How to Become a Loving-Kindness Secret Agent Mark Tully ’92
A widely quoted proverb from Winston Churchill suggests if a man is under thirty and not a liberal he has no heart, and if over forty and not a conservative he has no brains. If anyone can disturb such reductive logic with Bodhisattva-like compassion and endearing crankiness it is Mark Tully. Community organizer, arts activist, improv actor, teacher, and radical faerie, Mark’s life work lovingly contradicts the inevitability of repressive political binaries. watercolors as political insight... No one talks like that. So there we are, with each other, blessed be. Sarah: How did your time at the college prepare you for your life’s work? Mark: The COA experience cultivated the capacity for empathy and solidarity; an assumption that those were the primary skills in our primary role—as Mark Tully ’92 helps the Str8 Up youth group in Woonsocket, Rhode Island build large props to allies to everyone and protest restricted access to prophylactics in poor neighborhoods. everything. I got to spend my professional career going into community organizing projects Sarah Haughn: How did you find the college? and coalitions, working to connect and coordinate Mark Tully: COA’s course book was being passed people—especially through blending arts into around the hippies in my high school, who all of political organizing. COA led me directly into my course worshipped the curriculum, but we assumed work, equipped rather well to serve as an ally. The that something as anti-establishment as politics level of intentional communication at COA alone and philosophy could never be part of a “legit” builds invaluable skills in dealing with the variety of institutional curriculum. So we blew it off as a kooky and obviously unaccredited enclave. I was choosing people in this world and their perspectives. between majoring in theater or chemistry—and ended up so confused I went nowhere. Our friend Sarah: And where has the journey led? Kim Courchesne [Paola] ’90 went in ’86, and half a year later was on the phone yelling “Get Up Here!” Mark: Meiklejohn [Don Meiklejohn, former faculty So I came up, and was sitting in on Don Cass’ member in political science] wanted me to be a organic chemistry class. The discussion of amino acids rapidly transformed into one asking which lawyer, Etta [Mooser, now Kralovec, former faculty animals are harvested for amino acids to provide for member in education] wanted me to teach, and then the scientists. Don got an order book out that had Alesia [Maltz, former faculty member in history] the animal- and human-organ sources and prices, said I should wage my philosophy and activism and a riotous discourse ensued. That decided it for through the arts. She was right, but it took me fifteen me. years to get here. My first job was with ACORN Sarah: COA has stuck to your ribs then, so to speak? working in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and I kept with neighborhood organizing—in the Bronx, Mark: You just can’t talk to people out here like then leading citywide programs in San Francisco. I we talk with each other. All possibilities and brought arts activism in as I could and in the process perspectives on the table; refusing even activist took a master’s in human ecology at the University orthodoxies; musing about things like the link of Edinburgh. between the diet and music of a culture; citing 22 | COA