Who

A towering figure in the worlds of education and philanthropy, Vartan Gregorian is the former president of Brown and the current head of the Carnegie Corporation, one of the nation's oldest and largest philanthropic foundations.

Backstory

An ethnic Armenian, Gregorian grew up in Tabriz, Iran, and attended high school in Lebanon before arriving in the United States in 1956 to enroll at Stanford. He earned his B.A. in just two years and lingered in Palo Alto after graduation, picking up a PhD in history and taking teaching jobs at San Francisco State College, UCLA, UT Austin, and the University of Pennsylvania. He was a history professor at Penn in the '70s when he moved from teaching to administration, signing on first as the school's dean of arts and sciences and later as its provost. In 1981, Gregorian relocated to New York to become president of the New York Public Library. As the NYPL's leader, he helped reinvigorate the ailing institution, persuading then-Mayor Koch to restore much of the funding that had been revoked during the city's fiscal meltdown in the late '70s, and also secured donations from some of the city's most prolific arts patrons, people like Brooke Astor, David Rockefeller, and Daniel Rose. Gregorian returned to the ivory tower in 1989 when he was named president of Brown. His tenure at the school was fruitful: He more than doubled the endowment to over $800 million, boosted applications to record levels and added almost 300 new faculty members. Mission accomplished, he returned to Manhattan after he was named president of the illustrious Carnegie Corporation in 1997.

Of note

The Carnegie Corporation was founded by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie in 1911 with an endowment of $25 million; it now has about $2.2 billion in assets and hands out $100 million in grants each year. It supports a motley array of cultural institutions, educational programs, and world peace organizations, such as the National Academy of Sciences, Brookings Institute, Sesame Workshop, Educational Testing Service, the Federal Pell Grant program, Teach for America, Fund for Peace, and the Center for Public Integrity.

Although running the Carnegie Foundation is Gregorian's primary occupation, his extensive experience leading non-profits has made him a highly desirable advisor to other worthy causes in town; he's been recruited to serve on the boards of Human Rights Watch, the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, and the MoMA, among others. His success at reviving a number of important American cultural institutions has earned him plenty of trophies and commendations, too: He was given the National Humanities Medal by Bill Clinton in 1998, the Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush in 2004, and has been the recipient of over 56 honorary degrees (and counting) from educational institutions around the world.

In print

In 2003 he published a memoir, The Road To Home: My Life and Times. The former professor of Middle Eastern history has also written Islam: A Mosaic, Not a Monolith, and The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 1880-1946.

Keeping score

Gregorian he took home a tidy $600,000 paycheck in 2006, according to the foundation's tax documents.

Personal

Gregorian—who goes by Greg among friends and coworkers—has a West 57th Street apartment, a stone's throw from Carnegie Hall. He lives there with his wife Clare, whom he met at Stanford in 1957. The couple has three grown sons: Vahe, Raffi, and Dareh—the latter is a reporter for the New York Post who's married to Clyde Haberman's daughter, Maggie.

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