AUB gets a $2 million grant from philanthropy giant, the Mellon Foundation

By correspondent T.K. Maloy

BEIRUT – The American University of Beirut announced Monday that it was it was recipient of a “generous grant” of approximately $2 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The grant will be used for the establishment of a “Center for Arts and Humanities.” The university said that this grant is thus far the largest Mellon Foundation commitment to the school’s ongoing goal of becoming a regional leader in the humanities and arts. The university is already well known for its medical school and its engineering departments, among others.

Many students and parents also report that  AUB has become a representation of diversity and non-sectarian admission policy, changing the way the new generation of Lebanon and MENA young people communicate with each other without critical comment of religious, political party or ethnic sect, instead making friendships based on the person and not the their sectarian background.

“Given the radical transformations underway in the region, the humanistic role of AUB is more critical than ever,” said AUB Provost Ahmad Dallal, “This new center will provide an alternative Middle Eastern site for the production of humanistic knowledge rooted in local and regional cultures. The Center will occupy a pivotal position in mediating and articulating both inter regional and East-West cultural dialogues in a way inaccessible to similar centers in the U.S or Europe, and will be the natural regional and international partner for collaborative arts and humanities projects.”

According to a university press release. over the next five years, the grant will fund 15 faculty fellowships and 10 postdoctoral fellowships in addition to writers and artists in residence. Also it will help fund “high-profile public arts events, regional collaboration with scholars and universities, and other program activities and exchanges.”

The school’s Arts and Humanities Initiative, “which has been generously supported by the Mellon Foundation since its inception in 2012” will build on the AUB’s regional leadership in liberal arts education.

“As one of the leaders of liberal education in the region, AUB is well positioned to advance creativity and to promote freedom of expression, tolerance, diversity, and dialogue,” said Eugene Tobin, a senior program officer at the Mellon Foundation.
“The decision to establish a Center for the Arts and Humanities reflects the University’s core educational and research mission, and its far-reaching commitment to the region’s societies and their rich cultural legacies,” said AUB President Peter Dorman.

“This grant is a measure of the confidence Mellon feels in AUB, both in the importance of its educational mission in the Middle East and as an interlocutor for intercultural discourse.”

President Dorman will be leaving at the end of June. He will be succeeded by Fadlo Khuri a prominent Lebanese/American oncology physician and clinical cancer researcher who is the director of the large oncology program at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Khuri also has served as a trustee for AUB since 2014, and has a legacy of roots to the school including both grandfathers and his mother, all of whom graduated from AUB and a father who also was a greatly respected AUB doctor and dean of the medical school. Born in Boston, Khuri grew up Lebanon and was sent abroad to the United States during the Lebanese Civil War years in 1982 at the age of 18, and quickly climbed the ladder of the ultra-competitive system of American medical academic, research and patient treatment 

Emory University is one of America’s top medical schools and treatment centers.

Dorman leaves a strong legacy of diversity, saying in a recent media interview “we don’t want to be seen as an elitist university,” adding with regard to Lebanon “we are now recruiting  from all regions of Lebanon, from public schools and especially from families in financial need.”

Since Dorman becameAUB’s President, financial aid has rocketed from around $13 million — including the work-study program  — in the last five years, to currently boasting student financial aid of approximately $41 million.