Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York since 1997, died Thursday. Previously, he had been head of Brown University and the New York Public Library, where he was known for his fundraising prowess.
He was 87 and recently had been hospitalized with stomach pain, Carnegie said in its announcement of Gregorian’s death.
Thomas Kean, chairman of Carnegie’s Board of Trustees and a former governor of New Jersey, called Gregorian “a man of the world who inspired the world.”
In a phone call, Kean said he had been close friends with Gregorian since the 1990s, and the two still talked every week or two, usually by phone in the era of Covid. The two were scheduled to have a rare in-person lunch together Tuesday at a new restaurant, something they were both excited about, but it didn’t happen due to Gregorian’s sudden illness.
“He left a wonderful legacy. He represented to me everything that was great about American philanthropy ,” Kean said. “Where he came from and what he contributed were extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary.”
Gregorian was charming and persuasive, which helped forge many partnerships with other foundations and helped bring the far-flung worldwide network of philanthropic organizations established by Andrew Carnegie closer together.
“You couldn’t say no to the man. Over the years I tried. You couldn’t do it,” Kean said, chuckling. “You might as well say yes right away.”
In a 2018 essay, Gregorian, an Armenian who was born in Iran and became a naturalized U.S. citizen, offered an unabashed celebration of the generosity of Americans. “Whether givers are driven by guilt, redemption, patriotism, religion, self-glory, hypocrisy — all of this is secondary,” he wrote. “The fundamental concern is that no one is obligated to give, but so many do. While we cannot always know a philanthropist’s true motivations, we can always measure the outcomes of their giving.”
At Carnegie, Gregorian took multiple approaches to improving peace, stability, and democratic values worldwide. With those goals in mind, he aimed to strengthen higher education, not just in the United States but in Africa and the former Soviet Union as well.
He also bolstered Carnegie’s U.S. Democracy program and supported efforts to improve journalism. He inaugurated the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy to honor philanthropists who had devoted their wealth to the public good.
He spoke seven languages fluently. In addition to Brown, he enjoyed a wide-ranging academic career that included teaching or executive positions at San Francisco State University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Ford Foundation President Darren Walker issued a statement calling Gregorian “an icon in higher education and philanthropy — and a giant in my life.”
Walker added: “Vartan earned his wisdom with his full, consequential life, and shared it freely, with a full heart. As an immigrant, like Andrew Carnegie before him, Vartan understood what it was like to see America through the eyes of an outsider; as an ardent student and teacher, he was passionate about the transformative power of education.”
Last of the Philanthropy Old Guard
Stanley Katz, a Princeton University scholar, called Gregorian the “the senior statesperson of philanthropy in the United States” and the last of an old guard of foundation leaders.”
With Gregorian’s death, “we lose someone whose experience is so deep and unparalleled,” he said.
In many ways, Katz said, Gregorian was a traditional head of a large legacy foundation: He did not usher in any major changes in strategy, but he brought his own personal style to the foundation.
Katz predicted that Gregorian was the last of an old guard of foundation leaders. Whoever replaces him will likely be more concerned with evaluation and performance than Gregorian was.
“If you asked him about impact, he would have pretended not to know what you were talking about,” he said. “He didn’t speak the new foundation language.”
Under Gregorian, much of the work at Carnegie commenced because of the president’s initiative and interests rather than staff work, Katz said. For instance the first area of study of a group of Carnegie scholars focused on Islamic studies, a personal interest of Gregorian’s.
Katz added that Gregorian worked hard to raise the public’s awareness of Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist founder of the philanthropy, by taking out full-page advertisements in the New York Times to educate readers about Carnegie’s life.
He also called attention to the contributions of immigrants to the United States through full-page advertisements that appeared every July 4.
Gregorian was also a prodigious fundraiser before he became a grant maker, and even when he was at Carnegie, he often told tales of how he had won big gifts.
Gregorian led a campaign at Brown University that wrapped up in the early 1990s and raised more than $500 million. Before that, he brought in more than $325 million in private donations and government aid for the New York Public Library in his eight-year tenure there. That was a tough task because the library was in severe disrepair, and its hours of operation had been cut back. Still, he argued that the institution was vital to ensuring that everyone had access to intellectual resources and managed to persuade the city’s richest residents that the institution deserved their support.
When he saw visitors at his Carnegie office and elsewhere, he noted his pride in attracting resources for worthy institutions, and often noted that whenever wealthy people were in his presence, they marveled when they saw the backs of his hands because he so often had his palms open for donations.
