Commencement Speaker and Honorary Degree Recipient

Vartan Gregorian, the 12th president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, is an historian, educator and author.

As president of Carnegie Corporation, a grantmaking institution founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1911, he has worked for the past 10 years to promote Carnegie’s vision of philanthropy by building on his two major concerns: advancing education and international peace.

Born in Iran of Armenian parents, Gregorian was educated in Iran and Lebanon before entering Stanford University where he earned his B.A. in 1958 and Ph.D. in 1964. After teaching history at several American universities, he joined the Univeristy of Pennsylvania, where he was appointed founding dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (1974), becoming that institution’s 23rd provost four years later. He went on to become the president of The New York Public Library (1981- 89), where he raised over $300 million, and president of Brown University (1989-97), where he nearly tripled the University’s endowment.

Among his numerous awards and fellowships are the Ellis Island Medal of Honor (1986), the American Academy of the Institute of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal of Service to the Arts (1989), the National Humanities Medal (1998), awarded to him by President Bill Clinton and the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award (2004).

He serves on the boards of many institutions, including Brandeis University, Central European University, The Museum of Modern Art and Human Rights Watch and has been a board member of the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gregorian has been decorated by governments around the world and is the author of The Road To Home: My Life And Times, Islam: A Mosaic, Not A Monolith, and The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 1880-1946. For his visionary leadership in the field of education and the humanities, he will receive the Doctor of Humane Letters degree.