Reflections on Encounters With Three Cultures

by Vartan Gregorian

Introduction

1764, 1895 and 1911. Those dates represent quite a span of time. The first is the year that Brown University was founded; the second is the year that The New York Public Library was established and the third is the year that Andrew Carnegie created the philanthropic foundation he named Carnegie Corporation of New York.

It has been my privilege to serve the three above-named institutions, each representative of a different nonprofit culture, each with a different structure, different history, and different dynamics. While serving these institutions I have been both an observer and a participant, a spectator and an actor, a reader and a lender, a receiver and a giver'and every step of the way has made for an exhilarating and inspiring journey.

At first as a foreign student, then as an immigrant, then as a citizen who was born and raised in Iran and spent his secondary school years in Lebanon, I was always keenly aware of being an outsider, even though, over time, I gradually became an "insider," too. During the past fifty years, since I attended Stanford University as a freshman, I have always been interested not only in the outward, visible structure of organizations, but also their texture, their idiosyncrasies, and their individual institutional cultures. Furthermore, my career has been such that I have seen institutions both from below and above, from the trenches to the helm, which allowed me to observe not only their individual segments but also to understand how all the parts fit together to form their whole structure and support their overall mission. In writing this essay, it is my intention to share my observations, and to reflect on and analyze the nature of the three cultures in which I have spent my career: libraries, the academy, and the field of philanthropy. These reflections are based primarily on my experiences as the head of The New York Public Library, Brown University and now, Carnegie Corporation of New York. I hope that some of my observations as an outsider/insider will provide useful insights and the kind of first-hand knowledge that may assist those who have taken or will take similar journeys especially now, when the role of nonprofits is so essential to the advancement of progress in our nation's social, cultural, and economic domains and when the role of foundations, in particular, seems to be in the national spotlight.

Naturally, I have not drawn my observations exclusively from the three institutions that I have headed. I have also relied on my previous experiences and impressions during the years that I was a professor at San Francisco State College, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Pennsylvania. However, I have organized this essay along chronological lines, from my time at that most iconic of American libraries, The New York Public Library, followed by Brown University. Finally, I will examine the nature and scope of philanthropy in the United States as seen through the lens of Carnegie Corporation of New York, which I joined as president in 1997.

The experiences and knowledge I have acquired at each institution have had an impact on my experiences at the next. While each is different from the others, they do have common traits, common problems, and they often confront common issues. Perhaps their most important commonality, though, is that all were founded to serve our society and our democracy, and all remain dedicated to that purpose.

Synthesizing what I have observed and learned over decades of service in three different cultures provides a major challenge. Hence, though I cannot promise to be brief, I will do my best to be thorough.