Michael True, professor emeritus of English at Assumption College, gives a lecture on the history of nonviolence. Photo borrowed from the Seacoast Peace Response's website; http://www.seacoastpeaceresponse.org/.

Assumption College Professor Emeritus Receives Second Fulbright Scholarship

For some, world peace is just a dream, but for others, it is their life’s passion. Michael True, professor emeritus of English at Assumption College, is closer than ever to realizing his vision of a world without violence.

True, a longtime peace activist and researcher, has recently been selected as a Fulbright Scholar for January-March 2004. He will be traveling to India, where he will be lecturing on peace, conflict, and nonviolence studies at four different universities in the cities of Jaipur, Calcutta, New Delhi, and Banaras.

His career as a peace educator began taking shape around the time of the Vietnam War, while he was teaching American literature and poetry at Assumption. In the 1980s, he began to teach full courses in peace studies, using an interdisciplinary approach to create these curriculums. He even helped to form a Peace Studies committee with other dedicated faculty members on campus.

True spent 34 years at Assumption, retiring from full-time teaching in 1997. Since then, he has taught courses at colleges and universities all over the country. He also gives national workshops, conferences, and lectures centered around the topic of the history of nonviolence in the United States.

True’s work is widely published. As a respected authority on the United States’ history of nonviolence, he has written and edited 10 books, including An Energy Field More Intense Than War: The Nonviolent Tradition and American Literature (1995); The Frontiers of Nonviolence, with Chaiwat Satha-Anand (1998); To Construct Peace (1992); and Ordinary People: Family Life and Global Values (1991). He has also written numerous editorials and features for local and national publications.

Since the early 1980s, True has been affiliated with several national and international peace studies organizations, including the Peace and Justice Association and the International Peace Research Association Foundation. He began to serve on international committees and conferences after his 1979 American Philosophical Society Grant in England, where he began meeting peace activists from all over the globe, building lasting associations.

In November 2003, he was invited to give the Honors Convocation address, “Education for an Interdependent World” at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY. After he delivered his speech, the college awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa.

The Fulbright scholarship, True’s second, will take him back to India where he completed his first during 1997-1998. While on his first Fulbright, he taught American literature at Utkal University in Bhubaneswar, and the Center for Gandhian Studies at the University of Rajsathan, in Jaipur. He met a variety of people who shared his interests, and entertained the possibility of someday returning to India and concentrating on peace studies.

“I love India,” said True. “It’s a great country with a powerful culture. It’s invigorating and fascinating; full of tremendous extremes.”

During his Fulbright travels to four different Indian universities, True plans to lecture on a variety of topics. These will include, “Gandhi and the American Tradition of Nonviolence”; “The Story of Global Nonviolence or ‘People Power’ since 1980,” in which he cites examples such as the Berlin Wall’s demise in 1989, and “Building a Peace Culture: U.N. Decade for the Children of the World, 2001-2010,”a vision of where cultures need to be by the end of the decade. He will also be conducting several interviews with students and authorities.

True expects that his 2004 visit will be quite different from his last, given the political climate and the drastic changes that the world has seen in the past few years.

“The second Bush administration has made us quite unpopular in some foreign countries,” he says. “I’m anxious to hear the perceptions of the Indian people. I hope that I can win their trust, so they can tell me what they think.”

True is aware of the possible dangers of traveling abroad. He recently received an email from Fulbright officials, warning all traveling Fulbright scholars to be ‘vigilant’ in their foreign destinations.

True is grateful to Assumption College, which, he says, was encouraging and supportive of his travel and research, often providing him with faculty grants. In 1989, one of these grants allowed him to teach and lecture in China, where he found himself in the midst of the country’s democratic uprising; a “life-changing” experience, he says.

“There is still tremendous work to be done,” True says of the long road to peace. “But changes are being made.”