Gregorian, Vartan (b. 1934)
Role: Sixteenth PresidentDates: 1989 - 1997
Portrait Location: Sayles Hall 108
Artist: Prosperi, Lucia and Warren ()
Portrait Date: 1998
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 57 1/2" h x 32 1/2" w
Framed Dimensions: 67 1/2" h x 42 1/2"
Brown Portrait Number: 273
Brown Historical Property Number: 2214
Vartan Gregorian, sixteenth president of Brown University, was born in 1934 in Tabriz, Iran, of Armenian parents. He received his elementary education in an Armenian-Russian school in Iran and his secondary education in Beirut, Lebanon. In 1956 he entered Stanford University, graduating with honors in history and the humanities in only two years. He earned a Ph.D. from Stanford in 1964, writing a dissertation on traditionalism and modernism in Islam. He quickly earned distinctions as a teacher, and in 1972 the University of Pennsylvania named him Tarzian Professor of Armenian and Caucasian History; a year later he was faculty assistant to the president and provost. In 1980 Gregorian took on the presidency of the New York Public Library, a job that would earn him a reputation as a gifted institutional leader as well as educator. In eight years he rescued one of the United States' best-known public institutions from financial and cultural crisis and thereby restored the stature of public libraries nationwide. Public negligence of libraries, Gregorian said, was "not negotiable. It was unthinkable. Through my brashness, I reminded New Yorkers, and Americans, that [they] were dealing with an institutions that embodies 5,000 years of human history."
During his tenure at the library, Brown University awarded Gregorian an honorary degree. He left the library to become president of Brown in 1989, and remained in that role until 1997 when he accepted the presidency of Carnegie Corporation. While at Brown, Gregorian hired 270 new faculty members, expanded the library, and established eleven new departments. As a consummate fund-raiser, he also doubled the university's endowment. Yet Gregorian insisted that a Brown education should not be about money and chastised his colleagues for their Ivy League inferiority complex, "Brown, I have always said, is the ballerina of the Ivy League...the university must always be on its toes. It cannot be complacent. They still have a Brown crisis, a Rhode Island crisis. If anything great happens, they think it is accidental...they were dazzled by the wealth of Harvard, Princeton and Yale. I've never been dazzled by wealth. I've always been dazzled by who you are rather than what you have. And that attitude, it is my hope, will set the tone for Brown in the next decade."
The portrait of Gregorian, painted by husband and wife team Lucia and Warren Prosperi of Massachusetts, was unveiled in May of 1998 at a ceremony in tribute to the President Emeritus. A plaque unveiled in Gregorian Quad at the same time reads:
This quadrangle is named in honor of Brown's 16th president VARTAN GREGORIANChild of Tabiz ? Scholar/ Renowned professor at six universities/ Proud citizen of the United States/ Hero of the New York Public Library/ Leader of reform in education ? Author/ Perpetual student ? Humanitarian/ Devoted President of Brown university from 1989 to 1997There is no man and no woman who does not find his or her time and there is no hour that does not have its leader.