Just having celebrated its centennial, the Lebanese American University is starting its second century as an institution that is deeply invested in Lebanon’s socioeconomic transformation. A glancing view at the past and ongoing pivots of the institution – from “girls’ school” to women’s college to liberal arts college and internationally active university – and the various external shocks that LAU had to overcome in the past 60 years and up to the latest war on Lebanon, gives the impression that the institution itself is a somewhat under researched case study in social and academic transformations. It is also a case study for organizational leadership that is inseparable from the American and the Lebanese heritages in both scholarly and personality profiles. Executive discussed the institution’s constructive but meandering path with Chaouki Abdallah, the university’s 10^th president.  

It has been one year at the end of June since the news of your appointment. You have assumed your position officially in October of 2024, a very conflicted moment in Lebanon. But before you agreed to leave your position at a large US university, how long did it take for LAU to find you and convince you to assume the role of the president at the Lebanese American University?

I have no idea how long the whole process took them. They started talking to me two or three months before we reached the agreement for me to come. I was at Georgia Tech as head of research when I got an email from the search firm, asking if I am interested [in the position at LAU]. I had a standard answer of saying ‘thank you so much but I am happy where I am’. They responded by calling me and suggesting that I might want to speak to the chair of the board [of LAU]. Given that it was a Lebanese university, I accepted a call from the chair of the board and we talked for a long time, like 30 minutes. He told me some things that intrigued me. They made me say ‘ha, I am interested’.

One thing that he said was that universities in Lebanon are consequential, almost the last line of defense, or the last institutions that are still delivering all their missions, so that people who graduate go on to do great things. He talked about LAU but also all other universities. And then he told me that during the economic collapse LAU took money out of their endowment in order to make sure that students were able to pay and attend classes. This led me to coming to see the board of LAU in Europe. My wife, who is American, is from Atlanta, and we always thought it would be my last post [to be at Georgia Tech] but she said, “why don’t you go and talk to them. You thought about what you can give back to the country at one point, so let us.”

On the macro scale of things, your arrival at LAU coincided with the university’s centennial, the hundredth anniversary year. Entering the second century is a hard inflection point or an incremental transition for LAU, as well as a psychological marker of importance indicating that you have something else to do now. What is this “something else” that you see as important for LAU’s second century?

To me, universities, and especially universities that are not for profit, are anchor institutions. They are not a business or bank. They are institutions that anchor society. The mission of the university on the highest level is to generate and propagate knowledge, and then become more than that. It becomes a mission to create the environment. It used to be that a university was only concerned about the student when they came to us and would then forget about them after they leave us [as graduates]. That is no longer the case. Before they come to us, we work with schools and we work with alumni. In addition to that, we now are a healthcare system provider.

After the first hundred years, LAU is part of the fabric of society, especially in higher education. The next hundred years, or the next chapter of the story entails the mission that we do a lot more to keep some of the talent that we produce, in the country. Lebanon is a brain factory. We export talents. We import everything else, but we export people who want to do great things for other places. It is not a question of wanting to keep everybody in here because the market and the society cannot absorb all the talent. However, I saw a recent study saying that 65 percent of college graduates aim to leave the country but only 16 percent actually want to leave. The others see no other choice but leaving.

Most people would like to stay if they have the opportunity. The role of the universities now is to create that [environment allowing people to stay and find careers] above and beyond what they already do, which is provide education. How will we do that? One of the areas that I worked with when I was with Georgia Tech, an area that really mashes with the Lebanese spirit, is entrepreneurship. How do you got people to start their own companies instead of just waiting to get hired by a bank or a company? Well, there is an art to that and we have a lot of entrepreneurship. The other area that is extremely important is for universities to be connected to their society, specifically in the research of solving problems.

There is a role for longer-term research and a role for research in basic sciences but there is an increasing need, and especially in a place like Lebanon, to solve problems, such as the problems that EDL has or that municipalities have in treating water, or that the government has in other areas. So I am promoting applied research. Academia has to be a part of society; it cannot be an ivory tower.

LAU in the last century was perceived for a while as “that girls’ school” or a second rate institution for those who could not get to the top university in Lebanon. That was something that people mentioned when discussing LAU even in the early 2000s. But at the current juncture, when Lebanon is still in a societal state of fragmentation, how do you see the role of LAU? Are you a potential unifier of society? Are you still strictly associated with the liberal American Arts tradition in education, or even the earlier missionary tradition that LAU was once founded under?

Let me start with the premise of the question. At one time, there were no universities, or places that educated women. LAU filled that very important role. It was [Beirut College for Women] and before that, since 1835, the American School for Girls. Many people I meet today from the Gulf, or from Lebanon, often their mothers went to LAU, because there were at the time no universities educating women. We had a super-critical role and we are proud of that heritage and our origin. Having said that, how do we see ourselves today? We are a global university. We do believe in the American liberal arts education and its ideals because, if you do it right, it is the best model anywhere. In the US they have applied it rightfully for a long time. Now, there is a lot of pressure on this modal, for one reason or another, but it is very important to have the general education. It is important to have taken history and philosophy before you become a physician or an engineer.

Are we a unifier? I think the role of universities by definition is to make students safe to have ideas, not to make ideas safe for the students. We are not here to tell people what they like to hear. We are a unifier in the sense that we people get educated, and if you do it right, they learn how to question and to ask why. The important part of college education is not the material that you take a course on or the skills that you learn. You can do that by taking a short course. The important part is learning that you don’t know everything.

You mentioned that you see education as something that best is not done with a strong profit motive or focus on making money. On the other hand, the economic impact of a university on society is a measurable quantity and important in assessing the value of a provider. In 2016, the office of institutional research at LAU endeavored to gauge the economic impact of LAU on Lebanon and put the number at around $900 million, or 1.4 trillion LBP at the time, which was relative to a GDP of around 40 or 45 billion dollars. How do you assess the economic impact of LAU at this point in time, as the economy is emerging from the crisis years and still has a long climb ahead in order to climb back?

When I mentioned that the university should not aim for profit I meant it should make enough money to break even and fulfill the mission. But the impact of universities is huge, economically. Just by the fact that we exist here, we buy [many things]. We have an impact, and our graduates have an impact. The ones who stay here will hopefully not only make good money but also pay taxes. According to studies, college educated persons stay married longer, are healthier, live longer, and contribute more to society. The benefits of education transcend the immediate benefits to the person who gets the education and extend to everybody else. I am aware of that study [on the economic impact of LAU], and I think we need to do this on a yearly basis. I think we should do it for all the universities. In fact, one of the things that I see right now as lacking severely, is a center or place where studies on the impact of X on everything – X in this case being higher education – are being done. We are thinking about how to do that. If you ask me how I would assess the total economic impact [of LAU] at this point, I couldn’t even guess. Our budget today is in the neighborhood of $300 million including the hospital. That is the immediate economic impact.

So is the indirect impact impossible to measure at the moment?

Studies I have seen speak of three to almost four dollars in indirect economic impact for each dollar in direct impact.

And with the benefits to every soft drink vendor, brewer, pizza baker and taxi driver, there will be another multiplier for calculating the induced impact and ancillary economic activity around a university.

That is the type of things that needs to be researched, vetted, and eventually communicated. The way I would frame it is to ask: if you do not have this university or this campus, what would be the loss? You would not have the $300 million [of our budget]. Above and beyond that, it is about formulas and studies by economists. I think it should be done throughout [the country] and under normal circumstances, all the universities would submit data to an entity that is under the state, and the state will collate all information and have economists do the calculations and publish them. I am familiar with people who do this in every state in the US. I did it when I was in New Mexico, and we had people doing it in Georgia, and so on. To put it in perspective, at the last university that I was at, the budget was $2.5 billion and the impact to the state was $10 billion. I also saw a study on another state where they did a deep analysis and estimated that the impact is 3-4 dollars to the state for every dollar that is spent on higher education. This does not yet consider the long-time value creation. It is on a yearly basis where the impact for every dollar spent, is for three to four dollars. I myself do not calculate the economic impact of educated people in this way. As I mentioned, educated people will be much more involved and the impact of the university is not just economic. But today’s economic reality [in Lebanon] is such that, if I don’t have the [LAU] university and assume a four to one economic multiplier, I will immediately lose $1.2 billion in the economic activity of the country.

Continuing the discussion on value creation by the university in terms of entrepreneurial and industrial activity, I want to inquire about the situation of your affiliated hubs. Is there an operating entrepreneurship hub and an industry hub? How much value do these create?

 We have an entity that focuses on the interaction with the business world, with companies. We also have the Makhzoumi entrepreneurial innovation center. Our assets by numbers at the university are the students, not the president and faculty. There is one president and 300 faculty, and there are 9,000 students. That is what we build on and that is what the innovation hub does. Our hub at LAU is hosting 15 companies per year and we need to reach an output that is much bigger. By the way, AUB and USJ have something similar. Everybody has something of this type but it really needs to be scaled up to the size of Lebanon. I do not have the latest numbers, but Lebanon has about 200,000 college students. 80,000 of them are at the Lebanese University. I think USJ is 12,000, I am 9,000 and AUB is 8,000. Then there are for-profit universities, the largest is LIU but I don’t know what they do. But the bottom line is that we need to get to [national] scale. We need to really connect these hubs and innovation centers together.

Turning to another topic of the time, in several recent speeches, such as a presentation at a conference at Phoenicia Hotel, you have talked about Artificial Intelligence, AI, and have a tech background. Are you planning a center for AI at LAU?

I think AI is something that is not to be isolated at one place. I know that my colleagues at AUB are creating a college focused on computing and so forth. My belief is that AI belongs everywhere. However, since everyone is [moving into AI], you cannot have everyone doing their own thing. You need to create an AI hub, which was the model I used at Georgia Tech. We are using AI in our operations, we are using AI in medicine, we are using AI in teaching when we are creating courses for every student but also we are creating and delivering courses for executives outside. My point is that there will not be a college [for AI] or something separated. There will be an AI hub to coordinate all of these activities and we are probably launching this in the fall. What I am right now trying to figure out is ‘what does LAU do in AI?’ and I am discovering every day people either working in AI, wanting to work in AI, or doing research on AI. AI is going to be the substrate on which a lot of the business is going to be done, internally and externally. We are delivering courses, doing designs based on this, operationally we are [using it], we are evaluating people based on some AI tools, and so on. I probably spend 30 percent of my time interacting with an AI agent.

I will not have anything to complain about this, as long as you are still occasionally interacting with a real life journalist…

I think you are safe for several reasons. Number one, you are asking questions that no AI agent would come up with. Your questions take our conversation into new directions. Number two, even under the most optimistic scenarios, creativity will always come from humans, not from a machine. The one test for me is humor. AI agents can now pass the Turing test but ask AI to tell you a joke and see if it is funny.

In a final non-AI induced shift of my questioning, I want to ask you about the social angle of LAU activities. This is specifically about the fact that you had very important, and well publicized programs funded by the United States Agency for International Development, which up until this year has been funding activities around the world, including education. How did you experience this cessation of USAID funding as institution, and how did you cope?

We had about 20 million dollars impact on our budget. It was the second largest source of funding for us, and the impact was huge. We are still dealing with it. We said we are going to finish the students that we have and took this upon ourselves to take care of the students we have. We are not going to be able to do the same thing that we used to do, or as much as we used to do. We had a couple of programs [with US public funding], one was the USAID and another one was with MEPI, the Middle East Peace Initiative. That one is still ongoing. It is smaller but it has funding for the students.

In dealing with this issue, we are looking at the whole revenue mix of the university. We are a private university and after USAID going away, we get 90-some percent of our revenue from tuition. This is not sustainable, because we in turn give more than 50 percent in financial aid. We cannot [keep raising tuition payments] and maintain the quality as well as the financial support and so on. We are looking at other ways of doing things, such as diversifying our tuition base. We have a campus in New York now where we hopefully will generate some revenues. We have a successful online program which needs to be scaled. But we also are looking at areas beyond tuition. One thing [in revenue diversification] that I am focusing a lot on, is fundraising and philanthropy. We are trying to raise more funds for our endowment. Our endowment has been okay over the years, but we had to dip into it, as I mentioned, during the economic crisis and had to do the same thing during the summer war [of 2024]. The plan is now to raise some funds, leverage our international connections, our alumni, and others, and frankly try to take advantage of opportunities that we perhaps did not have before, namely the opportunity that Lebanon hopefully stays on this path and reaches a state where it becomes again an attractive place for international students.

Would you like to have a campus in Aleppo, Homs, or Hama?

Syria is an interesting place, for a lot of reasons. We are ultimately looking at a global LAU strategy. There are many places in the world where there is potential, including places where there is a lot of Lebanese diaspora who want an American education. It could be in Africa, in Latin America, and many places but [the strategy] has to fit together. My criteria are twofold: one is if it is part of our mission and we therefore have to do it and figure out how to pay for it. The other criterion is if something is not part of our mission but will generate money and resources that feed into the mission. Syria, under these criteria, is not immediate but it certainly is on the horizon.

Do you have a fundraising target for filling up your endowment?

Yes we do. We are now at 650 [million USD] and have a campaign to go up by about 200 to 250 million. But at four percent [interest returns] per year, we need to get to about a billion [dollars in the endowment] in order to have $40 million per year in interest. If we can get there, I can operate the financial aid more comfortably, and so on. Ultimately, by my back of the envelope calculation, we need about $1 billion and will probably get to $850 or 900 [million].

Is the current scholarship and financial support model still viable or will it have to change over the long term?

No university can do [without this model]. Otherwise we can only admit people who can afford to pay. You will always have to have financial aid based on need and on academic [merit]. You need to provide that to be a university in the full sense of the word. Otherwise you are either depending on one source of funding where that source can dictate your decisions, or you only accept only people who can pay, regardless of their ability. This is a model that for profit universities apply: you pay, you get in. That is not something that I think is the mission of a true university. But financial aid cannot be 50 percent, that is too much. My goal would be to reach 30 to 40 percent.

To return to the beginning of this conversation, you followed the call to LAU one year ago and came here during a very conflicted time. The past academic year was a period of several shocks, not only in the region and aggression on Lebanon, but also of shocks in the realm of academia that forced out people such as the president of Columbia University or confronted Harvard University with radical cuts in their funding by the federal government in the US. You also said in this interview that you do not see the ivory tower model as the future of education. So after this one year with commitment to LAU, would you say that you escaped the American academic ghetto to the freedom of the academic province of Lebanon or would you rather still be in Atlanta in sunny Georgia?

I want to answer this from a few angles. First of all, my friends in the US thought that I knew something at the time. Of course, I did not. But it is a very challenging time for higher education everywhere. The many reasons for this have to do with culture, with politics, and with finance. In Lebanon, higher education has always been the road to the next level. My family is a great example. My father is a stone mason, with eight children, had them college educated, and today every single one of us is three levels higher in the socioeconomic or the financial order than my father was. It is very important to keep that in mind that one role or aspect of higher education is to continue to help individuals to have a good career and good income.

At the same time, there is an opportunity for us in Lebanon right now, because there are a lot of people, young professors or young graduates, who perhaps did not consider coming back last year and were planning to stay not only in the US but other places. But either because of the positive trajectory that Lebanon is on, or because of restrictions on immigration in other places, people could be attracted back to Lebanon and one of the things we need to ask is how can we attract those people? How to make joining this [country] enough of an enticing opportunity that is not having people say we can come and visit for a while but will leave as soon as possible.

Is your identity then split between being a permanent contingency planner and a strategist for permanent development?

Yeah, but a I think a good strategist is someone who thinks in terms of scenarios. The plan will always change. As the saying goes, a plan does not survive its first encounter with reality. But if you do not have a plan, you are always reacting and switching. We have a lot of this in the country and at LAU. We have always been reacting and existing in this constant crisis mode. When you put a plan together, you adapt. You may have to switch but you stick with the plan. My plan is to make LAU sustainable not just financially but also produce the economic impact, do the research on the economic impact, and the entrepreneurship aspect, and so on. I may not be able to do something when people, for example, say they will not support the entrepreneurship event. But that does not mean that I do not stay focused—and I think that people have to work towards this mind shift. And all of that relies on information, on data that you can extract and draw real insight from, versus saying ‘so and so said this’ or ‘this is how we did it before’. That is the other cultural shift: to try to be data informed in our decision making.

How many years do you give yourself to work toward this goal or achieve this goal?

My term is four years and so it is three more years. It is a work in progress and I am currently assembling a team and we are getting some things done. By the time I finish my term, we will see. Either my wife will tell me ‘you come back’ or she will say “I” ’ll come and join you’.   

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