Photo: Alonso Nichols

The Editorial We

Glittering Prizes

If you’re like most people, October came and went without anybody waking you in the middle of the night to tell you, in breathless Nordic tones, that you had won a Nobel Prize. Passed over again! And yet there is consolation. One of our number, Eugene Fama, A60, H02, really did get the call from Stockholm—informing him of his selection for the 2013 prize in economics.

How excited should you be about a Nobel Prize you didn’t win? Plenty. This is family we’re talking about—fellow offspring of your alma mater (Latin for “nurturing mother”). People judge a school by who went there, who goes there, and who works there. When a fellow Jumbo shines, everyone else is entitled to absorb at least a few photons of reflected glory. So I say, break out the champagne.

Lucky for us, Tufts people are shining in all walks of life—as I was reminded last weekend when my son Jamie was setting up a terrarium for his tiny new pet, an inch-long slider turtle named Gi. The water had to be just the right depth and temperature, the lighting just the right part of the UV spectrum. “If you get stuck,” I told him, playing the Jumbo card, “I do know one of the world’s leading experts on turtles.”

So far, I have not had to call David M. Carroll, BFA65, winner of a 2006 MacArthur genius grant, to Gi’s rescue. But it’s nice to know he’s there, along with four other MacArthur geniuses from Tufts. Yes, genius is not a bad quality for a university to be associated with.

Neither is versatility. At least a dozen of America’s funniest cartoon voices have a Tufts pedigree. Whenever Apu or Chief Wiggum speaks in a Simpsons episode, I remind my daughter, “That guy went to Tufts.” Ditto for the characters Moe, Carl, Comic Book Guy, and others. Someday my daughter will figure out that they are all voiced by the same person, Hank Azaria, A88.

You want connections in high places? The head of the Environmental Protection Agency is Gina McCarthy, G81. DuPont is run by Ellen J. Kullman, E78; Warner Brothers Television, by Peter Roth, A72. The list goes on. And reaching back in time, let us not forget Vannevar Bush, E1913, G1913, the father of the National Science Foundation; or Norbert Wiener, A1909, H46, the father of cybernetics; or Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A48, F49, F61, H68, the influential U.S. senator and diplomat who was so witty and insightful that Tufts Magazine couldn’t just quote him once but had to give him his own soapbox in every issue (“D.P.M.”).

In the Tufts community, victory—anybody’s victory—has 100,000 siblings. So ask not for whom the Nobel Prize glitters. It glitters for you.

—DAVID BRITTAN
EDITOR