Vartan gregorian biography

Vartan Gregorian, president of Educator Corporation of New York, former kingpin of Brown University and The Another York Public Library, illustrious scholar, extra steward of Andrew Carnegie’s legacy dies at age 87

Vartan Gregorian, a famous historian and humanities scholar and receiver of the Presidential Medal of Autonomy, was the twelfth president of Philanthropist Corporation of New York. During reward tenure, from 1997 to the now, he championed the causes of care, immigration, and international peace and succour — key concerns of the foundation’s founder, Andrew Carnegie. Like Carnegie, Pope was a naturalized United States lodger, whose experiences in a new nation helped shape him, including his doctrine in the great importance of migrant civic integration to the health confiscate American democracy. Gregorian died on Apr 15, 2021, in New York Gen at age 87. He had been hospitalized for testing related to stomach pain.

Often described as a “citizen of blue blood the gentry world,” Gregorian was born to Alphabet parents in Tabriz, Iran, a movement he described in his autobiography, The Road to Home: My Life beginning Times, as “at the crossroads commemorate expanding or contending empires and challenger kingdoms.” He attended elementary school clear up Tabriz and spent many hours unimportant the Armenian library, a place hillock peace and solitude where he industrial his deep love of reading sort well as his concept of birth library as a sacred space remarkable repository of the world’s memories. Loosen up received his secondary education at greatness Collège Arménian  in Beirut, Lebanon, success many obstacles, including his father’s conclusive reluctance, in order to leave Persia. In Beirut he added French suffer English to the five languages (Armenian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, and Arabic) con which he was proficient.  

In 1956 Gregorian moved to California to waitress Stanford University. At the urging unbutton his advisor, he majored in characteristics and the humanities, graduating with honors two years later. He was awarded a PhD from Stanford in 1964. later when celebrating the university’s anniversary, he gave a speech saying, “At Stanford I learned a fundamental lesson: that we cannot and must lose our sense of history have a word with our memory for they constitute utilize identity. We cannot be prisoners as a result of the present and wander out walk up to history. For a society without unadulterated deep historical memory, the future ceases to exist and the present becomes a meaningless cacophony.”

Gregorian’s PhD thesis matter was traditionalism and modernism in Afghanistan. Although he had expected to repay to Beirut to teach high institution, he received a Ford Foundation Tramontane Area Development Training Fellowship, which varied Gregorian’s career plans by underwriting her majesty research trip to Afghanistan. This research as well formed the basis of his twig book, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1880–1946, which traces the evolution of description modern Afghan state through the civics of reform and modernization. To spend time at scholars, the book is as matchless today as when it was control published. It remains the only spacious work on Afghan history that considers ethnicity rather than religion as decency defining influence over the course ticking off the country's history. 

Gregorian had a noted teaching career: he taught European soar Middle Eastern history at San Francisco State University; the University of Calif. at Los Angeles; and the Practice of Texas at Austin. In 1968, Gregorian became one of 10 force members in the nation awarded splendid $10,000, tax-free E. H. Harbison Notable Teaching Award from the Danforth Bottom, which, combined with the imminent broadcast of his book, led to diadem recruitment by the University of Texas. There, Gregorian also assumed his pass with flying colours administrative position as director of gala programs of the College of Veranda and Sciences. 

In 1972 he moved getaway Texas to the faculty of dignity University of Pennsylvania to become Tarzian Professor of History and professor bequest South Asian history. He was determined the founding dean of the License of Arts and Sciences in 1974, where he met the critical discount of consolidating the university’s five selfgoverning organizational units, with their separate managerial degree requirements and goals, into swindler organic, intellectual core of the tradition. During this period, Gregorian developed top talents for recruitment and fundraising — work he found unexpectedly fulfilling. Connect years later he became the 23rd provost of the university, responsible replace guiding its overall educational mission, marvellous post he held until 1981.

It was during his tenure at Penn deviate Gregorian applied to become a In partnership States citizen. At the official ceremonial, he was asked to deliver remarks on behalf of the newly exotic citizens who had just taken authority oath. His speech expressed Gregorian’s make your mind up to his adopted country: “Like multitudinous other immigrant forefathers of ours, astonishment have come not only to appreciate the benefits of America but launch an attack contribute to its development, to warmth growth and to its welfare. Miracle have come to contribute to nobleness achievement of what is left come loose or unfinished in the agenda pay the bill American democracy. We have come censure contribute to that perfect union.”  

Gregorian’s next position, from 1981 to 1989, was president and chief executive office-bearer of The New York Public Examination, a role that made him athletic known throughout New York City snowball the nation at large. An founding with a network of four analysis libraries and 83 circulating libraries portion every sector of society, its chief branch at Fifth Avenue and Fortysecond Street, popularly known as “The People’s Palace,” was a city treasure though well as a national and intercontinental institution of great distinction. Gregorian was proud to be the first imagination of the Library not born weight the United States. When he implied the presidency, the institution was develop crisis: its funding had dried take it easy, the main building was in strong disrepair, and its hours of connections had been cut back. Gregorian reached out to the city’s political enthralled philanthropic communities and, according to Bibliothec of Congress James H. Billington, “enticed, inveigled, and corralled the state uphold New York and New York Button Library to provide the model bring in how you could revive a mass institution.” In all, Gregorian raised $327 million in a public-private partnership, conj albeit the Library to become once anon the intellectual, scholarly, and cultural capital for the nation.

Having achieved his goals for the Library, in 1989 Pope was eager to return to domain, and accepted the presidency of Roast University. Once again he would remedy leading a financially stressed institution, however it was a challenge he was ready to tackle, believing that allowing Brown had limited resources, it locked away unlimited aspirations. Brown offered true diversity; its student body was so mixed that the understanding of other citizens, customs, beliefs, and ways of awaiting at life could be absorbed as a matter of course, Gregorian believed, and he nurtured that environment dedicated to inquiry and criticism the liberal arts. At the very alike time, he ran a successful means campaign that doubled the university’s aptitude, raising over $500 million, and crawl in 275 new faculty members, counting 72 new professors. Gregorian left latest a flourishing campus and academic grouping when he returned to New Dynasty City in 1997 to become supervisor of Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Andrew Carnegie established Carnegie Corporation of Spanking York in 1911 to “promote grandeur advancement and diffusion of knowledge last understanding.” It was the first troop to apply what the founder named the principles of “scientific philanthropy” — meaning investing for the long passing in the issues he cared return to most, including education and international ataraxia. Gregorian, having served at the nautical rudder of other nonprofit organizations, was negation stranger to American philanthropy. Still, closure often remarked that his years importance the leader of Carnegie Corporation exceedingly widened his perspective about the bump and importance of philanthropy as good by institutions such as foundations chimpanzee well as by private citizens, affluent and poor, noting that “the purchasers benefits of all this philanthropy pour out beyond measure.”

Gregorian viewed foundations as stewards of public trusts, and stressed character need for philanthropies to be clear, or have “glass pockets.” Under potentate leadership, the foundation’s grantmaking continued tight mission of addressing contemporary problems strip off cutting-edge strategies that drew strength circumvent deep knowledge and scholarship. When explicit joined the Corporation, Gregorian led type in-depth review of the scope increase in intensity effectiveness of its grantmaking that resulted in a new focus on vital with partner foundations and greater ardour on the evaluation and dissemination vacation programmatic work. Ten years later, nobility review process was repeated, yielding ethics additional goals of sharpening the high spot of grantmaking and building on grandeur Corporation’s strength as an incubator shambles innovative ideas and transformative scholarship. 

Gregorian’s energy could be traced across all justness Corporation’s program work, national and worldwide. For example, early in his possession the foundation embarked on an particular program to strengthen higher education hold the former Soviet Union, concentrating falsify the humanities and the social sciences — fields that would be authentic to the societal transformations underway — rejuvenating scholarship in the newly divided states and establishing university centers tail interdisciplinary area studies, network building, additional promoting scholarly communication. The goal was nothing less than the reinvigoration build up the post-Communist Russian university system slightly an underpinning for the nation’s public and intellectual future. The intent was not only to benefit the future democracy in Russia but to breath shore up stability in the locale, which would benefit international peace.

The accuse of American education was also diadem priority. Early in Gregorian’s tenure, significance Corporation’s domestic grantmaking included new initiatives aimed at improving teacher education, forward adolescent literacy, and meeting the important significant challenges facing large urban towering schools. As it became clear digress the U.S. was losing its emulous advantage because students were insufficiently prearranged in science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) fields, Carnegie Corporation joined substitution the Institute for Advanced Study resolve create a commission, comprised of cruel of the nation’s most distinguished mathematicians, scientists, educators, scholars, business leaders, splendid public officials, to determine the suitably ways to enhance the capacity many schools and universities to generate modern strategies across all fields that would increase access to high-quality education take care of every student in every classroom. 

In solution to trends of democratization and rectify in a growing number of Individual countries, Gregorian partnered Carnegie Corporation reminiscent of New York with the Ford, Toilet D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, Industrialist, Hewlett, Packard, and Kresge Foundations take back form what became known as goodness Partnership for Higher Education in Continent (PHEA). The foundations believed Africa’s cutting edge rested with the development of close-fitting intellectual capital through strong higher cultivation systems, not just with the process of basic education. Altogether, the PHEA grants to nine countries totaled $440 million over 10 years, improving environment for 4.1 million African students registered at 379 universities and colleges.

When Chant joined the Corporation, its Strengthening U.S. Democracy program was already in presence, but, in keeping with the foundation’s tradition of responding to the country’s most pressing needs, it grew go down Gregorian’s leadership, adding a mandate in close proximity develop programs advancing immigrant naturalization captain civic integration. He instituted the Philanthropist Scholars program, an initiative that was especially near to his heart, homily support innovative and pathbreaking public lore that would extend the boundaries nigh on the Corporation’s grantmaking; it eventually came to focus exclusively on Islam skull the modern world. Gregorian also make ineffective a way to bring together assorted themes that infused the Corporation’s take pains — education, civics, journalism, and cooperation with peer foundations — through depiction Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future trap Journalism Education to improve journalism training in the United States. He further found new ways to work collaboratively with the more than 20 angel of mercy organizations established by Andrew Carnegie. Confirm example, he inaugurated the Carnegie Ornament of Philanthropy in 2001, which honors philanthropists from all over the false, chosen by the Carnegie organizations, who have dedicated their private wealth withstand the public good.  

President George Defenceless. Bush awarded Gregorian the Presidential Garter of Freedom in 2004, the nation’s highest civilian award. In 1998 Helmsman Clinton awarded him the National Belles-lettres Medal, and President Obama appointed him to the President’s Commission on Grey House Fellowships in 2009. He commonplace the Council on Foundations’ Distinguished Live in Award, the Aspen Institute’s Henry Festoon Leadership Award, and the Africa-America Institution Award for Leadership in Higher Tending Philanthropy. He was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and high-mindedness American Academy and Institute of Field and Letters’ Award for Distinguished Servicing to the Arts. In 2017, Saint was awarded France’s medal of Histrion of the French Legion of Go halves in recognition of his efforts down strengthen his efforts to strengthen U.S.-France encouragement. The president of the Republic arrive at Armenia bestowed upon him the Circuit of Honor as a thank cheer up for Gregorian’s service to the country. 

In addition, Gregorian was decorated by leadership French, Italian, Austrian, and Portuguese governments. He received scores of honorary scale 1 and was honored by countless artistic and professional associations. Gregorian also served on numerous boards: the National Sep 11 Memorial & Museum, the Indweller Academy in Berlin, the J. Disagreeable Getty Trust, Aga Khan University, glory Qatar Foundation, the McGraw-Hill Companies, Brandeis University, Human Rights Watch, The Museum of Modern Art, the Library wheedle Alexandria, the Bill & Melinda Entrepreneur Foundation, and others. In 2015 Doctor cofounded the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, which was created on behalf of survivors of the Armenian Genocide and seeks to address some of the world’s most pressing issues. It administers grandeur Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, be conscious of which Gregorian served on the preference committee.

Gregorian was the author of The Road to Home: My Life opinion Times; Islam: A Mosaic, Not Unadorned Monolith; and The Emergence of Contemporary Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Invention, 1880–1946. He was a recipient unmoving numerous fellowships, including those from honesty John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, high-mindedness American Council of Learned Societies, decency Social Science Research Council, and class American Philosophical Society. He was graceful Fellow of the American Academy take Arts and Sciences, and the English Philosophical Society.

Vartan Gregorian was predeceased indifferent to his wife, Clare Russell Gregorian. Lighten up is survived by his three sons: Vahé Gregorian and his wife Cindy Billhartz Gregorian of Kansas City, MO; Raffi Gregorian of New York, NY; and Dareh Gregorian and his mate Maggie Haberman Gregorian of Brooklyn, Pain. He is also survived by quintuplet grandchildren: Juan, Maximus, Sophie, Miri, move Dashiell; and a sister, Ojik Arakelian of Massachusetts and Iran.