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Page Turners: Interview With Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian
Aired July 08, 2003 - 15:21 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: A new book by Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian chronicles his rise from childhood poverty in Iran to the heights of American academia. The book is called "The Road to Home: My Life and Times."
Vartan Gregorian is here with me in New York to talk about it.
Thank you for being here.
VARTAN GREGORIAN, AUTHOR, "THE ROAD TO HOME": A great honor to be with you.
WOODRUFF: It is an extraordinary story from an Armenian in Tabriz neighborhood in Iran, a poor family, but an extraordinary influential grandmother. You talk about your father, your family, an extraordinary life, all the way to America and the incredible success that have had. It is an extraordinary life.
GREGORIAN: I never thought it was until now.
(LAUGHTER)
WOODRUFF: Why did you decide it was time to put this all on paper?
GREGORIAN: Well, four years ago, I was separated from my left kidney. And for the first time, I was in a major hospital. And I realized about my own mortality. And I decided to write the book, because my three sons and many of my friends only knew public Gregorian, public persona, but not the private one.
So I decided to write the book so they could know about my childhood, my struggles and my education. And, second, I wanted to illustrate and demonstrate the power of education, the power of a book, and the power of the imagination as a liberating force.
WOODRUFF: Which comes through loud and clear in this book. When you were growing up, you write about, there were only two books in your home. Your father, for some reason, even though he had some education, there weren't any books around. So what gave you the love of learning that you eventually...
GREGORIAN: By accident. First of all, my grandmother raised me, because my mother died when I was 6 1/2 years old. She was 26. And my grandmother instilled in me the love of learning, so to go to school and read. And then, by accident, I became a page in the local library, which was 5,000 books. And I read a lot. Some I understood. Some I did not.
But the books opened a new horizon, a new imagination, vistas. I lived many lives, many personalities, and imagined many vistas, foreign countries, individuals, cried with them, fought with them, lived with them, traveled with them. So it gave me an unlimited world in a limited world in which I was living.
WOODRUFF: And at the age of, what, 15 or 16, you left Iran to go to Beirut to university.
(CROSSTALK)
WOODRUFF: And you finished university. You came to the United States at the age of 20. What was the United States able to give you that you couldn't get anywhere else?
GREGORIAN: Well, I went from Iran to Lebanon all by myself, age 15. I finished high school -- college -- and I came to Stanford as a freshman. My teacher applied to two places, Berkeley and Stanford. Both of them admitted. Stanford sent airmail. Berkeley sent surface mail. So I arrived in America.
America has taught me -- gave me a completely different world, a world in which knowledge was not didactic, but was inductive. And, for the first time, I was surprised that I could question teachers, I could question text. It was not authority-based. It was process of education. And so America liberated me, in many ways, intellectually, as well as personally.
WOODRUFF: A lot is said about how Americans are too inward- focused. We don't think enough about the rest of the world. Is that what you found in your time in America, that we don't think enough about what goes on
(CROSSTALK)
GREGORIAN: Well, I was found I was as ignorant of America as America was ignorant of me. But it was a process of mutual discovery, because, when I came to America, America, I had imagined a beautiful land in which there were no ants, everything was clean. All Americans wore eyeglasses.
WOODRUFF: No ants. But there were ants.
GREGORIAN: Yes.
All Americans wore eyeglasses because they were reading so much. They were all educated, and a completely Hollywood version of America interpreted in Tabriz, where all the movies came 10 years late. So America was a land of justice, where cowboys fell, but no hats were lost, where individuals counted, when everything was law and order and beautiful people, where nobody worked. Everybody was enjoying themselves.
And, suddenly, the reality of America hit harder. Of all the things I have I discovered in America, I discovered that work had dignity in America, that to work for one's education was the most dignified thing I could do.
WOODRUFF: An extraordinary story, an extraordinary journey, the life of Vartan Gregorian. The book is "The Road to Home: My Life and Times."
We thank you very much for coming in to talk about this book.
GREGORIAN: I thank you for having me. Thank you.
WOODRUFF: We appreciate it.
GREGORIAN: Likewise.
WOODRUFF: All right.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
President Vartan Gregorian>
Aired July 8, 2003 - 15:21 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: A new book by Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian chronicles his rise from childhood poverty in Iran to the heights of American academia. The book is called "The Road to Home: My Life and Times."
Vartan Gregorian is here with me in New York to talk about it.
Thank you for being here.
VARTAN GREGORIAN, AUTHOR, "THE ROAD TO HOME": A great honor to be with you.
WOODRUFF: It is an extraordinary story from an Armenian in Tabriz neighborhood in Iran, a poor family, but an extraordinary influential grandmother. You talk about your father, your family, an extraordinary life, all the way to America and the incredible success that have had. It is an extraordinary life.
GREGORIAN: I never thought it was until now.
(LAUGHTER)
WOODRUFF: Why did you decide it was time to put this all on paper?
GREGORIAN: Well, four years ago, I was separated from my left kidney. And for the first time, I was in a major hospital. And I realized about my own mortality. And I decided to write the book, because my three sons and many of my friends only knew public Gregorian, public persona, but not the private one.
So I decided to write the book so they could know about my childhood, my struggles and my education. And, second, I wanted to illustrate and demonstrate the power of education, the power of a book, and the power of the imagination as a liberating force.
WOODRUFF: Which comes through loud and clear in this book. When you were growing up, you write about, there were only two books in your home. Your father, for some reason, even though he had some education, there weren't any books around. So what gave you the love of learning that you eventually...
GREGORIAN: By accident. First of all, my grandmother raised me, because my mother died when I was 6 1/2 years old. She was 26. And my grandmother instilled in me the love of learning, so to go to school and read. And then, by accident, I became a page in the local library, which was 5,000 books. And I read a lot. Some I understood. Some I did not.
But the books opened a new horizon, a new imagination, vistas. I lived many lives, many personalities, and imagined many vistas, foreign countries, individuals, cried with them, fought with them, lived with them, traveled with them. So it gave me an unlimited world in a limited world in which I was living.
WOODRUFF: And at the age of, what, 15 or 16, you left Iran to go to Beirut to university.
(CROSSTALK)
WOODRUFF: And you finished university. You came to the United States at the age of 20. What was the United States able to give you that you couldn't get anywhere else?
GREGORIAN: Well, I went from Iran to Lebanon all by myself, age 15. I finished high school -- college -- and I came to Stanford as a freshman. My teacher applied to two places, Berkeley and Stanford. Both of them admitted. Stanford sent airmail. Berkeley sent surface mail. So I arrived in America.
America has taught me -- gave me a completely different world, a world in which knowledge was not didactic, but was inductive. And, for the first time, I was surprised that I could question teachers, I could question text. It was not authority-based. It was process of education. And so America liberated me, in many ways, intellectually, as well as personally.
WOODRUFF: A lot is said about how Americans are too inward- focused. We don't think enough about the rest of the world. Is that what you found in your time in America, that we don't think enough about what goes on
(CROSSTALK)
GREGORIAN: Well, I was found I was as ignorant of America as America was ignorant of me. But it was a process of mutual discovery, because, when I came to America, America, I had imagined a beautiful land in which there were no ants, everything was clean. All Americans wore eyeglasses.
WOODRUFF: No ants. But there were ants.
GREGORIAN: Yes.
All Americans wore eyeglasses because they were reading so much. They were all educated, and a completely Hollywood version of America interpreted in Tabriz, where all the movies came 10 years late. So America was a land of justice, where cowboys fell, but no hats were lost, where individuals counted, when everything was law and order and beautiful people, where nobody worked. Everybody was enjoying themselves.
And, suddenly, the reality of America hit harder. Of all the things I have I discovered in America, I discovered that work had dignity in America, that to work for one's education was the most dignified thing I could do.
WOODRUFF: An extraordinary story, an extraordinary journey, the life of Vartan Gregorian. The book is "The Road to Home: My Life and Times."
We thank you very much for coming in to talk about this book.
GREGORIAN: I thank you for having me. Thank you.
WOODRUFF: We appreciate it.
GREGORIAN: Likewise.
WOODRUFF: All right.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
President Vartan Gregorian>
