Reprinted from the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, September 22, 1997
Waterbury to be resident president
By Caroline Moseley
John Waterbury, William Stewart Tod Professor of Politics and International Affairs, has been named president of the American University of Beirut. The appointment will take effect January 1, 1998.
Waterbury will be the first on-site president of AUB since president Malcolm Kerr was assassinated in 1984. The institution has been beleaguered by the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90).
Waterbury will
succeed acting president David Dodge, a great-grandson of AUB's
founder. Dodge, former recording secretary of Princeton, was taken
hostage in Lebanon in 1982. Though AUB's administrative offices have
been in New York City, the U.S. State Department recently revoked its
travel ban, and Waterbury plans to move to Beirut.
Despite warfare that has devastated much of downtown Beirut, AUB "still has quite a lovely campus," says Waterbury, who visited there in April. The physical plant, he says, "has survived the war almost unscathed."
He describes Beirut as "a big, wild, noisy, congested city about the size of Philadelphia." The campus, situated on the Mediterranean, is "a small island of relative calm, with tile-roofed buildings of local stone. It's an old campus in the way Princeton is old -- a lot of the buildings go back 80 or 100 years. It has an air of venerability."
Surprised he accepted
Waterbury wasn't surprised to be offered the presidency of AUB. "What surprised me was that I accepted," he says.
Five years ago he had refused to be a candidate, "for reasons that seemed very clear at the time. Because of the State Department travel ban, I knew I couldn't reside in Beirut. I would have had to operate out of an office in New York City, engage primarily in fund-raising, and try to maintain a connection to a university thousands of miles away."
The April visit to Beirut, however, changed his mind.
"I went to AUB to lecture on democratization in the Middle East, on an invitation extended long ago that had nothing to do with the presidential search. I spent three days in Beirut, walked around the city, saw the campus, met faculty and students.I sensed real intellectual vigor. There are a lot of people on the AUB campus who know the university has suffered, who want to put it back together again and are looking for leadership."
Subsequent talks with trustees ("especially [former Princeton President] Bob Goheen") further impressed Waterbury with the "extraordinarily devoted people who put in huge amounts of time on behalf of AUB."
Waterbury now welcomes the opportunity to "help AUB recover its role as an English-language institution of higher learning recognized through-out the Arab world."
Chartered in 1863
AUB, says Waterbury, is a private, nondenominational, coeducational institution chartered in New York State in 1863 as the Syrian Protestant College. "Lebanon didn't exist at that time except as part of the Ottoman Empire," he explains. "The administrative district was known as Syria." A medical school opened in 1867, and in 1905 the hospital that "served heroically" during the Lebanese Civil War. The institution changed its name in 1920.
Waterbury, who speaks Arabic fluently, notes that "All official business of the university is carried out in English. English is the language of instruction in every department -- though of course other languages are taught."
AUB has a special niche in the Middle East, he says, as "a liberal arts, humanities-oriented institution. Higher education in the Middle East, like much of Europe, tends to be specialized. AUB, on the other hand, has the same kind of requirements Princeton has, which encourage students to take courses in a wide variety of fields before they specialize. As the product of liberal arts education myself, this is something I believe in and want to promote."
Waterbury earned his BA in Oriental Studies at Princeton in 1961 and his PhD at Columbia in 1968. After teaching at the University of Michigan and the Université Aix-Marseilles III and carrying out research in Egypt and Morocco for extended periods, he joined the Princeton faculty in 1978. Named Tod professor in 1985, he directed the Center of International Studies from 1992 until this year. He has studied the management of transboundary resources, such as rivers, particularly in the upper Nile Basin, which he considers "my beat." His most recent book is A Political Economy of the Middle East: State, Class and Economic Development (with A. Richards, 1996).
Beyond survival
Waterbury smiles when asked what particular challenges he will face in his new position.
"There isn't anything that isn't a challenge," he says. "At the top of my list is the issue of trying to get beyond the civil war, the day-by-day survival atmosphere."
He expresses deep admiration for "the people who stuck it out and kept the place going in unimaginably difficult circumstances. For instance, AUB had to open a second campus because a number of students couldn't safely cross various check points in the city. This is the kind of measure that had to be taken just to keep the place operating."
Still, "We need to reestablish the procedures of a functioning university." His goal is "to have AUB be a normal university in a normal big city. Big cities always have problems, but I'd like to have it be no more problematic than, say, the University of Chicago or the University of Pennsylvania."
The lifting of the U.S. government's Lebanon travel ban will allow Water-bury to reside in Beirut. In addition, "It also opens the possibility of recruiting American faculty and students. And it's been years since the AUB trustees were able to meet with students."
Extremely complex
The political instability that necessitated the ban is long-standing, says Waterbury, the result of sectarian warfare involving both Christians and Muslims, exacerbated by foreign intervention.
"In 1970," he says, "Palestinians ousted from Jordan set up their base of operations in Lebanon. In 1975 they clashed with one of the Christian factions, which was alarmed at having an armed Arab presence in the country. That was the `first shot' in what became 15 years of on-again off-again civil war."
The situation, he says, "can only be described as extremely complex. Some people interpret the recurrent strife as strictly sectarian, while others say that Lebanon, which is very small and porous, simply mirrors whatever is going on in the larger region--that it reflects the Arab-Israeli conflict."
Waterbury notes "the present volatile situation in southern Lebanon near the Israeli security zone, where, in the last few weeks, Hezbollah and Lebanese forces have been in conflict with Israeli forces and Lebanese forces loyal to Israel.
"Aside from that," he says, with admirable sangfroid, "things are pretty calm."
Calm or not, he knows that, in today's Beirut, he may have to curtail some of his favorite extracurricular activities--and not simply because of the press of administrative duties. A regular runner, Waterbury would like to explore "the lovely Corniche that runs along the Mediterranean" but suspects "the security people will want to confine my running to the campus." Ditto with bird-watching, another strong interest, because "I don't think they'll want me wandering around marshlands at 5:00 a.m."