From the President

Spring/Summer 2020

July 2020

First and foremost, I would like to congratulate our remarkable students, faculty, and staff for their resourcefulness and resilience throughout the seismic events of the past academic year. During Lebanon’s Solidarity uprising, they stood up for AUB’s core mission values of civic engagement, freedom of expression, inclusion, and transparency in governance. They have remained steadfast in the face of Lebanon’s financial collapse, the global recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In this time of turmoil and change, we should all take comfort in the promise of this generation of students in Lebanon. I firmly believe that they will play a pivotal role in advancing fair and just leadership in Lebanon, the Arab world, Africa, and beyond.    

The AUB community should also rest assured that the AUB is not resting. With input from a wide range of stakeholders and experts inside and outside the university, AUB leadership is identifying needs, gaps, and opportunities. In doing so, we are ever more mindful of the immense challenge and consequence of balancing long-term health with short-term gain. We have prepared and will continue to monitor and adjust a budget that reflects our priorities and values while accommodating wide contingencies in local, regional, and global circumstances.   

A university is first and foremost about students, and when one also has stewardship of a medical center, it is about patients as well. Both are served by outstanding faculty members and physicians. In addition to the provision of education and healthcare, AUB has been steadily building its reputation as a world-class research institution. In the just-released 2021 QS World University rankings, AUB surged ahead of its competitors, landing in the top 19th percentile among the world’s elite institutions. 

We recognize that our students, faculty, and staff are unable to absorb the high costs of Lebanon’s unstable, exorbitant currency exchange rate. In the immediate future AUB will bridge the gap with financial assistance, but this is not sustainable. Several years ago, the university pegged the Lebanese pound to the US dollar to allow us to continue to obtain full grant funding and support from our multiple partners abroad, including MEPI, USAID, Mastercard Foundation, Al Ghurair, ULYP, and other scholarship donors. This hard currency tuition supports many bright AUB students and is critical to the continued operation of AUB. To protect our investment in our professorial faculty we have arranged for a portion of their annual salary to be paid in US dollars for the first time in decades. This, too, is a time-limited exercise to encourage and enable our faculty to obtain more external grant-based salary support for our healthcare system, to create more international business, and to rebalance the university towards a more diversified revenue stream.  

In moments of social unraveling and economic distress, it is important that those of us who can afford to sacrifice more do so. Last November, we initiated a series of voluntary contributions from the salaries of the leadership team. We have now extended these to include all the most highly paid members of the community, including senior administrators, physicians, and faculty members. With such contributions, we will be able to initiate substantial cost-of-living increases for the most vulnerable and help as many members of our community as possible to have a more dignified life. These measures were extended in July 2020 with the departures of 850 valued members of our AUB community. This was a most painful and ultimately unavoidable step. Before releasing our community members, we were able to build a social safety net including health and educational benefits to help protect them during the perfect storm that has engulfed the catastrophic Lebanese economy, in concert with the global economic downturn and the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this time of uncertainty and severe hardship, we have taken—and will continue to take—the difficult but necessary steps to make AUB more secure in the long term. I can assure you that this great university, which has endured so much, and whose character has been tested on so many occasions, will be here to educate the best and the brightest for at least another 150 years, and will expand its role to ensure that not only individuals but the societies and the peoples of Lebanon and the region may have life and have it more abundantly. 

Fadlo R. Khuri