American University of Beirut

​​​​​​​​​As we close out what has been a tumultuous spring semester, I find myself harking back to the immediate aftermath of the Israeli bombardment of Beirut on April 8, 2026. I immediately headed to the medical center, starting with our Emergency Department, trying to ascertain whether our remarkable group of physicians, nurses, and staff had what they needed to treat the wounded who had already started to flow into the Levant’s premier medical center. Were we applying the lessons learned from the myriad previous crises, especially over the last seven years? Did we know when to pause and divert the incoming ambulances to other hospitals and medical centers for stabilization before again accepting the most badly injured residents of the war-torn country? After an hour of planning and discussions, I was confident the answer was a resounding yes.

I then headed back to campus, where I met with students studying at Jafet Library, urging them to shelter in place unless their homes were a safe distance from the areas likely to see further danger and destruction. We announced a closure of the university to all but essential staff, exempting of course AUBMC and KMC, through Monday, April 13, with the emphasis on one thing only: ensuring the safety of our community.

Even before President Trump announced the ceasefire that would include Lebanon, starting on April 17, I was determined to pull off a fitting graduation for the Class of 2026. This remarkable group of students, the vast majority of whom had joined AUB between 2021 and 2023, had seen, and suffered through, a great deal. Many of them came from communities that had lost families, homes, jobs, and opportunities over the last five years. During this period, their and their loved ones’ lives had become considerably harder.

Despite the rising quality of education at AUB, with the recruitment of excellent faculty and staff to replace those who departed in peak crisis times, theirs had not been an easy voyage through our magical university. But the Class of 2026’s persistence and resilience was nothing short of admirable. Everyone at every level of AUB—faculty, staff, administration, and board—was fully determined to give them the unique, rousing AUB sendoff they so richly deserved.

 

We resumed in-person teaching fully on April 21, right after the Orthodox Easter break. As such, knowing I had upcoming trips to Athens to attend the Delphi Forum, and to Cyprus to work with AUB Mediterraneo Rector Wassim El Hajj on several urgent matters, we started preparing for graduation on many levels. This included choosing a topic, song, and lesson for my commencement address; managing student expectations for the semester and graduation; communicating with and arranging the travel and speeches of our three distinguished honorands; and, finally, coming to the difficult decision with Board Chair Abdo Kadifa to limit the number of trustees attending graduation while ensuring sufficient representation to help lift the spirits of our community members. None of these would prove easy.

The ceasefire has largely held in our immediate surroundings, unlike what took place on April 8, where areas near our campus were damaged. We needed to account for the trauma our community had suffered and bring back to campus those who had gone abroad in order to finish the semester. 

The provost, registrar, and Senate extended the semester by about one week, with a shortened reading period for final exams. Meanwhile, our commencement committee and University Student Faculty Committee (USFC) met frequently to bring together our plans and enhance communication. While I had reassured our students we would have a graduation on time, even if we limited attendance to the students and their parents or guardians, expectations grew as Beirut and the airport were largely spared further blows. As May rolled on, students petitioned politely but firmly to restore the full allocation of tickets, which we were eventually able to accommodate.

This year, I wrote my commencement address earlier than at any time in my eleven-year tenure as president. The message was clear in my mind, even if the connection was obscure. I had first heard Bonnie Raitt’s magnificent rendering of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” late in the summer of 1974. The song, written by a 24-year-old Prine from the perspective of a despairing older woman whose life was filled with regret and longing, was a prayer for meaning amidst disappointment. Disappointment in life itself.​

Although those feelings were largely alien to me at age eleven, I had already lost my maternal uncle to an early heart attack and a classmate to cancer. At the same time, I had begun to discover that not even my parents had all the answers to life’s questions. I searched for some of those answers in the lyrics and music of Bonnie Raitt, Joan Baez, Linda Ronstadt, and Joni Mitchell, artists who, along with Bob Dylan and the Beatles, had inspired me from an early age.​

The song stuck in my mind. I have been listening to it a great deal over the last few years. But the message, of searching for meaning in one’s “not so golden” years, was not what I was searching for to share with this year’s hardened but still hopeful graduates. It was another of Prine’s songs, written two decades later, that better fit the occasion. 

“All the Best” anchored Prine’s 1991 comeback album The Missing Years, following a series of profound personal losses, including the breakup of his second marriage. What Prine makes clear in this song is that despite his own heartbreak, he does not wish his former companion the same torment; instead, he wishes her “all the best.” It culminates in Prine’s devastating distillation of what happens when two people grow apart: “Your heart gets bored with your mind/And it changes you.” Yet the song’s lasting message is one of grace rather than bitterness.

That was precisely the message I wanted to send our graduating students. Over three, four, and five years, I had discovered that they too had “so much love that (they) cannot hide.” 

 

This message dovetailed well with the thoughtful and inspiring speeches of our three honorands, Christiane Amanpour, Suad Amiry, and Amin Arnaout, who spoke of resilience, justice, and learning. Messages powerfully distilled in their own ways by our two student commencement speakers, Joe Youssef and Carmen Bonja, and FAS Penrose Award winner Elias Skoulte Oweiss, all of whom described the very sense of purpose, duty, and belonging to a community, in this case the AUB community, that eludes the “old woman” in “Angel from Montgomery.” The narrator in that song pleads repeatedly for the angel to:

“Just give me one thing I can hold on to
To believe in this living is just a hard way to go”

I may well have pleaded for an angel from somewhere to help us give these wonderful students and honorands the graduation they all had quietly dreamed of and, in some cases, not so quaintly clamored for. By the Friday of commencement, and looking ahead to the undergraduate ceremony on Saturday, I was facing exhaustion. Fifteen trustees, having met with representative groups of students, faculty, staff, and administrators, recounted 56 possible imperatives for us to undertake moving forward. The trustees, who further uplifted the mood on campus through their presence, were delighted to report that they found the four groups in a surprisingly confident and determined mood. As I worked to distill the main items from that list, along with making final preparations for graduation, during an eleven-day marathon where I gave fifteen different speeches, I found myself again looking everywhere for that angel from anywhere.

But the graduation in the end was poignant, powerful, and, in far more ways than one could have possibly imagined, as close to perfect as possible. That angel from Montgomery did just fine after all.​