Amid a week of festivities, Joseph E. Aoun is inaugurated as Northeastern’s seventh president, charting a new vision for the future
The last week in March was perfect for a grand Northeastern celebration.
On Monday of that week, Joseph E. Aoun was formally installed as the university’s seventh president during a Matthews Arena ceremony that drew an audience of thousands.
But this was only the beginning.
The rest of the week was devoted to exuberant, wide-ranging festivities and events that showcased the university’s creativity, achievement, excellence, and distinction.
Art exhibitions, music performances, lectures, symposia, receptions, and a cultural gala shone a spotlight on the university’s strengths in key areas, including experiential education; global and urban outreach; interdisciplinary scholarship; and the arts, aesthetics, and ethics.
The week’s proceedings—dubbed “Northeastern Illuminated”—gave the university an opportunity to show its many passions.
“Every day, this passion comes into sharper focus for me,” Aoun said to the faculty, staff, students, governing board members, academic dignitaries, and government officials who assembled for his inauguration ceremony.
“It is a passion for scholarship that can address societal issues,” he said. “A passion for research that creates new knowledge and approaches. A passion for this university’s growth and its place in the world. A passion for engagement that embraces diversity in all its forms.”
Addressing the university community, he said, “You have entrusted me with the future of this institution. On behalf of the generations to come, I have the responsibility to uphold that trust.”
KEY PARTNERSHIPS
Throughout his inauguration speech, Aoun spoke of the importance of partnerships—within Northeastern, with surrounding communities, and with the world.
He also spoke of the four themes he said characterize the university—experiential education, translational and interdisciplinary research, humanities and the arts, and urban engagement.
In the area of experiential education, Aoun said the university will double its international co-op opportunities, to enable students to “be as comfortable in Shanghai, Johannesburg, or Mexico City as they are here in Boston.” A new universal core curriculum will offer a comparison of world cultures and religions.
To foster translational and interdisciplinary research, Aoun said the university will reward academic innovation and collaboration. Thirty new interdisciplinary faculty members will be hired over the next three years, and graduate education will be reoriented to reflect the stronger interdisciplinary focus.
Observing that the humanities and the arts “stir our passion, motivate and ground us,” Aoun vowed to encourage every Northeastern student to explore the human experience through these fields. He also said the university would work with neighbors to create film festivals and jazz concerts, assemble an oral history of Roxbury, and create and display art both at Northeastern and in surrounding communities.
Beginning this fall, he said, the university will offer bachelor and master of fine arts degrees with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and will seek to establish similar collaborations with other institutions.
Finally, to strengthen Northeastern’s partnership with surrounding communities, Aoun announced the formation of the Stony Brook Initiative, which will explore new ways to link the university and its neighbors in such areas as education, housing, economic development, and health and recreation.
The initiative’s name comes from a waterway that flows underneath the Northeastern campus and winds its way into many of Boston’s communities.
Aoun said he envisions a new Northeastern-neighborhood alliance that will join student, faculty, and staff volunteers with schools, homeless shelters, religious organizations, and community centers.
FROM GUESTS, PRAISE, AND PRIDE
Before an inauguration audience that included representatives from more than 150 universities, learned societies, and professional organizations—including thirty-four presidents and chancellors—an array of distinguished speakers expressed confidence in Aoun’s leadership and Northeastern’s future.
Taking a turn at the podium were Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the former president of Brown University; Steven Sample, president of the University of Southern California, where Aoun spent twenty-five years as a professor and a dean; Boston mayor Thomas Menino and his wife, Angela; Daniel Smith, vice president of Raytheon and a university overseer; Board of Trustees chair Neal Finnegan, BA’61, H’98; nursing professor Carol Glod; and Barbara Alleyne, LA’70, who spoke on behalf of alumni.
Praising Aoun as “an outstanding and visionary leader,” Gregorian applauded Northeastern’s interdisciplinary centers, its creation of new technologies, and its position as “the unchallenged leader in cooperative education.”
Sample remembered how, at USC, Aoun “listened carefully to his colleagues, and helped them create, collaborate, and innovate.”
Menino thanked Northeastern for its partnership with the city of Boston, and Angela Menino brought greetings from Boston’s children and neighborhoods.
Later, at a post-ceremony reception in the Curry Student Center, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick extolled the new president as a strong leader who can open more doors to civic-academic cooperation.
PASSION ON DISPLAY
In the days after Aoun’s inauguration, the Northeastern community stayed abuzz with an impressive calendar of cultural and scholarly events.
An Arts in the Park installation featured works by Northeastern students, faculty, staff, and neighbors, displayed amid flowers, ferns, and a flowing fountain. Lectures and symposia tackled the topics of drug-abuse research, obesity, and nanotechnology.
Nine outside-the-box Husky sculptures, customized to symbolize Northeastern’s colleges and several of its schools, were on view. Teens from nearby communities gathered to sketch out ideas for banners that will soon adorn campus.
The university’s largest-ever research expo featured 215 projects, exploring everything from computer-human connections, to cancer, to consumers’ interest in alternative fuel vehicles.
And, to top it all off, on Friday a gala cultural celebration showcased performances by an Italian jazz ensemble, a Spanish dance theater, a Chinese lion dance troupe, and many other global artists.
Entertainment and learned discourse were the order of the week. But the many events also highlighted the university’s obligation as a premier educational institution.
As Aoun phrased it in his inauguration speech, Northeastern “cannot merely be a mirror of what society is; we should be a model of what society can do.”
— Karen Feldscher