David Cuttino
David D. Cuttino served as Dean of Admissions, Enrollment and External Affairs at Tufts University. He was responsible of undergraduate admissions, financial aid policy, and the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership. He initiated the Tufts Institute for Leadership and International Perspective and a number of scholar programs including the Balfour Scholars Program for minority students and the Neubauer Scholars Program for students who reflect the capacity for “transforming intellectual leadership”. He also was Interim Dean of the College of Special Studies. He continues to serve on the External Advisory Board of the Institute for Global Leadership.
Prior to coming to Tufts, he was Associate Dean of Admissions at Georgetown University where he chaired the committees directing admission to the School of Foreign Service and the School of Business Administration. He developed and coordinated a Board of Advisors for an alumni admissions network and developed a successful scholarship program. Working with an educational foundation he instituted programs on foreign policy and the judiciary at Georgetown for approximately 10,000 high school students each spring involving national and international leaders.
He has developed a variety of unique programs including an Appalachian Semester program and a science seminar for high school teachers and students. He served as a trustee for the Henry David Thoreau Foundation encouraging undergraduates for leadership in confronting complex environmental issues and also served on the board of Opportunity Homes building and restoring homes for low-income families.
" Shortly after arriving at Tufts to lead the admissions effort, I began working with Sherman Teichman recognizing that the programs he was directing were uncommon among leading universities and offered a distinguishing university signature and the opportunity to make an important difference in the quality of education. We worked together to build ties to international universities, organizations and foundations and to expand and support unique university efforts in scholarly and pragmatic engagement to involve and prepare students to manage and direct insightful change. As the number of programs grew The Institute for Global Leadership was created and provides unique and intensive intellectual and experiential educational experiences across disciplines that are effective in preparing students to meaningfully and ethically confront complex global issues. He has continued to build bridges and bring people together across perspectives, disciplines and endeavors"
Together with fellow Board member Fred Berger, who we miss tremendously, we created Engineers Without Borders. Its first trip went to Tibet.
David’s qualities are hard to encapsulate - they are deep, meaningful and broad. A man of tremendous integrity, intellect, curiosity, vision, open-mindedness, an adventurous spirit combined with a courtly demeanor and impeccable appearance :). I was honored to work with him and report to him for years in admissions when he also held the portfolio as supervisor or director of special projects and admissions, of which the Institute was deemed one.
We traveled together to secure the “yield” of students the university really wanted to admit, across a broad spectrum of socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. David was to me the precursor of DEI with a sense of justice and fair-mindedness that one could only hope for in a dean of admissions. His staff loved him and most importantly admired him.
I was honored when he agreed to join the Institute board. He certainly knew about us almost from day one of his coming to Tufts, and I believe appreciated our maverick spirit and our distinctive sense of breaking boundaries and willingness to innovate along with him. I had the privilege of directing the Newbauer Scholars initiative, whose first class included Ben Harburg and others, including a student who accompanied the NSA’s Thomas Blanton to Cuba to record the first uncensored Russian documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Balfour program which enabled me to meet and mentor remarkable young scholars from relatively underprivileged, rural and urban highschools across the country. We had many interesting experiences together, but perhaps none more unique than meeting with Allan Goodman, the head of the International Institute of Education in New York City in Manhattan, opposite the United Nations the very moment the planes hit the World Trade Center, and we watched them crash on the IIE’s TV monitors. We were hustled out of the building by UN security and fled the city in one of the last rental cars as the convoys of the National Guard were passing us on the highway. David was a confidant, a sage advisor, always able to find silver linings and renew my optimism. We were in New York to discuss a novel program, Passport to Leadership, that would provide Tufts rising sophomores who had never had a passport, and therefore never been outside the confines of the US, to link with IIE schools around the world on a specific, unified theme (we chose the world’s rivers) to bond and research together and present at symposia around the world. We could never raise the funding in a post-911 world where funding went elsewhere and isolationism took hold. David, who was also a minister, encouraged me to invite theological students to the EPIIC Nuclear Era year as many clergy had outspoken views on proliferation and mankind’s survival.