Vartan Gregorian papers (OF.1C.16)

Biographical/Historical note

Vartan Gregorian, sixteenth president of Brown University, was unanimously elected at a special meeting of the Corporation on August 31,1988. Born in Tabriz, Iran, on April 8, 1934, he attended an Armenian-Russian school until he was fifteen, when he left Tabriz with fifty dollars and a letter of introduction from a French Vice Consul and entered the Collège Arménien in Beirut, Lebanon. In 1955 he received a degree in Armenian studies. The next year he was awarded a scholarship for study overseas, and entered Stanford University. Studying through the summers, he received a bachelor of arts degree in history and humanities in two years. He earned his Ph.D. degree at Stanford in 1964, writing a dissertation on "Traditionalism and Modernism in Islam." He taught at San Francisco State University from 1960 to 1968. He won the Danforth Foundation's Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1968, and in the same year became professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1972 he was named Tarzian Professor of Armenian and Caucasian History at the University of Pennsylvania. The next year he was named faculty assistant to the president and provost, and served until 1980, when he resigned. A year later he became the president and chief executive officer of the New York Public Library, which he restored from a declining institution to a financial and cultural success during the next eight years.