Dear friends and colleagues in the AUB community,
This is my last President’s Perspective message of 2016—a chance to wish all who are
celebrating a Merry Christmas, and everyone a prosperous and safe New Year. I hope
everybody will manage to get some well-deserved rest at some stage in the next few
weeks at the end of an extraordinary year of attainment and exhilarating hard work.
Sesquicentennial crescendo
We rounded off the 150th anniversary celebrations in great style last Thursday with a
concert on the plaza in front of College Hall. The clement December weather allowed us
to enjoy the light show against our signature College Hall building, with great live music,
and an al-fresco buffet. Faculty, students, staff and alumni gathered in considerable
numbers, and the atmosphere was thick with the optimism and enthusiasm that has
tracked this whole year of memorable festivities. Your engagement as a community with
these initiatives has been unmistakably the highlight of this year. A phenomenal amount
of effort and expertise has gone into the preparation and implementation of our 150th
calendar; I want to thank each and every one of you who undertook this tremendous
work, alumni, faculty, students, and staff, many of whom have endured a whole year of
double shifts, and weekend work (I’m thinking especially of the Events Unit and the
Creative Services team, among others). A lot of stress has been borne by many
shoulders in order to make our celebrations such a success. My sincere gratitude and
appreciation goes to all of you.
On the exact day of our 150th birthday, December 3,
after much delicate negotiation by Vice-President for
Advancement Dr. Imad Baalbaki in the corridors of
power, we were able to produce a beautiful
commemorative postage stamp in partnership with
LibanPost, with 2,750 limited edition first-day covers, and
a run of 30,000 ordinary printed stamps. The design was
by our own Najib Attieh, Art Director in the Office of
Communications, one of our most talented, yet modest
employees, who with his team has performed miracles
throughout the year. I strongly recommend obtaining
one of these stamps, your own very affordable memento
of this landmark year.
Two days later, we staged a memorable 150th Founders’ Day,
with University of Pennsylvania historian Dr. Eve M. Troutt
Powell as keynote speaker making a powerful argument for
liberal arts education which lies at the core of AUB’s unique
contribution to Lebanon, the Arab world and beyond during its
century and a half. Dr. Troutt Powell drew on the life
experiences of greats like Jurji Zaydan and Huda Sha’arawi, and
lesser-known figures such as one-time slave and later Sudanese
anti-slavery campaigner Father Daniel Sorur Farim Deng to make her case. It was an
eloquent and unforgettable affirmation of how our connections to another as human
beings are most strongly expressed through the arts, humanities, and natural sciences—
to paraphrase Dr. Troutt Powell, these are what makes us human and allow us to find
the humanity in others.
A most accomplished AUBite
Congratulations to Dr. Huda Zoghbi, AUB alumna and Trustee,
who raised a Breakthrough Prize last week. Huda is without
question among the most accomplished and generous
scientists, and most likely the most insightful basic scientist to
have emerged from this institution in its 150 years. Her
groundbreaking work on genetic and
neurodevelopmental/neurodegenerative disorders will impact
medicine and science for generations after we are all long gone
and it gives us great pride to see her deservingly sweep so many major awards in one
year—not just the $3M Breakthrough Prize, but a Shaw Prize, the first Nemmers Prize for
Medicine, and the Jessie Stevenson Kovalenko Medal, awarded every three years by the
US National Academy of Sciences.
As an alumnus, Dr. Zoghbi is an extraordinary ambassador and a source of so much pride
for our University. It has often been our people's quandary that we are hesitant to
express pride in our native origins while fully immersed in the enchanted world of the
West. But Huda leads the way in pride of origin as much as in science, and we at AUB, in
Lebanon and in the Arab World are heartened to hear her speak affirmatively on her
own pride of origin and also on what current opportunities might be like for progress in
science and medicine should recent nativist campaign platforms come to reality. It is the
courage to speak out at times like these that is most critical, and she has exemplified
that yet again in the interviews that I had the privilege to read. As the cupboardful of
prizes this year has not surprised us, nor were we surprised that Huda hasn’t sought to
use her winnings for personal enrichment, but rather has given every penny back to
educate and inspire other transformative scientists. We are particularly grateful to be
able to announce the four-year Huda and William Zoghbi Scholarship in Science and
Medicine, which we will be able to initiate with the interest from her latest most
generous gift.
On stage, in the community
Shakespeare’s King Lear is my favorite work of drama—an agonizingly tragic tale of a
country plunged into civil war over the foolish pride and malicious rivalries among the
ruling elite. Violence, torture, treachery, majestic power reduced to utter destitution,
and a terrible storm from which some emerge enlightened, others blind or mad. It was a
stroke of artistic genius for the AUB Theater Initiative, in collaboration with the Londonbased
Faction Theatre to envision staging this gut-wrenching Jacobean tragedy in
modern colloquial Lebanese dialect. The performance has received enthusiastic
reviews and played to good-sized audiences in the 400-seater Al Madina Theater in
Hamra throughout December. I saw it myself on Sunday and will try to catch it again if
possible. I cannot recommend this Lear enough, and it is great to know so many of our
community have experienced the show. If you haven’t, there are still tickets available for
December 15-18.
The AUB Theater Initiative, which is a collaboration between the Departments of English
and Fine Arts, under the respective leaderships of Drs. Robert Myers and Sahar Assaf,
has been gradually building momentum since their first productions in 2013. Robert,
who is a highly accomplished playwright and professor of English at AUB, and the multitalented
Sahar came to me in February along with English Chair Sonja Meijer-Atassi and
then Associate Provost and current Dean of Arts and Sciences Nadia El Cheikh with the
proposal to stage a Lebanese Lear, and there is no doubt with this terrific production the
Initiative has reached a new level of excellence, in terms of quality, scale and scope.
Sahar (pictured above with Roger Assaf in the role of Lear), whose credits for codirecting,
co-translating, and co-starring (as Lear’s daughter Cordelia) must make her
“hardest working person” in show business—at AUB at least—and we are enormously
proud and admiring of her and Robert’s work. It has been a great year for the initiative,
which also staged the Mounadilat series in October, the stage reading of After Darwin in
September and the promenade theater عامل أنا exploring the experience of janitors on
AUB campus in April. I look forward to this initiative going on to ever-greater
achievements. In my mind, a thriving theater culture is one of the hallmarks of a vibrant
and open society and it is gratifying to see talented members of the AUB community
reviving this culture not just on campus but in the neighboring areas of Beirut.
Best regards,
Fadlo R. Khuri, MD
President