May 14, 2021
Master of raising money and of giving it away…
Vartan Gregorian, the Iranian-born former president of the New York Library and Brown University, and more recently the leader of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, passed away April 16. He was 87.
He died shortly after being hospitalized for testing related to stomach pain.
Gregorian overcame the countless challenges he faced as a young immigrant to the United States and went on to build a remarkable career that spanned several decades and crossed the lines of academia, philanthropy, and culture within and beyond his adopted country. He was an ardent advocate of education and enlightenment, seeing books as “stations of hope, education and better future.”
Gregorian was born into an Armenian Christian family in Tabriz April 8, 1934. His father worked as an accountant for the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. and often lived away from home. Vartan’s mother died when he was six. Desperate to soften the blow, his relatives told him and his younger sister that she was simply “undertaking a long journey” to “America, a beautiful, faraway land,” he wrote in his memoir, fueling his vision of the United States as a welcoming paradise.
His grandmother became the guiding force of his childhood, telling aphoristic stories, instilling manners and morals and always encouraging education. When Vartan was 14, he was offered the opportunity to attend an Armenian school in Beirut.
He excelled at his studies, spoke seven languages and completed his undergraduate degree at Stanford in two years,
When he arrived in New York, a shy and lonely scholarship student, one of his first stops was the palatial New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. “Suddenly, I realized that nobody had asked for any identification or permission for me to enter,” he later told NPR. “So quietly, I left.” He didn’t realize that the library was free and open to all.
In 1956, aged 22 and with only a rudimentary knowledge of English, he arrived in the United States to enroll at Stanford University, where he majored in history and the humanities, graduating with honors in 1958. His quest to understand the relationship between the individual and society at large began there.
Vartan Gregorian was awarded a Ph.D. in history and humanities by Stanford in 1964. In 1972, he joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty and was appointed Tarzian professor of history and professor of South Asian history. He was founding dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and four years later became its twenty-third provost.
But he resigned in 1981 when he was passed over as president of the Ivy League university, partly as a result of his social rough edges, the very characteristic that endeared him to so many outside academia and made him so approachable.
In 1981–1989, Gregorian served as president of The New York Public Library and was widely credited with restoring the status of the library as a cultural landmark. According to The New York Times, when Gregorian arrived, he discovered that the library’s 75 miles of shelving had not been dusted in 75 years. Even worse, the air conditioning had broken down and the library’s collection of rare books was moldering. The library was so decrepit after years in which the city government was impoverished that burned-out light-bulbs were not even being replaced. Gregorian went on a huge fund-raising spree and changed everything, making the library a revered institution in the city and making himself a revered character in the city.
In 1989, he was appointed president of Brown University. Brown became both more global, more academically competitive, and more financially secure under his leadership. During his tenure, he led a campaign that raised over $500 million, bringing the institution’s endowment passed the $1 billion mark.
Gregorian grew frustrated by campus politics, and he had no patience for faculty pettiness or backbiting. “Let me put it delicately,” he told Humanities, describing the difference in running a library versus a university. “Books don’t talk back.”
From 1997 until his death, Dr. Gregorian was president of the Carnegie Corporation.
In 1998, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton, and in 2004 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civil award of the United States, by President Bush.
Gregorian was a master fundraiser, which gave him the capital to rescue the floundering New York Public Library system and to restore a drowning Brown University to eminence. At Carnegie, founded a century earlier by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie as a philanthropic foundation, Gregorian shifted gears from raising money to giving it away.
“I thought it would be easy to come here and just write checks, but I found it just as difficult as being a fundraiser,” he said to Humanities. “Actually, it’s harder … because you have so many excellent projects that compete for funding.”
He pushed back against criticism, levied most forcefully in a 1997 report by a private commission headed by former Education Secretary Lamar Alexander, that foundations like his were ineffectual extensions of big government, addressing “broad social theories” instead of “concrete problems.”
“Foundations were created to do things that government could not,” Gregorian argued in an interview with The New York Times, such as study issues, ask questions and stimulate discussion — not to pick up the slack when Washington cuts social programs.
In his lifelong mission to achieve global prosperity and peace, Gregorian always spoke up on behalf of the most destitute and disenfranchised.
A prolific author, Gregorian wrote several books, including: The Road To Home: My Life and Times; Islam: A Mosaic, Not a Monolith; and The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 1880-1946.
“I know it’s a cliche to say ‘only in America,’ but in my case, that is the truth,” Gregorian said in his commencement address at Stanford in 2006. “I’m still convinced that while America is not perfect, it is still perfectible.”
Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the Carnegie Corporation’s board of trustees, said, “We will remember him most for his immense intellect, his thoughtful generosity, his witty, learned, and sly sense of humor, and his uncanny ability to both inspire and challenge each of us to do our utmost to advance the Corpor-ation’s mission above all else. He was a man of the world who inspired the world.”
In 1960, Gregorian married Clare Russell, whose ancestors — on both sides — had come to America aboard the Mayflower. She died in April 2018. Survivors include their three sons, Vahe Gregorian of Kansas City, Missouri, Raffi Gregorian of New York City and Dareh Gregorian of Brooklyn; a sister; and five grandchildren.