The Prieuré turns 1,000

The view from Tufts, 2018: At last, older than Harvard.

A pioneer of the Tufts European Center looks back
By Mary Van Bibber Harris

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the MacJannet Foundation is celebrating its 50th anniversary during the same year that the Prieuré in Talloires celebrates its 1,000th birthday, for these two entities have come to sustain each other almost symbiotically.

When Donald and Charlotte MacJannet transferred ownership of the Prieuré to Tufts University in 1978, they retained usufruct— that is, the right to use the Prieuré for their purposes, which annually included meetings of the MacJannet Foundation as well as occasional Entretiens symposiums. This synergy between Tufts and the MacJannet community endowed the medieval Prieuré with new life and purpose far beyond its present title as Tufts University’s European Center. While some of France’s great cathedrals have found new life in the 21st Century as living museums of the past, the 1,000-year-old Prieuré has been transformed into a unique incubator of new ideas.

​The significance of working in a building with a thousand years of history first struck me when then Tufts President Jean Mayer expressed his delight that Tufts could now claim to be older than Harvard, by six centuries!

As a Frenchman, Mayer was no stranger to old buildings, and indeed admired the Prieuré’s ancient stones right from his first visit there, in 1976. I was with him, and it was pretty clear that his fertile imagination was working overtime to determine how to convince the Tufts trustees to take on this precious responsibility, virtually unprecedented for an American university.

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