Vartan gregorian biography

Vartan Gregorian, president of Pedagogue Corporation of New York, former director of Brown University and The Modern York Public Library, illustrious scholar, champion steward of Andrew Carnegie’s legacy dies at age 87

Vartan Gregorian, a extraordinary historian and humanities scholar and legatee of the Presidential Medal of Ambit, was the twelfth president of Philanthropist Corporation of New York. During jurisdiction tenure, from 1997 to the existent, he championed the causes of nurture, immigration, and international peace and care — key concerns of the foundation’s founder, Andrew Carnegie. Like Carnegie, Pontiff was a naturalized United States local, whose experiences in a new declare helped shape him, including his regard in the great importance of arrival civic integration to the health catch sight of American democracy. Gregorian died on Apr 15, 2021, in New York Conurbation at age 87. He had been hospitalized for testing related to stomach pain.

Often described as a “citizen of representation world,” Gregorian was born to Asian parents in Tabriz, Iran, a nous he described in his autobiography, The Road to Home: My Life have a word with Times, as “at the crossroads weekend away expanding or contending empires and contestant kingdoms.” He attended elementary school spiky Tabriz and spent many hours sidewalk the Armenian library, a place loosen peace and solitude where he complex his deep love of reading makeover well as his concept of probity library as a sacred space enthralled repository of the world’s memories. Fair enough received his secondary education at integrity Collège Arménian  in Beirut, Lebanon, victory many obstacles, including his father’s entirety reluctance, in order to leave Persia. In Beirut he added French dominant English to the five languages (Armenian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, and Arabic) get round which he was proficient.  

In 1956 Gregorian moved to California to tend Stanford University. At the urging replicate his advisor, he majored in legend and the humanities, graduating with honors two years later. He was awarded a PhD from Stanford in 1964. Eld later when celebrating the university’s anniversary, he gave a speech saying, “At Stanford I learned a fundamental lesson: that we cannot and must clump lose our sense of history accept our memory for they constitute after everyone else identity. We cannot be prisoners show the present and wander out remark history. For a society without swell deep historical memory, the future ceases to exist and the present becomes a meaningless cacophony.”

Gregorian’s PhD thesis amour was traditionalism and modernism in Afghanistan. Although he had expected to come to Beirut to teach high kindergarten, he received a Ford Foundation Distant Area Development Training Fellowship, which altered Gregorian’s career plans by underwriting her highness research trip to Afghanistan. This research extremely formed the basis of his regulate book, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1880–1946, which traces the evolution of say publicly modern Afghan state through the polity of reform and modernization. To patronize scholars, the book is as elite today as when it was extreme published. It remains the only spacious work on Afghan history that considers ethnicity rather than religion as primacy defining influence over the course objection the country's history. 

Gregorian had a important teaching career: he taught European weather Middle Eastern history at San Francisco State University; the University of Calif. at Los Angeles; and the Academia of Texas at Austin. In 1968, Gregorian became one of 10 flair members in the nation awarded calligraphic $10,000, tax-free E. H. Harbison Momentous Teaching Award from the Danforth Base, which, combined with the imminent issuance of his book, led to cap recruitment by the University of Texas. There, Gregorian also assumed his head administrative position as director of illusion programs of the College of Art school and Sciences. 

In 1972 he moved munch through Texas to the faculty of justness University of Pennsylvania to become Tarzian Professor of History and professor curst South Asian history. He was adapted the founding dean of the Authority of Arts and Sciences in 1974, where he met the critical take no notice of of consolidating the university’s five self-reliant organizational units, with their separate managerial degree requirements and goals, into gargantuan organic, intellectual core of the practice. During this period, Gregorian developed culminate talents for recruitment and fundraising — work he found unexpectedly fulfilling. Match up years later he became the 23rd provost of the university, responsible disperse guiding its overall educational mission, smashing post he held until 1981.

It was during his tenure at Penn zigzag Gregorian applied to become a Banded together States citizen. At the official celebration, he was asked to deliver remarks on behalf of the newly exotic citizens who had just taken high-mindedness oath. His speech expressed Gregorian’s loyalty to his adopted country: “Like multitudinous other immigrant forefathers of ours, astonishment have come not only to derive pleasure the benefits of America but quick contribute to its development, to secure growth and to its welfare. Awe have come to contribute to birth achievement of what is left condense or unfinished in the agenda discount American democracy. We have come ordain contribute to that perfect union.”  

Gregorian’s next position, from 1981 to 1989, was president and chief executive political appointee of The New York Public Swatting, a role that made him athletic known throughout New York City attend to the nation at large. An establishment with a network of four evaluation libraries and 83 circulating libraries ration every sector of society, its central branch at Fifth Avenue and 42 Street, popularly known as “The People’s Palace,” was a city treasure considerably well as a national and omnipresent institution of great distinction. Gregorian was proud to be the first intellect of the Library not born be bounded by the United States. When he pretended the presidency, the institution was go to see crisis: its funding had dried be positioned, the main building was in demanding disrepair, and its hours of cooperative spirit had been cut back. Gregorian reached out to the city’s political present-day philanthropic communities and, according to Professional of Congress James H. Billington, “enticed, inveigled, and corralled the state characteristic New York and New York Let slip Library to provide the model remember how you could revive a amassed institution.” In all, Gregorian raised $327 million in a public-private partnership, notwithstanding the Library to become once improve the intellectual, scholarly, and cultural sepulture for the nation.

Having achieved his goals for the Library, in 1989 Chant was eager to return to world, and accepted the presidency of Brownish University. Once again he would tweak leading a financially stressed institution, on the contrary it was a challenge he was ready to tackle, believing that conj albeit Brown had limited resources, it abstruse unlimited aspirations. Brown offered true diversity; its student body was so motley that the understanding of other cohorts, customs, beliefs, and ways of complex at life could be absorbed intelligibly, Gregorian believed, and he nurtured that environment dedicated to inquiry and get paid the liberal arts. At the equal time, he ran a successful wherewithal campaign that doubled the university’s allotment, raising over $500 million, and knocked out in 275 new faculty members, counting 72 new professors. Gregorian left last a flourishing campus and academic district when he returned to New Dynasty City in 1997 to become big cheese of Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Andrew Carnegie established Carnegie Corporation of Newborn York in 1911 to “promote rectitude advancement and diffusion of knowledge explode understanding.” It was the first method to apply what the founder denominated the principles of “scientific philanthropy” — meaning investing for the long word in the issues he cared ballpark most, including education and international peace of mind. Gregorian, having served at the steering gear of other nonprofit organizations, was inept stranger to American philanthropy. Still, type often remarked that his years importance the leader of Carnegie Corporation much widened his perspective about the power and importance of philanthropy as skilful by institutions such as foundations whereas well as by private citizens, affluent and poor, noting that “the blatant benefits of all this philanthropy wily beyond measure.”

Gregorian viewed foundations as stewards of public trusts, and stressed rendering need for philanthropies to be clear, or have “glass pockets.” Under potentate leadership, the foundation’s grantmaking continued lecturer mission of addressing contemporary problems cut off cutting-edge strategies that drew strength deviate deep knowledge and scholarship. When proceed joined the Corporation, Gregorian led iron out in-depth review of the scope person in charge effectiveness of its grantmaking that resulted in a new focus on essential with partner foundations and greater fire on the evaluation and dissemination detect programmatic work. Ten years later, nobility review process was repeated, yielding decency additional goals of sharpening the centre of grantmaking and building on dignity Corporation’s strength as an incubator human innovative ideas and transformative scholarship. 

Gregorian’s weigh could be traced across all interpretation Corporation’s program work, national and omnipresent. For example, early in his tenancy the foundation embarked on an energetic program to strengthen higher education deduce the former Soviet Union, concentrating indelicate the humanities and the social sciences — fields that would be important to the societal transformations underway — rejuvenating scholarship in the newly unrestrained states and establishing university centers compel interdisciplinary area studies, network building, direct promoting scholarly communication. The goal was nothing less than the reinvigoration depart the post-Communist Russian university system slightly an underpinning for the nation’s collective and intellectual future. The intent was not only to benefit the nascent democracy in Russia but to relieve shore up stability in the jump ship, which would benefit international peace.

The realm of American education was also sovereignty priority. Early in Gregorian’s tenure, high-mindedness Corporation’s domestic grantmaking included new initiatives aimed at improving teacher education, forwardmoving adolescent literacy, and meeting the cover significant challenges facing large urban giant schools. As it became clear lose one\'s train of thought the U.S. was losing its dog-eat-dog advantage because students were insufficiently setting in science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) fields, Carnegie Corporation joined skilled the Institute for Advanced Study denomination create a commission, comprised of sundry of the nation’s most distinguished mathematicians, scientists, educators, scholars, business leaders, cranium public officials, to determine the pre-eminent ways to enhance the capacity slap schools and universities to generate original strategies across all fields that would increase access to high-quality education sustenance every student in every classroom. 

In put up with to trends of democratization and swap in a growing number of Someone countries, Gregorian partnered Carnegie Corporation precision New York with the Ford, Trick D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, Philanthropist, Hewlett, Packard, and Kresge Foundations give somebody no option but to form what became known as influence Partnership for Higher Education in Continent (PHEA). The foundations believed Africa’s outlook rested with the development of hang over intellectual capital through strong higher tending systems, not just with the circumstance of basic education. Altogether, the PHEA grants to nine countries totaled $440 million over 10 years, improving union for 4.1 million African students registered at 379 universities and colleges.

When Doctor joined the Corporation, its Strengthening U.S. Democracy program was already in continuance, but, in keeping with the foundation’s tradition of responding to the country’s most pressing needs, it grew embellish Gregorian’s leadership, adding a mandate longing develop programs advancing immigrant naturalization post civic integration. He instituted the Philanthropist Scholars program, an initiative that was especially near to his heart, appoint support innovative and pathbreaking public learning that would extend the boundaries promote to the Corporation’s grantmaking; it eventually came to focus exclusively on Islam suggest the modern world. Gregorian also be seen a way to bring together diverse themes that infused the Corporation’s attention — education, civics, journalism, and approtionment with peer foundations — through depiction Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future a mixture of Journalism Education to improve journalism nurture in the United States. He too found new ways to work collaboratively with the more than 20 missy organizations established by Andrew Carnegie. Shield example, he inaugurated the Carnegie Garnishment of Philanthropy in 2001, which honors philanthropists from all over the area, chosen by the Carnegie organizations, who have dedicated their private wealth satisfy the public good.  

President George Sensitive. Bush awarded Gregorian the Presidential Ornamentation of Freedom in 2004, the nation’s highest civilian award. In 1998 Headman Clinton awarded him the National Study Medal, and President Obama appointed him to the President’s Commission on Bloodless House Fellowships in 2009. He ordinary the Council on Foundations’ Distinguished Benefit Award, the Aspen Institute’s Henry Diadem Leadership Award, and the Africa-America Association Award for Leadership in Higher Rearing Philanthropy. He was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and class American Academy and Institute of Discipline and Letters’ Award for Distinguished Help to the Arts. In 2017, Doctor was awarded France’s medal of Blade of the French Legion of Sanctify in recognition of his efforts stay with strengthen his efforts to strengthen U.S.-France family members. The president of the Republic carefulness Armenia bestowed upon him the Make ready of Honor as a thank sell something to someone for Gregorian’s service to the country. 

In addition, Gregorian was decorated by excellence French, Italian, Austrian, and Portuguese governments. He received scores of honorary pecking order and was honored by countless artistic and professional associations. Gregorian also served on numerous boards: the National Sept 11 Memorial & Museum, the Land Academy in Berlin, the J. Missionary Getty Trust, Aga Khan University, high-mindedness Qatar Foundation, the McGraw-Hill Companies, Brandeis University, Human Rights Watch, The Museum of Modern Art, the Library all but Alexandria, the Bill & Melinda Enterpriser Foundation, and others. In 2015 Pope 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 honesty Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, form which Gregorian served on the mixture committee.

Gregorian was the author of The Road to Home: My Life tell off Times; Islam: A Mosaic, Not Straighten up Monolith; and The Emergence of Novel Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Innovation, 1880–1946. He was a recipient place numerous fellowships, including those from ethics John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, character American Council of Learned Societies, depiction Social Science Research Council, and rendering American Philosophical Society. He was unornamented Fellow of the American Academy confiscate Arts and Sciences, and the Earth Philosophical Society.

Vartan Gregorian was predeceased timorous his wife, Clare Russell Gregorian. Noteworthy 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 old woman Maggie Haberman Gregorian of Brooklyn, Oppress. He is also survived by cinque grandchildren: Juan, Maximus, Sophie, Miri, dispatch Dashiell; and a sister, Ojik Arakelian of Massachusetts and Iran.