By Karen Feldscher

The compliments flow easily, one after another. Friends and coworkers describe him as urbane and worldly. Energetic. Warm. Friendly. Forward-thinking. Buoyant. Optimistic. A good listener. Community-oriented. A fundraising whiz.

And another thing: He played a huge role in turning the University of Southern California into a top-ranked school, in much the same way that Northeastern has been remaking itself.

By all accounts, Northeastern's seventh president, fifty-three-year-old Joseph Aoun, is an excellent fit for the university.

An internationally known linguistics scholar, Aoun served for the past six years as dean of USC's College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, before being chosen to succeed Northeastern's outgoing president, Richard Freeland.

The $385 million operation he oversaw at USC—Letters, Arts, and Sciences is the largest of nineteen schools, with more than forty-five academic departments and programs, nearly 7,000 undergraduates, and 1,000 graduate students in some forty-four PhD programs—is roughly comparable in size to Northeastern, a $600 million enterprise with about 15,000 undergraduates and 3,000 graduate students.

There are other striking similarities. Both USC and Northeastern are private urban universities. At USC, Aoun led a $100 million academic initiative to bring top-notch professors to the university; Northeastern is in the midst of a similar $75 million initiative to hire a hundred new tenure-track faculty.

Aoun strengthened community ties between USC and its neighbors—a key goal for Northeastern. And Northeastern, as it strives to enter the ranks of the nation's top universities and stay affordable to a wide variety of students amid rising tuition costs, is definitely interested in tapping its new president's acknowledged fundraising skills.

"I think it is a wonderful find for Northeastern, someone whose experience aligns so well with our program," Board of Trustees chair Neal Finnegan told the Boston Globe after Aoun's appointment was announced in June.

"The trustees and selection committee probably saw the transformation of USC over the last twenty years, and saw the profile and the activity between USC and Northeastern are very similar," notes USC history professor Kevin Starr, a former California state librarian.

After spending nearly twenty-five years at USC, Aoun undoubtedly views the eastward move as a bit of an uproot. But, he says, the opportunity to help steer a university on a dramatic upward trajectory was irresistible. At his June 1 address to the university community, many of whom had crammed into the Curry Student Center to get a first look at the president-elect, Aoun called Northeastern "an exciting university that has tremendous, tremendous momentum."

Such momentum, he added, "is a precious commodity that most universities try to have. It involves innovation, risk-taking, and commitment. And that's what attracted me."

A complete package

The search committee's seventeen members were impressed with Aoun from the start.

George Chamillard, UC'66, MBA'70, chair of the board of directors at Teradyne, led the committee. He recalls Aoun telling them that he considered his job at USC one of the greatest jobs in education, and that if he were to leave, it would have to be for a place that wants change.

"And we put our hands up and said, ëWe want change,'" Chamillard says.

"The fact is, Joseph Aoun was absolutely extraordinary in an extraordinary pool of candidates," says Barry Bluestone, the Stearns Trustee Professor of Political Economy, another search-committee member. "We were all incredibly thrilled with the quality of the overall pool. This is a credit to President Freeland's leadership, that Northeastern is at a point where such an incredible array of people would be interested in being its president."

What did the committee see in Joseph Aoun? Quite simply, says Chamillard, he had all the strengths Northeastern was looking for: A first-rate academic. An expert recruiter.

A skillful, experienced manager of a large organization. A proven fundraiser—last year, Aoun brought in $40 million for USC, part of an initiative to raise $400 million over five years (close to $200 million has already been raised). Someone who understands the need for universities to work closely with their surrounding communities.

Says Bluestone, "My last comment, as I smiled at some of my new friends around the [search-committee] table, was, ëMy friends, we're not playing in Pawtucket anymore. We're playing at Fenway Park.'"

Picking up on the baseball theme, Peter Kunzel, the search committee's student representative, presented Aoun with a Huskies baseball jersey and cap at the meet-and-greet in June. He was thrilled when the incoming president instantly put them on. "That was great," says the middler majoring in criminal justice.

The crowd in the Student Center thought so, too. As Aoun modeled his new duds, the place rang with applause.

"Very culturally textured"

Colleagues call the new president (whose last name is pronounced "Ah-oon") a true citizen of the world. Now an American citizen, he was born in Lebanon, the son of an investment banker, and educated at a Jesuit school, adding fluency in French and English to his native Arabic.

Aoun earned degrees at St. Joseph University in Beirut in 1975 and at the University of Paris in 1977. He came to the United States to do doctoral work in linguistics and philosophy at MIT, studying with linguistics megastars Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. After receiving his PhD in 1981, he taught briefly at UMassñAmherst before beginning his professorial career at USC in 1982.

Elected president of USC's Academic Senate in 1993, Aoun took on several other administrative positions before being named dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences in 2000.

"Joseph is a very elegant man, without being affected," says USC's Starr. "There are many layers to him. There's the Lebanese layer. He was educated by French Jesuits in Lebanon, so there's the Catholic layer. He grew up speaking fluent French, Arabic, and English, then had a period of education in France. Then he got a doctorate at MIT. Then spent twenty-five years in Los Angeles. All these experiences pooled together make for a very culturally textured man, a man of great subtlety and of great personal elegance and vigor."

Aoun calls his experience at MIT pivotal. "Studying with Noam Chomsky was a very exciting opportunity in my life," he says. "MIT was a focal point for linguistics studies. We had visitors from all over the world, so it was a very vibrant place. Chomsky was clearly a towering figure. So was Morris Halle.

"But what's interesting is that, from day one, the students were all treated like colleagues," he says. "It was an atmosphere of peers. We were expected not only to contribute but also to build the theory that was being formulated, and to criticize any weakness we saw, whether it was coming from faculty, a visitor, or a student."

Aoun and his wife, Zeina, who at the time of her husband's NU appointment was working at USC as a senior financial analyst, both underscore how much experiencing various cultures and locales adds to their lives. "My parents stressed from day one the importance of education and culture," says Aoun. "And we find that being steeped in various cultures allows you to appreciate the culture you live in."

According to Starr, Aoun can appear slightly reserved. "There's a strong streak of the European in him," he says. "But he's not a stuffed shirt. He's good-humored and friendly."

Zeina also is "smart and friendly," says Starr, and he calls the Aoun sons, Joseph and Adrian, both born in France, "charming and entrepreneurial." Joseph, twenty-five, is starting his second year of law school at USC. Adrian, twenty-three, just finished a master's in electrical engineering at USC; his mother reports he's already running two companies.

Asked about the move to Boston, Zeina says such a transition "is never easy, but what makes it easier is that we're looking forward to something wonderful and exciting." Having studied political philosophy at the University of Paris and worked in international banking, she isn't sure what her next job might be. "At this point in my life, I only know what I'm doing tomorrow," she says.

Wherever she ends up working, she says she and her husband intend to participate in Boston's cultural life. Over the years in Los Angeles, they've been regular visitors to the opera, the symphony, museums. "We like to keep in touch with the cultural world around us," she says. "We also find time to work out, to manage the stress."

Not surprisingly, the Aouns love traveling to different corners of the globe. "My favorite is the southern part of France," says Zeina. Her husband? "He likes to go everywhere," she says.

When asked about memorable trips, Aoun says he particularly loved China. Visiting there in 1983, he says, "you could see the beginning of enormous change that was about to occur. They were beginning to open the doors of China to the world."

Unerring academic instincts

Faculty buzz about the new president, both from Northeasterners in the know and USC professors, has been unabashedly positive.

Aoun, says Chamillard, has developed USC's College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences into "an academic powerhouse."

"He's a remarkable man," Starr says. "As dean, he launched a rather amazing initiative to take some $100 million and recruit top faculty to USC. He recruited people from the Sorbonne, in Paris; from Oxford University; from Princeton; from MIT, Cornell, and Berkeley. He looked for people who were looking for new challenges, and did a very astute job of recruiting. He also brought in newly minted young assistant professors and other distinguished professors. He really transformed the college.

"Before that," Starr continues, "USC was in many ways a confederation of professional schools, with the college not exactly at the center. The professional schools—such as the law school, the medical school, and the school of cinema-television—have very strong identities. Joseph devoted himself to bringing the college up to that point of excellence, and then positioning it into the center of USC. So the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences is now in the best shape it has been in since 1880, when it was founded."

According to a description on the USC website, under Aoun's leadership the college strengthened programs in earth sciences and earthquakes, and launched studies in an entirely new field, geobiology. He also helped boost programs in urban studies, global studies, economics, art history, and the humanities.

Successful recruiting, Aoun says, requires strong involvement from current faculty: "They know the field well, and they can spot the leaders."

He also believes it's crucial to show prospective faculty, who may already hold prestigious positions at other universities, why moving to a new institution would be good for them. "They will come to your institution if they feel you are charting an exciting path with respect to their field and the institution as a whole," Aoun explains.

"If you offer to duplicate what they have, they are not interested, and rightly so," he says. "If you work with them on building new vision, new strategy, that is much more exciting. That is what attracts faculty from outside."

Chaibong Hahm, who directs USC's Korean Studies Institute, says he got sold on the idea of moving to USC, bypassing other good jobs that were beckoning, because Aoun seemed truly to understand how the Korean community in Los Angeles was evolving, and how a USC institute could play a major role in its life.

Carla Kaplan, Northeastern's new Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature, is a former faculty member at USC, hired there by Aoun. He "really understood," she says, "how central it is to have excellent faculty. He had this wonderful knack for hiring good people and then letting them do their work."

For many years, USC labored in the shadow of its better-known neighbor, UCLA. In fact, USC was occasionally—and cheekily—referred to as the "University of Second Choice." But by 2005, USC had made it to 30 in the U.S. News & World Report ranking of national universities (in comparison, Northeastern was listed at 115 in 2005).

To ensure the growth would continue, Aoun in fall 2005 launched a $400 million, five-year Letters, Arts, and Sciences fundraising campaign, which has already netted nearly half of its targeted goal.

Last year, Aoun helped raise $40 million, up from the college's previous annual average of $18 million. By June 2006, the college had surpassed its 2005 total. In addition, during the six years Aoun was dean, sponsored research jumped by 50 percent.

"Aoun has been really impressive in both getting the right people and providing them with the resources to carry out their vision," says Hahm.

Dominique Sportiche, a UCLA linguistics professor with whom Aoun studied at MIT and one of his current research partners, calls his colleague "a scholar and administrator of exceptional distinction." Aoun, Sportiche says, has "an outstanding ability for strategic thinking and a very clear sense of priorities. And he's a great listener, with his two feet firmly planted on the ground and an uncanny ability to very quickly zero in on the essentials."

In addition to deftly handling a large academic operation, Aoun simultaneously maintained research and teaching duties, an unusual feat for any busy administrator (even one known to carry not one BlackBerry but two).

He's not just interested in furthering his own research; he's also fascinated by the scholarship of others. Last June, for instance, Aoun was reading Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, by neurologist Antonio Damasio (who this year became the director of USC's Brain and Creativity Institute); Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond; and Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

The man who promoted Aoun to dean at USC, provost emeritus and university professor of physics Lloyd Armstrong, says, "Very few deans can still keep up to date and, in fact, visible in their academic field. But Joseph recently published a major book in linguistics. He just keeps rolling along."

"I don't sleep much," Aoun admits with a laugh.

In all, he has authored or coauthored seven books and more than forty articles, in addition to lecturing at leading universities in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and editing several major journals.

Aoun's "intellectual powers and talent for research make collaboration exciting and challenging," Sportiche says.

Janet Randall, an associate professor of linguistics at Northeastern, studied alongside Aoun at MIT. She calls him "academically top-drawer."

"I know he's done a lot of fundraising," she says. "But I know him as an intellectual and as a linguistic academician. Linguistics is a really hard field to pursue—it's not easy stuff [see sidebar, page 32]. He's a researcher, a scientist, and he's very good.

"He knows what good research is, and he understands what faculty need."

Reaching out to others

Aoun has also proved adept at community relations. In addition to establishing the Korean Studies Institute at USC, he created a similar setting for Armenian studies. The pair of institutes aim to forge ties between the university and its neighbors.

This will help the Korean and Armenian communities assume larger roles in Los Angeles and throughout the nation, Aoun believes. At the time of his departure from USC, he was also working on establishing an African American institute and a Hispanic institute. Key backing for such centers doesn't just come from alums, he notes. Members of the community can also be very generous with their support.

In other efforts to connect USC with the larger world, Aoun oversaw the creation of partnerships with the Huntington Library, the Getty Research Institute, and the Shoah Foundation, which became part of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences earlier this year.

"I have tried to build an environment where my institution is viewed as a resource for the community," he explains. "At the same time, I want our institution to view the community as a resource."

Both USC and Northeastern "are committed to the urban dimension and the community," Aoun says. "Northeastern has played a big role in the life of the city, and I hope it will continue."

As he takes the reins at Northeastern, the new president will be stepping into a delicate community-relations situation. Like most urban universities, Northeastern has grappled with issues around student misbehavior and campus expansion into surrounding neighborhoods.

Months of talks among Northeastern representatives, city officials, and neighbors have led to plans, still under discussion, to erect two new high-rise dorms in 2009 and 2011, with the goal of moving more students out of leased apartments and into campus housing. The university hopes these plans will help ease neighborhood concerns.

Aoun is well aware of such issues. Los Angeles officials have also talked to USC about building more dorms. "And when you do that, you want to be cognizant of the needs of the community," he says.

Once he's settled in Boston, Aoun says he'll visit every neighborhood around Northeastern. "I believe that neighbors are very important, so I would like to get to know them," he says, "to get to build trust and a good working relationship."

Aoun also wants to build good relationships with students. In fact, he hopes to involve them closely in university life.

"We have to look at students as a source of innovation and ideas," he said at a June press conference. "I realized very quickly in my tenure as a dean at USC that students have great ideas. We agreed to launch a dean's prize, focusing on soliciting ideas from students about improving student life. But it's not enough to have great ideas. You have to imagine how you can implement them, too. So, when students submit these proposals, we not only ask for a great idea but whether the idea is feasible."

Aoun hopes to ramp up students' academic involvement as well. "I feel that we have focused in higher education on looking at students as passive learners," he says. "It is not enough. Students are innovators. We need to look at them as knowledge creators, because we need to educate a community of creative citizens."

Finally, Aoun intends to make strong connections with alumni. "I consider them to be ambassadors for Northeastern," he says. "I will work hard to meet with as many as I can.

"Although," he adds with a laugh, "I will not be able to meet with all 160,000 in the first year."

A homegrown vision

Aoun makes it clear that he appreciates what makes Northeastern special among national universities—its commitment to practice-oriented education.

"Northeastern has the vision to chart its own path, blaze its own trail," he says. "The Northeastern approach to undergraduate education is an approach that marries and blends practice and study. I think this is very bold and very special.

"I have also felt, over the years, that this is something that other universities will copy," the new president says. "As a matter of fact, they are already copying it. And, frankly, Northeastern wrote the book."

It's simple, says Aoun, to pinpoint Northeastern's most important priority over the next five years: "an absolute commitment to excellence."

His first order of business, he says, will be to "absorb the culture" of Northeastern. "I need to be in a listening mode, to understand the aspirations of the stakeholders, whether they're students, alumni, faculty, staff, administration, the Board of Trustees, or the community."

He adds, "Moving the agenda forward is a collective effort that requires all the stakeholders to feel ownership. It is not a one-person situation. The president is only a catalyst and an enabler."

Armstrong, the former USC provost, recognizes Aoun has been a huge booster at USC and admits, "It's a little scary when someone like that leaves." But, he says, USC's loss will be Northeastern's gain.

"He will come to understand the legacy of the university—where it is, how it got there, what its strengths are, what the opportunities are in the region—and he will put it together, I expect, in a wonderful strategic vision.

"I know the university has done remarkably well over the last decade or so," Armstrong says. "And while it's always hard to continue a creative success, I think Aoun is a person who can make that happen.

Karen Feldscher is a senior writer.

What's in a Word?

You've read that new president Joseph Aoun is an internationally known scholar in linguistics. And some of you are no doubt thinking, Linguistics . . . what is that, exactly?

Well, in a nutshell, it's the scientific study of human language. Linguists examine the structures, sounds, forms, functions, and varieties of specific languages and speech in general.

Aoun himself explains, "Linguistics tries to analyze and describe the knowledge that human beings have in terms of language that other species don't have. It also asks, Where does our knowledge about language come from?"

A relatively young area of inquiry, linguistics is acknowledged even by linguists to be rather complex, and is only slowly working its way into popular discourse. As associate linguistics professor Janet Randall points out, the field's best-known book, Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, was published just twelve years ago, in 1994.

One of the more prevalent linguistics theories is the "universal grammar" idea developed by Noam Chomsky (Aoun, Randall, and Pinker all studied under Chomsky at MIT). It holds that children are born with innate knowledge of a basic grammatical structure common to all human languages. The Chomskian view isn't universally accepted, however. Some experts argue that language acquisition falls less under "nature," more under "nurture."

At the broadest level, linguistics study tends to be either theoretical or applied. Theoretical linguistics looks for general frameworks that describe individual languages and universal aspects of language. Applied linguistics seeks answers to practical problems, such as language instruction, speech synthesis and recognition (resulting, say, in a garage door that can open when you tell it to), or speech therapy.

Linguists may also specialize in subfields. For instance, those who study sound may specialize in phonology, the study of patterns in a language's basic sounds (a language that's missing the "f" sound, it turns out, will likely lack the "v" sound as well).

Or they may specialize in morphology, studying the internal structure of words (why the word "untieable" means both "able to be untied" and "not able to be tied") or the formation of compounds (why we say "fax machine toner cartridge" instead of "toner cartridge fax machine").

Semanticists focus on meaning—sentence logic, for example. Psycholinguists study the cognitive processes underlying language use, such as why certain sentences are harder to understand than others (like this grammatical but practically unparsable example: "The bike the guy my sister likes fixed broke again"). Sociolinguists study how language and culture are related and how language is used in different social contexts.

For his part, Aoun is a theoretical linguist specializing in syntax, the so-called skeleton of languages.

"An analogy can be made to physiology," he says. "All human beings are created from the same mold, even though no two are exactly alike. The field of generative grammar, launched by Noam Chomsky, shows that all languages are created from the same mold.

"English differs from French, or Chinese, or Hebrew," says Aoun. "But our job as linguists is to show what is universal. And linguistics studies have implications for learning, teaching, speech therapy, speech recognition, and for language deficiencies and impairments."

Aoun was drawn to the field for two reasons. "It's about the importance of studying something unique to the human species," he says, "while at the same time approaching it with formal rigor."

— Karen Feldscher