The first time Vartan Gregorian stepped foot inside the New York Public Library was in 1956, the year he arrived in America to enroll at Stanford. He was headed for the Slavic section but was so overwhelmed he walked right back out.
Photo: Courtesy Carnegie Corporation of New York
“I simply could not believe that someone could walk up those big front steps and enter that extraordinary building without any questions, without any identification,” he recalled in a 1986 New Yorker profile.
Twenty-five years later, Gregorian was tapped to bring the library back to life after years of budget cuts and neglect. For his efforts there and at other leading institutions, including Brown University and the Carnegie Corporation, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Humanities Medal.
Gregorian, ’58, PhD ’64, died on April 15 after being hospitalized for stomach pain. He was 87.
“It’s like the sun didn’t come up,” says Thomas H. Kean, chair of the Carnegie Corporation, where Gregorian had served as president since 1997.
Gregorian was born in 1934 in the Armenian section of Tabriz, Iran. His mother died when he was a child, and his primary caretaker was his maternal grandmother, whom he referred to as his “hero” in a 2019 interview. She was largely illiterate but used storytelling to teach her grandchildren about integrity. “I learned more about character from her than from anybody I ever met or any book I ever read,” he added.
He used a study-abroad scholarship he had won in Beirut to attend Stanford, graduating after two years with a degree in history and humanities. In 1960, he married Clare Russell, ’59, and four years later, he earned his PhD.
Gregorian taught at San Francisco State, UCLA and the University of Texas at Austin before joining the University of Pennsylvania, where he became founding dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and then provost. After being passed over for the presidency at Penn, he accepted the top post at the nearly bankrupt New York Public Library in 1981. The library was teetering under a $50 million deficit, many of its rare books were moldering in the stacks, and some branches were open for only eight hours a week. But Gregorian—a prolific fund-raiser—embraced the challenge of rescuing what he considered a national treasure. By the time he left in 1989 to assume the presidency at Brown, he had raised $327 million in public and private funds, including through star-studded events with Brooke Astor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Arthur Miller and James Baldwin. The infusion allowed for numerous improvements, from an extensive physical renovation to computerizing the card catalog, installing temperature controls and expanding days of service, and it placed the library on solid ground.
Gregorian’s eldest son, Vahe, says his father’s work at the library stands out among his many accomplishments.
“The library needed saving,” he says. “Whatever it was he injected into Brown or Carnegie was substantial and significant, but I don’t know if either of those places needed saving.”
His father had a “genuine warmth to him that is very hard to replicate,” Vahe says.
“He wanted to know all about you,” says Kean, “and then he didn’t forget.” On April 21, Kean was celebrating his birthday when the doorbell rang. “It was flowers from Vartan that he’d ordered the day he died,” he says. “That’s the way he was.”
Gregorian was predeceased by his wife. In addition to Vahe, he is survived by his sons Raffi and Dareh, five grandchildren and his sister.
Rebecca Beyer is a Boston-based journalist. Email her at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.
