Impact Stories

More than 40 years after she left AUB, Mary Rowland Robinson (1927-2020) wrote, “AUB and Lebanon will be with me forever.” Mary Robinson will also be with AUB forever – not just because she was the first dean of women, but also because of the generous bequest that she made to the university. Her bequest is funding the Mary R. Robinson Endowed Scholarship, one of the first scholarship funds to be recognized as part of AUB’s new AUB4Women Campaign, which was recently launched to celebrate the centennial of coeducation at AUB. The goal of the campaign is to raise urgently needed funds for exceptional women students so many of whom are facing formidable challenges these days because of the economic and financial collapse of Lebanon.

During her nine years as AUB’s first dean of women, Robinson formed lasting friendships that she would treasure for the rest of her life and accumulated a treasure trove of stories from life on campus and also her many trips around the region – to Kuwait, on one occasion as the chaperone of the women’s ping pong team; frequent trips to Cyprus; to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert, where she rode a camel up Jebel Musa; and four trips to Petra, once with her mother who visited her in Beirut in 1964. Robinson was an intrepid and tireless traveler – always up for an adventure. “Long after she left Lebanon,” Robinson’s niece, Annette Brun, remembers, “we regularly heard wonderful stories about AUB and Lebanon. Mary loved her time there and was very proud of the role she had played at AUB.”

Robinson had a lot to be proud of having been a strong champion of women students during a time of enormous change at AUB: between 1959 and 1969, the number of women students on campus increased dramatically from 400 to 1,000. There were several occasions when Robinson was pressured to make special arrangements for the growing number of women students on campus. In her memoirs, she mentions a visit from someone at the Jordanian Embassy who wanted her to impose an earlier curfew for women students from Jordan. Robinson described another occasion in an interview with MainGate magazine in 2012: “I dealt with trustees a lot and I remember John Case [who was chairman of the AUB Board of Trustees between 1956 and 1964], head of Standard Oil. He had a donor who was willing to give money for a new dorm, if it would enforce restricted hours for those people from more conservative countries. And I said, no. I didn’t want to do that, because that was part of the reason I came to AUB to help students make choices and to take responsibility.”

Although she left AUB in 1969, Robinson returned to Lebanon on several occasions – most recently in 2007 – and stayed in close touch with the university. She participated in AUB’s 150^th celebrations in New York in 2016 when she was celebrated as one of AUB’s History Makers. With the establishment of this endowed scholarship fund at AUB, the legacy of Mary Robinson will live on at the university that gave her “the experience of a lifetime.”