History
In 1862 American missionaries in Lebanon and Syria, under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, asked Daniel Bliss to establish a college of higher learning that would include medical training. On April 24, 1863, while Dr. Daniel Bliss was raising money for the new college in the United States and England, the State of New York granted a charter for the Syrian Protestant College. The college, which was renamed the American University of Beirut in 1920, opened with a class of 16 students on December 3, 1866. Dr. Bliss served as its first president, from 1866 until 1902.
AUB alumni have had a broad and significant impact on the region and the world for many years. For example, 19 AUB alumni were delegates to the signing of the United Nations Charter in 1945 — more than any other university in the world. AUB graduates continue to serve in leadership positions as presidents of their countries, prime ministers, members of parliament, ambassadors, governors of central banks, presidents and deans of colleges and universities, businesspeople, engineers, doctors, teachers, and nurses. They work in governments, the private sector, and in nongovernmental organizations.
On March 21, 2008, the Board of Trustees selected Peter Dorman to be AUB's 15th president. He succeeded John Waterbury who was president of AUB from 1998 to 2008. Dorman is an international scholar in the field of Egyptology and formerly chaired the University of Chicago's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
As of June 2011, the total number of degrees and diplomas awarded totaled 82,032.
Read more about this topic: American University Of Beirut
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)