Joseph E. Aoun

Joseph Aoun
Joseph Aoun
	Aoun in 2008
7th President of Northeastern University
	Incumbent
	Assumed office ; August 2006
Preceded by	Richard M. Freeland
Personal details
Born	March 26, 1953 (age 71); Beirut, Lebanon
Education	Saint Joseph University of Beirut (BA); Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis (MA); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD)
Academic background
Thesis	The Formal Nature of Anaphoric Relations (1982)
Doctoral advisor	Noam Chomsky
Academic work
Discipline	Linguistics
Institutions	University of Southern California; Northeastern University

Joseph Aoun (born March 26, 1953)^[1] is a Lebanese-born American linguist and academic administrator who serves as the 7th president of Northeastern University since August 2006. He was previously a professor and dean at the University of Southern California. As a theoretical syntactician, he is known for his work on logical form and wh-movement. Aoun was the eighth highest-paid private college president in the country during the university’s 2022 fiscal year.^[2]

Biography

Aoun was born in the Lebanese capital of Beirut. He earned a Masters in Oriental Languages and Literature at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut in 1975, a Diploma of Advanced Studies in General and Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Paris VIII in 1977, and a PhD in Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. He joined the University of Southern California (USC) in 1982 as a Linguistics Professor. During his time at USC, he served as head of the academic Senate and eventually became a Dean. His success in fund-raising allowed for the hiring of multiple professors, the creation of named chairs backed by endowments, and the creation of two new sub-departments for the study of Armenian and Korean.

He is married to his wife Zeina; the couple has two sons, Adrian and Joseph Karim.^[3]

Aoun was hired by Northeastern University in Boston in 2006 to serve as university president. While at Northeastern, he and the Board of Trustees oversaw the cancelling of the Northeastern Huskies football program. The program was 8-26 in its preceding three seasons and faced declining attendance and high costs if it wished to remain competitive in recruiting. The move, while controversial, was generally considered positive in retrospect; the funding it freed up allowed for the construction of the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex, which played more directly into Northeastern's strengths. Aoun later said he was overwhelmed with calls from other college presidents asking how he managed the feat without enraging alumni.^[4]

In 2007, Northeastern University purchased a 5-story townhouse for President Aoun at 34 Beacon Street for $8.9m.^[5] Aoun's 2018 salary was around $1.5–1.8 million dollars.^[6] In spring 2020, Aoun announced he would donate 20% of his annual salary (~$290,000) to new funds meant to support students facing economic hardship as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and to support research programs related to the crisis.^[7]

Robot-Proof

Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence was published and released in 2017 by MIT Press.^[8] The book appeared over a year after Aoun wrote a commentary for the Chronicle of Higher Education^[9] that shares the first part of the book's title.

In Robot-Proof, Aoun proposes a way to educate the next generation of college students to invent, to create, and to discover—to fill needs in society that even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence agent cannot.^[10]

A "robot-proof" education, Aoun argues, is not concerned solely with memorizing facts. Rather, it fosters a creative mindset and the mental elasticity to invent, discover, or create something valuable to society—a scientific proof, a hip-hop recording, a web comic, a cure for cancer. In his book, Aoun lays out the framework for a new discipline, humanics, which builds on our innate strengths and prepares students to compete in a labor market in which smart machines work alongside human professionals.

He argues for the need for better and continuous education to keep up with changing technology, saying, "Beyond simply conferring degrees, the foundational purpose of colleges and universities must be to educate — and that means equipping people of all ages, at all stages of their careers, to build successful and fulfilling lives."^[11]

Honors and awards

Chevalier de La Légion d’honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor): French Government, 2018^[12]
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2013
Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, 2011
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2010^[1]
Doctor of Humane Letters: Anatolia College, 2009
Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa: Hebrew Union College, 2007
Chevalier de L'ordre des Palmes Academiques (Knight of the Order of the Academic Palms): French Government, 2006
Endowed Chair, Anna H. Bing Dean's Chair in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
MIT Robert A. Muh Alumni Award in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, 2011
USC Associates Award For Creativity In Research And Scholarship, 1997
USC Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award, Award for The Syntax of Scope (with A. Li), 1993
USC Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award, Award for A Grammar of Anaphora, 1988