Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, former president of Brown University and The New York Public Library, illustrious scholar, and steward of Andrew Carnegie’s legacy dies at age 87
Vartan Gregorian, a distinguished historian and humanities scholar and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was the twelfth president of Carnegie Corporation of New York. During his tenure, from 1997 to the present, he championed the causes of education, immigration, and international peace and security — key concerns of the foundation’s founder, Andrew Carnegie. Like Carnegie, Gregorian was a naturalized United States citizen, whose experiences in a new country helped shape him, including his belief in the great importance of immigrant civic integration to the health of American democracy. Gregorian died on April 15, 2021, in New York City at age 87. He had been hospitalized for testing related to stomach pain.
Often described as a “citizen of the world,” Gregorian was born to Armenian parents in Tabriz, Iran, a city he described in his autobiography, The Road to Home: My Life and Times, as “at the crossroads of expanding or contending empires and rival kingdoms.” He attended elementary school in Tabriz and spent many hours in the Armenian library, a place of peace and solitude where he developed his deep love of reading as well as his concept of the library as a sacred space and repository of the world’s memories. He received his secondary education at the Collège Arménian in Beirut, Lebanon, overcoming many obstacles, including his father’s great reluctance, in order to leave Iran. In Beirut he added French and English to the five languages (Armenian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, and Arabic) in which he was proficient.
In 1956 Gregorian moved to California to attend Stanford University. At the urging of his advisor, he majored in history and the humanities, graduating with honors two years later. He was awarded a PhD from Stanford in 1964. Years later when celebrating the university’s centennial, he gave a speech saying, “At Stanford I learned a fundamental lesson: that we cannot and must not lose our sense of history and our memory for they constitute our identity. We cannot be prisoners of the present and wander out of history. For a society without a deep historical memory, the future ceases to exist and the present becomes a meaningless cacophony.”
Gregorian’s PhD thesis topic was traditionalism and modernism in Afghanistan. Although he had expected to return to Beirut to teach high school, he received a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Development Training Fellowship, which changed Gregorian’s career plans by underwriting his research trip to Afghanistan. This research also formed the basis of his first book, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1880–1946, which traces the evolution of the modern Afghan state through the politics of reform and modernization. To many scholars, the book is as unique today as when it was first published. It remains the only broad work on Afghan history that considers ethnicity rather than religion as the defining influence over the course of the country's history.
Gregorian had a distinguished teaching career: he taught European and Middle Eastern history at San Francisco State University; the University of California at Los Angeles; and the University of Texas at Austin. In 1968, Gregorian became one of 10 faculty members in the nation awarded a $10,000, tax-free E. H. Harbison Distinguished Teaching Award from the Danforth Foundation, which, combined with the imminent publication of his book, led to his recruitment by the University of Texas. There, Gregorian also assumed his first administrative position as director of special programs of the College of Arts and Sciences.
In 1972 he moved from Texas to the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania to become Tarzian Professor of History and professor of South Asian history. He was appointed the founding dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1974, where he met the critical challenge of consolidating the university’s five autonomous organizational units, with their separate administrative degree requirements and goals, into an organic, intellectual core of the university. During this period, Gregorian developed his talents for recruitment and fundraising — work he found unexpectedly fulfilling. Four years later he became the twenty-third provost of the university, responsible for guiding its overall educational mission, a post he held until 1981.
It was during his tenure at Penn that Gregorian applied to become a United States citizen. At the official ceremony, he was asked to deliver remarks on behalf of the newly naturalized citizens who had just taken the oath. His speech expressed Gregorian’s commitment to his adopted country: “Like many other immigrant forefathers of ours, we have come not only to enjoy the benefits of America but to contribute to its development, to its growth and to its welfare. We have come to contribute to the achievement of what is left undone or unfinished in the agenda of American democracy. We have come to contribute to that perfect union.”
Gregorian’s next position, from 1981 to 1989, was president and chief executive officer of The New York Public Library, a role that made him well known throughout New York City and the nation at large. An institution with a network of four research libraries and 83 circulating libraries serving every sector of society, its main branch at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, popularly known as “The People’s Palace,” was a city treasure as well as a national and international institution of great distinction. Gregorian was proud to be the first head of the Library not born in the United States. When he assumed the presidency, the institution was in crisis: its funding had dried up, the main building was in severe disrepair, and its hours of operation had been cut back. Gregorian reached out to the city’s political and philanthropic communities and, according to Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, “enticed, inveigled, and corralled the state of New York and New York Public Library to provide the model of how you could revive a great institution.” In all, Gregorian raised $327 million in a public-private partnership, allowing the Library to become once again the intellectual, scholarly, and cultural repository for the nation.
Having achieved his goals for the Library, in 1989 Gregorian was eager to return to academia, and accepted the presidency of Brown University. Once again he would be leading a financially stressed institution, but it was a challenge he was ready to tackle, believing that although Brown had limited resources, it had unlimited aspirations. Brown offered true diversity; its student body was so varied that the understanding of other people, customs, beliefs, and ways of looking at life could be absorbed naturally, Gregorian believed, and he nurtured this environment dedicated to inquiry and to the liberal arts. At the same time, he ran a successful capital campaign that doubled the university’s endowment, raising over $500 million, and brought in 275 new faculty members, including 72 new professors. Gregorian left behind a flourishing campus and academic community when he returned to New York City in 1997 to become president of Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Andrew Carnegie established Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911 to “promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.” It was the first organization to apply what the founder called the principles of “scientific philanthropy” — meaning investing for the long term in the issues he cared about most, including education and international peace. Gregorian, having served at the helm of other nonprofit organizations, was no stranger to American philanthropy. Still, he often remarked that his years as the leader of Carnegie Corporation greatly widened his perspective about the impact and importance of philanthropy as practiced by institutions such as foundations as well as by private citizens, rich and poor, noting that “the societal benefits of all this philanthropy are beyond measure.”
Gregorian viewed foundations as stewards of public trusts, and stressed the need for philanthropies to be transparent, or have “glass pockets.” Under his leadership, the foundation’s grantmaking continued its mission of addressing contemporary problems with cutting-edge strategies that drew strength from deep knowledge and scholarship. When he joined the Corporation, Gregorian led an in-depth review of the scope and effectiveness of its grantmaking that resulted in a new focus on working with partner foundations and greater emphasis on the evaluation and dissemination of programmatic work. Ten years later, the review process was repeated, yielding the additional goals of sharpening the focus of grantmaking and building on the Corporation’s strength as an incubator of innovative ideas and transformative scholarship.
Gregorian’s influence could be traced across all the Corporation’s program work, national and international. For example, early in his tenure the foundation embarked on an ambitious program to strengthen higher education in the former Soviet Union, concentrating on the humanities and the social sciences — fields that would be essential to the societal transformations underway — rejuvenating scholarship in the newly independent states and establishing university centers for interdisciplinary area studies, network building, and promoting scholarly communication. The goal was nothing less than the reinvigoration of the post-Communist Russian university system as an underpinning for the nation’s social and intellectual future. The intent was not only to benefit the emerging democracy in Russia but to help shore up stability in the region, which would benefit international peace.
The state of American education was also his priority. Early in Gregorian’s tenure, the Corporation’s domestic grantmaking included new initiatives aimed at improving teacher education, advancing adolescent literacy, and meeting the most significant challenges facing large urban high schools. As it became clear that the U.S. was losing its competitive advantage because students were insufficiently prepared in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, Carnegie Corporation joined with the Institute for Advanced Study to create a commission, comprised of some of the nation’s most distinguished mathematicians, scientists, educators, scholars, business leaders, and public officials, to determine the best ways to enhance the capacity of schools and universities to generate innovative strategies across all fields that would increase access to high-quality education for every student in every classroom.
In response to trends of democratization and reform in a growing number of African countries, Gregorian partnered Carnegie Corporation of New York with the Ford, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, Rockefeller, Hewlett, Packard, and Kresge Foundations to form what became known as the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (PHEA). The foundations believed Africa’s future rested with the development of its intellectual capital through strong higher education systems, not just with the development of basic education. Altogether, the PHEA grants to nine countries totaled $440 million over 10 years, improving conditions for 4.1 million African students enrolled at 379 universities and colleges.
When Gregorian joined the Corporation, its Strengthening U.S. Democracy program was already in existence, but, in keeping with the foundation’s tradition of responding to the country’s most pressing needs, it grew under Gregorian’s leadership, adding a mandate to develop programs advancing immigrant naturalization and civic integration. He instituted the Carnegie Scholars program, an initiative that was especially near to his heart, to support innovative and pathbreaking public scholarship that would extend the boundaries of the Corporation’s grantmaking; it eventually came to focus exclusively on Islam and the modern world. Gregorian also found a way to bring together several themes that infused the Corporation’s work — education, civics, journalism, and collaboration with peer foundations — through the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education to improve journalism education in the United States. He also found new ways to work collaboratively with the more than 20 sister organizations established by Andrew Carnegie. For example, he inaugurated the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2001, which honors philanthropists from all over the world, chosen by the Carnegie organizations, who have dedicated their private wealth to the public good.
President George W. Bush awarded Gregorian the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004, the nation’s highest civilian award. In 1998 President Clinton awarded him the National Humanities Medal, and President Obama appointed him to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships in 2009. He received the Council on Foundations’ Distinguished Service Award, the Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Leadership Award, and the Africa-America Institute Award for Leadership in Higher Education Philanthropy. He was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters’ Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts. In 2017, Gregorian was awarded France’s medal of Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in recognition of his efforts to strengthen his efforts to strengthen U.S.-France relations. The president of the Republic of Armenia bestowed upon him the Order of Honor as a thank you for Gregorian’s service to the country.
In addition, Gregorian was decorated by the French, Italian, Austrian, and Portuguese governments. He received scores of honorary degrees and was honored by countless cultural and professional associations. Gregorian also served on numerous boards: the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the American Academy in Berlin, the J. Paul Getty Trust, Aga Khan University, the Qatar Foundation, the McGraw-Hill Companies, Brandeis University, Human Rights Watch, The Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Alexandria, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and others. In 2015 Gregorian 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 the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, for which Gregorian served on the selection committee.
Gregorian was the author of The Road to Home: My Life and Times; Islam: A Mosaic, Not A Monolith; and The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1880–1946. He was a recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Philosophical Society. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Vartan Gregorian was predeceased by his wife, Clare Russell Gregorian. He 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 wife Maggie Haberman Gregorian of Brooklyn, NY. He is also survived by five grandchildren: Juan, Maximus, Sophie, Miri, and Dashiell; and a sister, Ojik Arakelian of Massachusetts and Iran.