AUB History

The publication is the cumulation of a project by AUB's Neighborhood Initiative that identified and located 46 streets in Beirut that carry AUB-related names emphasizing the shared history between the university and the city. The goal of the project is to bring awareness to the connections between people and place through the actual names of Beirut’s streets and to those in whose honor they are named. The booklet is original published by AUB’s Office of Communications as a bilingual edition and includes a pull-out map of Ras Beirut highlighting the 28 AUB-related streets in the neighborhood.

​AUB's 125th anniversary celebrations in 1992 coincided with the beginnings of Lebanon's return to peace after sixteen years of civil war, throughout which AUB continued to function. This book is a special anniversary tribute to the founders of the university, originally the Syrian Protestant College, who laid the foundations on which the college could grow and develop into one of the leading institutions of higher education in the Middle East. The book documents seven of the original faculty: Daniel Bliss, the first president; David Stuart Dodge; Edwin R. Lewis; Harvey Porter; George E. Post; Cornelius Van Dyck; and John Wortabet. Sections in English and Arabic include speeches, official papers, letters, and articles – some contemporary, others more recent – that demonstrate the values and principles these founding fathers sought to put into practice.

​​Eighteen-year-old Gladys Mouro left her home in New Hampshire for the American University of Beirut, where she soon became a first-rate registered nurse. But in her pursuit of adventure, Lebanon gave her more than she had ever bargained for. Less than a year after her arrival, Lebanon's civil conflict erupted and swept her into fifteen years of dealing with the tragic human consequences of war in an understaffed and unprotected hospital. This book is a personal record of living and working in a war-torn land; it is also a story of the noble survival of an institution – the American University of Beirut Medical Center and the courageous people who, against all odds, kept it alive and functioning throughout the Lebanese Civil War.

​​​This is the story of the Lewis Affair at the American University of Beirut (then the Syrian Protestant College). When Professor Edwin Lewis mentioned Charles Darwin in the course of a commencement address, there were drastic ramifications, including faculty resignations, student suspensions, the first student protest in the Arab World, a subsequent drop in student enrollment, and the imposition of a Declaration of Principles on AUB faculty members. It represents a momentous event in the history of the American University of Beirut, and its reverberations were felt in intellectual circles throughout the Arab world. A foreword by former AUB president John Waterbury outlines how the issues underlying the Lewis Affair, including the controversy generated by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the struggle between conservative and liberal elements of academia, and the question of academic freedom, remain pertinent to this day.

​In May 1873, Mrs. Abby Bliss and her four children left Beirut and returned to Amherst, Massachusetts for reasons of health and the children's education. This book contains letters written to them between 1873 and 1874 by Abby's husband, Daniel Bliss, the first president of the Syrian Protestant College, later the American University of Beirut. Written in diary form just seven years after the founding of the College, the letters reveal the excitement of the almost completed construction of College Hall, the frustrations and achievements of their fourteen months of separation, and fascinating information about daily life and the politics of the time. They show Daniel Bliss as a loving family man missing his wife and children while enthusiastically dedicated to the task of building the College.

​Speeches made at the commencement exercises of the Syrian Protestant College are collected in this volume, from the first in 1870 (five graduates) to the fifty-first in 1920, when the SPC became the AUB. Also included are commentaries on the commencement exercises, as they appeared in prominent contemporary newspapers, and a copy of the first diploma granted by the SPC. This is a valuable resource for all those interested in the history of education in the Middle East and particularly in the history of AUB, the institution that sought to become a link between the society and heritage of the Arabs, and those of the western world.