American University of Beirut

It seems like only days, or maybe weeks ago. At most. Surely, it cannot be more than five decades since my father spoke these words to me and my brother Ramzi. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends," he stated upon arriving home one day in late 1975, in the midst of that terrible first year of the Lebanese Civil War. 

It was a chaotic, bloody, brutal period. As the country descended deeper into internecine strife, week after week passed without schools resuming. My parents started assigning us books to read. Our affinities for physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and history were manifest, and my brother taught himself, and me with him, the game of chess. He would go on to become Lebanon's under-17 champion five years later. I also consumed comic books, rock music, and listened to football (soccer) and baseball on British and American radio stations, developing a lifelong addiction to Manchester United and the Boston Red Sox. 

During this period, Ramzi and I scoured our house for interesting things to read to wile away the monotony of war-induced isolation. While in the confined spaces of our mother's family building where we were raised, we stumbled on William Shakespeare's Macbeth, thereby falling in love with his histories and tragedies. My father, recognizing the bleakness of the oeuvre ensconced within the offerings of the unparalleled playwright, prodded us to read Henry V, the Bard's comparatively uplifting history of one of England's most heroic kings. Henry the Fifth, also known as Henry of Monmouth, was King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Duke of Aquitaine from 1413 until his death in 1422. His exploits, the most memorable of which may well have been his extraordinarily unlikely and decisive victory over the French Army at the Battle of Agincourt, continue to be celebrated to this day by many Britons.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean."

Raja Khuri was a man who cherished the peace, where “nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility." He found that serenity he so ardently hoped for, where he could develop his greatest scientific work, elusive from the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 until his premature death in 1996. Truthfully, Lebanon has not seen much of that peace either, despite interludes, from late 1990 until early 2005, where the absence of conflict seemed to hint at tranquility. The tranquility that eludes Lebanon and the Levant has denied its greatest university the repose we have sought, cherished, but never quite found. The peace my father taught us to seek was the font of the greatest flourishes of creativity in human history, including Isaac Newton's two-year retreat from Cambridge after its closure due to the Great Plague.

Having discovered the generalized binomial theorem while a university student, Newton obtained his BA degree at Cambridge in August 1665. Newton’s private studies during the two years following his bachelor's degree have been described as "the richest and most productive ever experienced by a scientist.” During that singular period, while sheltering in place at his home in Woolsthorpe to keep safe from the plague, Newton developed his landmark theories on calculus, optics, and the law of gravitation. To quote the physicist Louis Trenchard More, "There are no other examples of achievement in the history of science to compare with that of Newton during those two golden years.”​​​​​​​​​​

But does the absence of peace always ensure the extinguishing of creativity? Not in my view. Three quarters of a century before Newton's annus mirabilis, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson produced their finest work, work that has set the standard for English language and indeed Western theater for nearly half a millennium. They did so during a period in the English Renaissance where the deep divisions in England between the newly established Church of England and the Catholic Church, and the constant threat of invasion by Catholic Spain, divided families and ensured that, whether for commoners or for England's rulers, quietude was in extremely short supply.

This, it seems, is the case at our AUB and in the Levant as a whole. Our university campus has boasted a series of extraordinary plays in the last several years, as the Theater Initiative launched by the recently retired Robert Myers a decade ago has continued to bear abundant fruit. Two plays in the last year plus by Lucien Bourjeily and Farah Shaar have brought Henrik Ibsen to life, transposing 19^th century Norway to 21^st century Lebanon with relevance.

On balance, AUB, which lost some outstanding faculty during the recent nadir period stretching from late 2019 through the summer of 2021, now has considerably more faculty who are manifestly at the top 2 percent of their fields than at any time since the mid-1970s, despite the travails, turmoil, and tragedy Lebanon continues to face. One of the strongest incoming classes of students in a half century matriculated in Beirut and Pafos over the last few weeks. And despite all the turbulence my father experienced in civil war Lebanon, up until his illness-enforced retirement in 1994, his creative instincts, his talent for discovery and for innovation, were all very much on display.

Yet, there should be no question that recent conflicts have left their scars. Navigating all that we have seen the last few years will naturally render many, if not most, even more reluctant to join the fray, but in this case, to rebuild ruptured societies rather than invade them. To reinforce the shared experience of exacting journeys, I made Homer's Odyssey, the ultimate narrative of the painful journey home, a major focus of my Opening Ceremony remarks this year.

I ended those remarks by charging our students, faculty, and staff to pursue the intersection of their passion and their competence; in other words, to emulate Tennyson's aging Ulysses and:

“Follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."

The new year will see many launch, or continue, their great adventures. Mankind has only produced one Sir Isaac Newton in the last several millennia, so that cannot be the bar. Instead, as our year starts again, we must join together to leap “Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more." Surely, whether in Beirut, Pafos, or Keserwan, a fine adventure beckons. With that, I wish you all a wonderful year ahead.