From the President – Spring 2022

At commencement this year, I addressed the first class since the summer of 2019 to have the privilege of being on the magnificent Green Field with their parents seated behind them. Most were about to leave AUB, but as I pointed out, AUB will never truly leave them.

These students have excelled–reviving student life on campus, contesting student elections, holding music concerts, and winning top prizes in international sports competitions and global Model United Nations contests. A stunning 85 percent of our medical graduates match at highly competitive residency programs in the United States at the first two times of asking, our graduates continue to get into the best firms, masters and PhD programs in the world, and to win prizes for innovation and for courage. As I told last year’s class and repeated this year, “You are our good news for the world, our hope for the better days to come.”

Since I first challenged all of us at AUB to become more intellectually accomplished than we are economically elite, we have almost trebled the number of students on full scholarships, with almost a quarter of our community enjoying that privilege this last academic year, the highest number on record for fifty years. In the Lebanese parliamentary elections of May 15, 2022, seven AUB faculty members from four faculties stood as candidates, all conducting themselves with courage, integrity, and equipoise. In five years since restoring tenure to AUB for the first time in 33 years, 200 faculty members have earned this vital protection of academic excellence.

And as I told our new graduates, the ties that bind them to AUB are far more tensile than they might imagine. I also reminded them that time is ephemeral, but that as the Reverend Martin Luther King stated in 1968 at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC just a few weeks before he was assassinated: “The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.” For many of them, the arc may seem imperceptible, but I am confident they will learn over time that it indeed bends inexorably toward justice. It is vital to acknowledge that justice on earth does not occur absent effort. We must all contribute to bending the arc of that moral universe in the direction of social and environmental justice.

Anne Brontë published two novels in her short life. In Agnes Grey, she speaks about human resilience: “The ties that bind us to life are tougher than you imagine, or than anyone can who has not felt how roughly they may be pulled without breaking.” All of us living in Lebanon these past few years have felt near the breaking point. But by sticking together and sticking up for each other, by holding fast to the “ties that bind,” we can weather any storm.

Undoubtedly, our graduates will face further challenges, but they will not face them alone. They have built deep and binding ties to the American University of Beirut and its community, both here and abroad. More than 75,000 alumni and legions of friends and allies of this university await, ready to help them forge their own personal paths. They too savor the ties that bind.

Fadlo R. Khuri