Vartan Gregorian
Vartan Gregorian (born April 8, 1934 in Tabriz, Iran) is a distinguished Armenian-Iranian-American academic, currently serving as the president of Carnegie Corporation of New York. After receiving his dual Ph.D. in history and humanities from Stanford University in 1964, Gregorian served on the faculties at several American universities before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he became the founding dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1974 and the provost in 1981. Starting in 1981 until 1989, Gregorian served as president of the New York Public Library, an eight-year tenure which would prove one of his most lasting legacies.
In 1989, he was chosen to become president of Brown University, where he served until 1997. In 1995, he was offered the presidency of Columbia University, which he declined due to his commitment to Brown's capital campaign. In 1997, he was selected as president of the philanthropic Carnegie Corporation of New York, his current position as of 2006. He has received the National Humanities Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Gregorian is on the advisory board of USC Center on Public Diplomacy and is a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica.[1] He has also received (as of 2006) honorary degrees from fifty-six institutions. He documented much of his private life in his 2003 autobiography The Road to Home: My Life and Times.
Early life
Gregorian was born in Tabriz, Iran, to Samuel B. Gregorian and Shushanik G. Mirzaian. His family belonged to the minority Armenian Christian population within the predominantly Azeri-speaking Muslim population in Tabriz. At age six, Gregorian's mother, then twenty-six, died in childbirth. His father distanced himself from Gregorian, and Gregorian and his younger sister Ojik were raised by Voski Mirzaian, his maternal grandmother.[2]
Elementary and secondary education
Gregorian attended elementary school in Iran. In his autobiography, in discussing the events that led to his secondary education, Gregorian refers to several "strangers" who allowed this transition in his life to take place (and eventually move him to the United States). First, in 1948, Edgar Maloyan, the Gaullist French vice-consul in Tabriz at the time, suggested to Gregorian that he ought to go to Beirut, Lebanon to continue his education and provided him with three letters of introduction:[3] one to the head of the Lebanese Internal Security Agency, one to the Collège Arménien, and one to a hotel where he could stay.[4] Gregorian also procured the assistance of another stranger in Tabriz to obtain his passport to get to Lebanon:
What also enabled me to do that was that a second stranger, an optometrist in Tabriz, gave me his property deed. That allowed me to obtain a passport because my father had told me if I could get a passport on my own, he would let me go, assuming that no fourteen-year-old kid could get a passport. This optometrist had taken me under his wing.[3]
The head of the Armenian Relief Society of Lebanon—also a stranger to him—arranged to provide Gregorian with meals for a monthly cost of $6.15 as well as lodging. He learned French and completed his secondary education at the Collège Arménien in Beirut. Simon Vratsian, former prime minister of the pre-Soviet Democratic Republic of Armenia and then director of the college, advised Gregorian to attend a university in the United States in the vicinity of a large Armenian population. In 1956, he applied to only two universities—the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University—and was admitted by each. Stanford's acceptance arrived by airmail months before Berkeley's did by surface mail, at which point Gregorian had already enrolled at Stanford.[5]
Stanford
Gregorian was twenty-two when he began his undergraduate education at Stanford in 1956. He developed an affinity for European history due to his relationship with his freshman mentor Wayne S. Vucinich, a historian of Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. He completed his B.A. in history and humanities with honors in 1958; the topic of his thesis was "Toynbee and Islam."[5]
While a student at Stanford, he again received provisions from Armenians who were strangers to him. He explains how this consistent benevolence reaffirmed his faith in the Armenian community in the diaspora and diaspora communities in general:
In Palo Alto, an Armenian family adopted me for all Sunday meals and holidays. All of this reinforced my conviction that diasporas are not ghettos—rather they are connecting bridges to larger communities, be it Jewish, be it Irish, be it Chinese, Armenian, Indian, and so forth. I never realized that until then.[3]
He would go on to receive his Ph.D. in history and humanities from Stanford in 1964, writing a dissertation entitled "Traditionalism and Modernism in Islam."[3] The topic of his dissertation was related to an ongoing research project which he began in 1961, after being nominated for a Ford Foundation fellowship which took him to Afghanistan. He also used the experience for his first book, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1840-1946 (1969, Stanford University Press).[5]
Professorships
Prior to receiving his Ph.D., Gregorian had already begun teaching European and Middle Eastern history at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) upon returning to California from Afghanistan in 1962.[5] He left San Francisco State in 1968 and for a brief stint served as Associate Professor at UCLA. That same year he transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained until 1972. He received the title of Professor at UT Austin, and also served as the Director of Special Programs there from 1970-1972.[6]
While at UT Austin, Gregorian had befriended John Silber, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences who was fired by the administration over a disagreement about whether to increase the university's student population and expand the university. Gregorian himself resigned in protest of the issue, but did not follow Silber and a number of other faculty members in their exodus to Boston University. Rather, in 1972, Gregorian accepted the position of Tarzian Professor of Armenian and Caucasian History and Professor of South Asian history at the University of Pennsylvania, an endowed professorship which allowed him to teach Armenian, South Asian, and European intellectual history.[3]
When in 1974 the University of Pennsylvania merged its College for Men and College for Women, Gregorian was named Dean of the School of Arts and Science, the first person to hold this position.[5] In 1978, he became Provost, the second highest administrative position at the university. By this point in his career, Gregorian was preparing to become the administrative head of an American university.
In 1980, then-president of the University of Pennsylvania Martin Meyerson announced his retirement, and Gregorian anticipated to succeed Meyerson. In fact, Gregorian was a candidate for the chancellorship at UC Berkeley but had withdrawn his candidacy in expectation of the appointment in Pennsylvania. But Gregorian was never appointed President of the University of Pennsylvania. "The story generally accepted," writes one Stanford alumnus in a 2005 interview with Gregorian, "is that some Philadelphia mandarins on Penn's board couldn’t tolerate a foreign name and accent—someone they saw as insufficiently polished and pedigreed—as president of their Ivy League institution."[5] In 1981, Gregorian resigned as Provost, and Sheldon Hackney was named President of the University of Pennsylvania that year.
References
- ^ Board of Editors: Vartan Gregorian. Encyclopædia Britannica (retrieved June 26, 2006).
- ^ Book Review: The Road to Home by Vartan Gregorian. Armenian News Network / Groong (retrieved June 10, 2006).
- ^ a b c d e "A Conversation with Vartan Gregorian". National Endowment for the Humanities (retrieved June 22, 2006).
- ^ French, Yvonne. "Vartan Gregorian Speaks at Library". Library of Congress (retrieved June 22, 2006).
- ^ a b c d e f "The Lionheart". Stanford Magazine (retrieved June 22, 2006).
- ^ Rhode Island House Resolution 386: Recognizing [Gregorian's Distinguished Academic and Administrative Career]. June 24, 1997 (retrieved September 5, 2006).