Interviewee: Leon Trilling
Interviewer: Clarence G. Williams
Date: April 25, 2002
Leon Trilling received his B.S. and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology (Mechanical Engineering, 1944 and Aeronautics, 1948). He taught at the California Institute of Technology and was a Fulbright Scholar in Paris before coming to MIT in 1951. Professor Trilling joined the STS faculty in 1978. He founded the Integrated Studies Program at MIT and co-directed the New Liberal Arts Program. He is a senior staff member of The Institute for Learning and Teaching (TILT) at MIT. His research centers on the development of jet propelled airliners and the role of science and mathematics curriculum in the middle school.
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The Bridge Leadership Program was developed at MIT by Clarence G. Williams, founding director of the MIT Black History Project. He is Adjunct Professor of Urban Studies & Planning Emeritus and Former Special Assistant to the President of MIT.
The Bridge Leadership Program program provides perspectives and developments of new insights based on the concept “Bridge Leadership” that emerged in Technology and the Dream: Reflections on the Black Experience at MIT, 1941-1999 (MIT Press, 2001). The concept developed from the investigator’s view as an important element in the educational experiences of black students and faculty members at MIT. It defined a small core of mostly non-black faculty and administrators who worked diligently, along with the limited number of underrepresented faculty and students, to bridge divisions at the university based on race. While this book focused on the black experience, a new phase of the “bridge leadership” concept was broadened over the past nine years to include not only race but culture and ethnicity as well. The project has developed through interaction beyond MIT with over sixty former and current presidents, senior faculty and administrators at 17 major universities and educational institutions. What has surfaced from interviews and fact findings from these institutions (see lists of “bridge leaders” and “bridge leader targets”) is a core of identifiable characteristics associated with “bridge leader” professionals, both faculty and administrators who work to transform their campuses into a more welcoming, nurturing environment for minorities and other individuals from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
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