Jean Mayer assumed the presidency of Tufts in 1976. . . . You can imagine the stunned response to now president Mayer’s announcement at his inaugural address in the summer of 1976 that one of his highest priorities was to be the establishment of a veterinary school at Tufts. Not only that, but Mayer informed the audience that veterinary medicine was on the edge of a tremendous revolution in research. By the 1990s, he asserted, veterinarians will be active in the fields of nutrition, marine and equine medicine, toxicology, public health, and environmental science.

He also had another motive. As the Master of Harvard’s Dudley House, Mayer had watched generations of Massachusetts students fail to gain admittance to the out-of-state veterinary schools. Ninety-eight percent of New England applicants to the nation’s veterinary schools were rejected because of state residency requirements. Of the thirty-eight New England students who were admitted to twenty-two veterinary schools, twenty-six were subsidized by Massachusetts at an annual cost of $221,000.

This was classic Jean Mayer. He had come to a university with a history of conservative, cautious management, poor in resources, with no particular reputation for creative or innovative research, and he announced to the world that the institution was about to embark on a dramatically new academic adventure that had had a history of failure in New England; furthermore, he assured the listening audience that the journey was without peril, that the veterinary school would be a cooperative venture, with start-up and operating costs funded jointly by the six New England states. There would be no problem with the land, either. President Mayer was aware that the 1,100 acres of the Grafton State Hospital grounds near Worcester had been set aside by Governor Frank Sargent for some appropriate use. Sargent, who was one of the state officials advocating a regional veterinary school, made certain that the land would remain available after he announced the closing of the hospital and its activities in January of 1972.

Soon after his inaugural speech, the entrepreneurial optimist began rolling, while hypnotizing a Board of Trustees not really accustomed to such activities from a Tufts president. By August of 1976, not two months after taking office, Mayer had gotten Schlossberg and Cassidy signed to a contract, and they were actively working through the corridors of Congress, looking for earmark opportunities. The president had also found an ally on campus. During the interview process for the presidency, Mayer had met a faculty member and associate dean of the Dental School, Thomas Murnane, and there was a chemical reaction that lasted for as long as Mayer was president of Tufts. Dr. Murnane had been a Tufts undergraduate before attending the Dental School and also acquiring a Ph.D. from Tufts in basic sciences. His entire academic life had been spent at Tufts, waiting for someone to come along who could inspire him. Tom Murnane possessed many of the same characteristics of optimism, guile, and charm that gave the Tufts president his unique persona. Together, they presented the Tufts community with an energy package seldom seen and rarely trusted. They moved with the speed of a whirlwind, or as others might say with less charity, a cobra. Once he became president, Mayer sent Murnane to the governors of the New England states with the plans for a regional veterinary school. At first, there was hesitant but modest commitment. The New England Governors Conference contributed two separate $100,000 planning grants. However, soon it became apparent that the New England states, as they had often in the past, would walk away from regional cooperation. Even though this cooperation had been the cornerstone of Mayer’s pitch to his Board of Trustees, the states’ abandonment did not deter him. By the summer of 1978 New England regional cooperation was dead. But, by that time, the work of Schlossberg and Cassidy had begun paying off. Thanks to the strong support of the Massachusetts congressional delegation, Tufts received in early 1978 a $10 million federal appropriation from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for the construction of a veterinary school at Tufts University. In October of that year, the commonwealth gave title to Tufts of a 634-acre parcel of land that had been part of the Grafton State Hospital. The price was one dollar. To those traditional Tufts trustees, Mayer was either a magician or a madman; they were not sure which. Suddenly, they realized that they were in this venture alone, without the other New England states and with uncertain commonwealth commitment, outside of the free land. When the preliminary figures came in by the fall of 1978, the cost of the school was to be $31 million, an unheard of figure for Tufts.

There was no slowing him down. By the fall of 1978 Mayer had himself a dean of the Veterinary School, Albert M. Jonas, Professor of Comparative Medicine and Pathology at the Yale Medical School. Jonas was a veterinarian who had never been on the faculty of any veterinary school. Recruitment for students had begun for a class to enter in the fall of 1979, the charter class, before the Board of Trustees had given final approval to establish the school.

In the meantime, neither the national nor Tufts community could believe what it was witnessing. Obstacles were everywhere, and support around the institution was minimal. The deans of the veterinary schools at Cornell and Penn were actively campaigning against the establishment of a Tufts Veterinary School. They mobilized their alumni associations in New England and testified before Congress. These veterinary schools had for years enjoyed the contracts from the New England states and lusted after these students and dollars. Closer to home, the most unhappiness came from the faculty and administration of the Medical School, who saw resources so scarce as to be almost non-existent going to a new school and a rival for attention. In spite of a background in public health, Mayer had arrived at Tufts with precious little credibility with the Medical School. Nutrition was a field that simply did not interest the clinical or basic sciences faculty of the medical profession, at Tufts or for that matter anywhere in the country. I remember my first interview as provost with the chairman of the Department of Molecular and Microbiology, while standing in front of the recently constructed Human Nutrition Research Center on the downtown Boston campus. “That building might as well be on the planet Krypton, as far as my department is concerned. We are not interested in human nutrition. No one down here is.” That attitude basically represented the opinion of a great many in the medical profession across the nation in the early 1980s. In Mayer’s first two years, his preoccupation with veterinary medicine and later nutrition really drove the Medical School faculty into a fury. While he was promising the Medical School all sorts of new monies and incremental faculty, every dollar he could get from the federal treasury seemed to pass through the Medical School and find its way to the Vet School or to Nutrition. There was rage downtown on the health sciences campus. When the trustees finally approved the establishment of the Veterinary School by a vote on October 28, 1978, the document still contained language that pointed to agreements with the other New England states, even though Mayer knew that by early October Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut had completely backed out. It also contained language underlining the Medical School’s frustration, calling for the chairman of the board to appoint an ad hoc committee of trustees to ensure “that any financing of a short-fall in donated funds will not impose an unreasonable burden on the Medical School and that it shall be the responsibility of the Executive Committee and the standing committees to work actively with the President and the University Administration in the development of the [Medical] School and to report thereon regularly to the Board of Trustees.”

By September 1979, just over three years from his first announcement, Jean Mayer had created the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. . . . The $10 million construction grant had permitted work to start on a large-animal facility on the Grafton campus, and an entering class had been recruited, along with a dean, faculty, and administration.

One could only look on in wonder at how this had all happened.

The fact that President Mayer had advanced his nutritional agenda in his inauguration speech did not make any particular impression. Nor did the construction of a fourteen-story human nutrition research laboratory in the middle of the health sciences campus. It should have. . . . [H]ere comes Jean Mayer, Ph.D., committed to the field of nutrition, which in the minds of most of the medical community at Tufts and the rest of the country meant very little scientifically and was represented in the Medical School and its primary teaching hospital, the New England Medical Center, by the Frances Stern Nutrition Center, established in 1918 to train nutritionists. By the 1970s the center was providing patient services in the various Tufts hospitals, and Professor Johanna Dwyer, an earlier Mayer assistant, had brought professional and scientific credibility to the field as director of the center, unrecognized as she might have been. In the official history of the Tufts University School of Medicine, Century of Excellence, there is no mention of the Frances Stern Center or of nutrition. They were invisible to the general medical community.

If there was any terrain on which Jean Mayer felt more secure than usual, it was when he was dealing with national nutritional issues. He did not need faculty allies at Tufts or anywhere. He was marvelously connected to the appropriate congressional committees dealing with the Department of Agriculture, and Schlossberg and Cassidy could do the rest. Within weeks of his assumption of presidential leadership at Tufts, Mayer was laying the groundwork in Washington, D.C., for a comprehensive nutritional agenda at Tufts that would dazzle the academic community in Boston and the country. He proposed that the United States Department of Agriculture fund the capital and on-going scientific costs of a human nutrition research center operated at Tufts University to investigate the human nutrition requirements in the normal aging process. Mayer had convinced the Massachusetts delegation, and the delegation instructed the USDA: Do it. The Agricultural Research Service, the appropriate funding agency within the USDA, was furious. But, the ARS was helpless. All the wires had been placed, with the Senate and House committees coordinated by Schlossberg and Cassidy, who had very special connections from their White House Conference days with the committees dealing with nutritional issues.

What made it more aggravating was that Mayer was right. The lack of research into nutritional standards for an aging population was disgraceful, he said, and no other universities were picking up on this. Mayer was proving that earmarking could make scientific contributions to the country.

His activities also caught the attention of the Boston higher education community. As 1977 progressed, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston University each in its own way attempted to inform the federal government that Tufts lacked expertise in the field of nutrition, and that only a four-university cooperative program could provide enough resources to guarantee success. Mayer, however, had already recruited the key members of the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Nutrition for Tufts, but the pressure from the other institutions continued. MIT tried in vain to get part of the proposed center placed on its campus.

The Tufts medical community had not seen any new construction for basic sciences research in decades. Plans had been drawn up by generations of Medical School deans, with no results. One can only imagine the impact of an announcement in 1977 of a federal allocation of $2 million to make engineering and architectural studies for the construction of a USDA-owned and Tufts-operated USDA human nutrition research center on aging, a proposed fifteen-story state-of-the-art facility and laboratory. Shortly thereafter it was announced by the Boston Redevelopment Authority that Tufts had acquired space at 711 Washington Street, adjacent to the health sciences campus in downtown Boston, for the building. Jaws dropped again when the $20 million construction allocation was announced, along with initial operating funds of $7 million for nearly a dozen research programs, covering investigation into lipoproteins, nutrition and aging; nutrition, aging, and cardiovascular metabolism; vitamin K–dependent proteins in hemostasis; nutritional epidemiology; bone density; body composition and nutrient needs; micronutrient absorption and metabolism; nutrition and eye lens function; and nutrition and free radical reactions, research that sounded very much like basic sciences activities, but focusing on nutritional issues. Mayer had lined up the exiled scientists from Harvard and MIT, and had even found a few jewels on the Tufts faculty who were willing and had been waiting, people like Norman Krinsky, a Ph.D. who had come to the Medical School in 1960 in pharmacology, had published his first paper that year on vitamin A and carotenoids, switched to the Department of Biochemistry in 1967, and now took full advantage of the collaborative opportunities in the Human Nutrition Research Center.

Yet, the Tufts president’s agenda was even more complicated than that suggested by the research center in Boston. Mayer was at heart a public policy advocate; he wanted to make change in Washington, and for that he needed social scientists who would help him find a national and international forum. In November of 1976, a few months after his arrival, the trustees approved the creation of a Nutrition Institute within the Arts and Sciences. It was in the Arts and Sciences where he felt he would place the social scientists and physiological psychologists whom he brought with him from Harvard. Their impact would prove to be enormous. A young research fellow from the Harvard School of Public Health, Robin Kanarek, joined the Arts and Sciences Department of Psychology in 1977. Mayer turned all of his grants over to her, and she instantly had more funding than the entire Tufts Department of Psychology! In June of 1977, Stanley Gershoff left Harvard, and within four years he would be named the first dean of the only School of Nutrition—and one with a policy emphasis—in the United States. In May of 1981, the school was created by approval of the Board of Trustees, who had accepted in the past three years the establishment of two new schools, neither of which could look to any endowment. For Tufts, here was risk-taking on a truly grand scale. And there was still more to come.

In the autumn of 1976, Donald MacJannet was beset by worry. He was about to meet the new president of his alma mater, Tufts University, from where he had graduated in 1916. The eighty-year-old educator had been running private schools and camps in Europe for more than forty years, His first effort, the MacJannet School for Young Americans, was located outside of Paris. After opening a second school at St. Cloud, MacJannet purchased a plot of land on Lake Annecy in the Haute Savoie region in the village of Talloires, the site of an eleventh-century Benedictine monastery. It was here that his destiny would take him, and the MacJannet Camps—Camp L’Aiglon for Boys and Camp Alouette for Girls—soon established a reputation as a high-quality college preparatory experience in Europe. He and his wife, Charlotte, attracted celebrity adolescents such as Prince Philip and Indira Gandhi, and only the Nazi occupation interrupted their activities. They spent the war years in the United States and returned to Europe in 1952, to renew their work.

In 1958, with the Benedictine buildings falling into ruins, the Priory where the monks had eaten was put on the market for sale. The building was a huge pile with a large main hall, and Mrs. MacJannet led the bidding and acquired the property for $10,000, along with enormous needs for reconstruction and rehabilitation, for which the MacJannets had no resources other than their considerable energy and wits. The camps finally closed in 1964, and it was about that time that Mr. MacJannet began asking Tufts Presidents if they would be interested in acquiring a facility in an idyllic part of France that could serve as a potential European study center.

From the perspective of Tufts administrators and trustees, this was the last thing they would have needed. European adventures in property acquisition by American universities were frightening institutions with far greater resources than Tufts. Harvard University had just gone through the epic struggle to decide what to do with the bequest of one of its distinguished alumni [Bernard Berenson],who died and left his European properties, the Villa I Tatti, to his alma mater.

With the history of I Tatti well known to all, Donald MacJannet made little headway with either Presidents Wessell or Hallowell. The last thing they needed was an unendowed, falling-down eleventh-century ruin in some mountainous region near the Italian border in France. His offer was rejected out of hand.

But, Mr. MacJannet had three great loves in his life: his wife Charlotte, the campgrounds and Priory, and Tufts. He had heard about the new president, who was French. For Mr. MacJannet, this was his last and best opportunity. No guts, no glory, and MacJannet met with Jean Mayer.

Mayer did not hesitate for a moment. He knew the region well, its staggering beauty and the reputation of its people. When from time to time he would regale me with war stories, President Mayer reminisced about “mon generale DeGaulle” and how DeGaulle said that there were only two countries that really fought the Nazis: Yugoslavia and the Haute-Savoie. Mayer had enormous regard for the people of the region, where some of the most ferocious fighting by French Resistance forces against the Germans and Italians took place. He told this octogenarian and loyal Tufts alumnus that he would be delighted to accept the property, and it was his intention to turn it into a European Studies Center to give Tufts a visible space on the continent. He accepted Mr. MacJannet’s gratitude, as well as what the founding director Professor Seymour Simches described as “a large box filled with unpaid bills and back taxes.”

One can only wonder what sorcery Jean Mayer indulged in to get the trustees, in May of 1979, to accept the facilities in Talloires for Tufts. By this time there was a full-scale revolt against President Mayer within his own administration and the trustees were admitting that they could not control him. Nonetheless, the crumbling Priory—Mr. MacJannet did heroic maintenance by himself and with volunteers—was officially inaugurated as a Tufts University campus, with a tiny endowment. Tufts-in-Talloires joined the Veterinary School and the soon-to-be-named School of Nutrition as three financially unsupported educational ventures begun by the new Tufts President.