President Waterbury with Abdul-Muhsen Qattan

Abdul-Muhsen Qattan, chairman of the A.M. Qattan Foundation and a well-known businessman highlighted AUB's role in his own development and success to graduates of the years 1951, 1956, 1966, 1971, 1976, 1991, 1996 and 2001, who were gathered at AUB for a special reunion.

Qattan was introduced by AUB President John Waterbury who welcomed alumni, encouraging them to stay active and connected to the University. Waterbury highlighted the University's future outlook, which he described as "doing pretty well these days."

Indeed, the $140 million five-year fundraising campaign has been very successful, having attracted "unprecedented levels of support from our alumni." Also, several new building projects are underway, including the Charles W. Hostler Student Center, the Suliman S. Olayan School of Business and the Iran/Oxy Engineering Complex. More importantly, several new academic programs and centers have been launched, and seven new PhD programs will be reintroduced.

When he was preparing to leave his hometown Jaffa in Palestine, his mom warned him against Lebanese women's "notorious love of dancing," Qattan recounted. "What I found at AUB was a wonderful space of freedom, full of stimulating men and women who mixed together in ways unheard of in most places in the Arab world of the time," he said. "AUB was also a place where we were encouraged to value our freedom of thought and right to self-expression, to defend our point-of-view and to be independent."

Qattan recalled student meetings, the Arabic student magazine of which he became editor and student activism. His experience instilled in him self-confidence and the courage to express and defend his point of view, he said.

He also recalled how professors were "attentive, stimulating, and like all first-class teachers, unforgettable." So when he was about to become distracted from his studies with the political activism taking place on campus in response to the Palestinian Naqba of 1948, he was summoned by then-AUB President Stephen Penrose who reminded him of his family responsibilities and "admonished me not to jeopardize my last year at AUB because of rash political activity. 'Graduate first,' he advised me, "then do and say what you like."

But while Qattan highlighted the successes of AUB graduates, noting that despite the relatively small number of graduates since its founding (about 50,000), AUB alumni "have had an incommensurable influence over many aspects of the region's economic, political and social life -considerably more than the hundreds of thousands of graduates who leave today's Arab universities with little qualification for leadership."

"But this relative success is meaningless if it is not coupled with a strong sense of social responsibility," said Qattan, noting that the region could sink into even greater chaos if we do not wake up to its dreadful realities of injustice, corruption, inequality and unsustainable contradictions.

Qattan encouraged graduates to invest their energies in development as he considered this the only means for enriching the region. He blamed corruption and the absence of a common social or political project for the fleeing of money abroad.

In closing, Qattan told the alumni gathering that he hoped they would choose the path he had chosen-a path for investing in the region's social, cultural and political development.