New president pledges to continue NU's rise to top
By Marcella Bombardieri, Boston Globe, June 1, 2006

Northeastern University's president-designate, Joseph Aoun , said yesterday he was lured to the job partly because of the university's rapid transformation over the last decade into a much more selective school. When he takes over, he wants to help the university continue its rise.

"The sky is the limit,"Aoun said in his first interview as Northeastern's president-designate.

Aoun, dean of the largest college at the University of Southern California for six years, will start Aug. 15. He will replace retiring president Richard M. Freeland.

The 53-year-old said he would get to know Northeastern better before setting specific goals.

"You cannot come from outside and say, 'Elsewhere it was done like this,' or 'I want you to do it this way,"he said. "It has to be organic. Constituencies have to share ownership of the vision. Then everything else follows."
Neal Finnegan, chairman of Northeastern's board of trustees, said the board picked Aoun because of his proven leadership in a setting with many parallels to Northeastern.

"I think it is a wonderful find for Northeastern, someone whose experience aligns so well with our program,"Finnegan said.

Finnegan acknowledged that fund - raising will be one of Aoun's major tasks as Northeastern tries to boost its endowment. Northeastern has had great success beefing up its academic offerings, building a more attractive physical campus, and attracting much more competitive students, but hasn't managed to bring in the kind of money that will help the university continue to grow.

Aoun, who spent nearly a quarter century at USC, said he has been successful as a fund-raiser because he was able to persuade people with no connection to the university, not just the usual alumni and parents, to buy into his vision.

For example, Aoun said, the person recruited to chair the fund - raising campaign for a Korean Studies Institute is head of the Korean alumni association -- not at USC, but at its more prestigious rival, the University of California, Los Angeles.

At USC, Aoun said, his strategy was to not copy the approach of other successful institutions, but rather to fashion a new identity by pursuing emerging fields such as computational biology and brain science.

"You make bets on the fields of the future. You take calculated risks,"he said.

Aoun noted in a letter to colleagues announcing his departure that in his six years as dean he oversaw an increase in fund-raising from a historical average of $18 million per year to $40 million in 2005. The school has already raised more than $40 million in the first half of 2006. He also wrote that outside research funding has increased by more than 50 percent.

Aoun grew up in Lebanon, in a Catholic household where French and Lebanese were spoken at home. He pronounces his surname as Ahh-oon. English is his third language. The son of an investment banker, he earned his master's degree in linguistics at a Jesuit university in Beirut, where his mentor was the Rev. Peter - Hans Kolvenbach , a Dutch linguist who is now the superior general of the Society of Jesuits, the order's highest post.

Aoun left Lebanon just before the country's civil war, and remembers not a country ravaged by violence but a climate of tolerance, in which he wrote his first book with a Jew and a Muslim.
Arriving at MIT in 1978, Aoun said he studied for his doctorate in linguistics and philosophy with the famed Noam Chomsky .

"Boston has a special meaning for me,"he said.

He also spent a semester teaching linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Aoun's wife, Zeina , is a financial analyst at USC. The couple have two adult sons.

© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

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