ANC Man of the Year Acceptance Speech

Remarks by Dickran Kouymjian on March 5, 2000, Fresno

        I would like to thank the Armenian National Committee of the Central Valley for bestowing this honor upon me. I think of the distinguished past recipients of the award -- Raffi Hovannisian, Richard Hovannisian, Congressmen Radanovich and Pallone -- and feel flattered to be associated with them. I would like to thank the ANC for all the work it has done in preparing this banquet to honor an educator and I would like to thank all of you, friends and former students for your loyalty and friendship. I would also like to thank all those who called or wrote to me personally, especially members of my own and my wife's family. For various reasons, all of them unfortunately to do with health and sickness, my wife Angèle, my brother Armen in Pasadena, and my cousins were unable to come to Fresno.

        I would like to believe that the award is as much for the Armenian Studies Program, which I established at Fresno State 23 years ago, as it is for me. If my presence in this city has meant anything it must surely be for trying to permanently institutionalize the teaching of Armenian subjects to a broad populace from the Central Valley. In the past 23 years more than 5,000 students of all ages have enrolled in our courses. Many of them have earned a 24 credit minor in Armenian Studies. I hope that those I have taught have learned more than facts about Armenian history, literature, and art, that they have taken away a method for studying such disciplines, that they have at least learned how and where to find those facts, which in time they will forget. Armenian Studies at California State University, Fresno is now an integral part of the curriculum because more than half a dozen courses are part of the General Education Program. From the beginning I have tried to make the courses in Armenian Studies attractive to the general student body and not just students of Armenian origin. In part this is why nearly half of the 200 plus students we teach every academic year are not Armenian.

        For more than two decades I have tried to offer a very varied selection of courses on all aspects of Armenian scholarship. Modern Armenian, history, literature, architecture and art, Armenian film, political violence, historiography, Armenian-Turkish relations, William Saroyan, diaspora and Armenian immigration, David of Sasun, Armenian music, Karabagh, even Armenian cuisine: no other program has been able to provide such a wide spectrum of courses.

        From the beginning I insisted on an active outreach program, the cornerstone of which is our newspaper Hye Sharzhoom now in its 21st year. It is by far the oldest (perhaps the only) and most consistently published university student Armenian newspaper in the world. It serves as the major vehicle to broadcast to the world our academic and extracurricular activities, and our students produce it. In the past two or three years we have reinforced Hye Sharzhoom with the Armenian Studies Program Web Page, visited by more than 8000 surfers. In the coming months, we hope to add to it more and more information on Armenian affairs, Armenian art and architecture, and university news. This too is a student driven activity.

        You who are here today have been my closest supporters. You have helped the program grow, you have taken courses it has offered, you attend the evening lectures we offer regularly, and you help finance these activities. More than a decade ago we established an annual fund. Armenian Studies with only two regular fulltime faculty members directly employed by the program does not generate enough university budget to pay for anything more than the annual telephone and photocopying bill. Our secretary's entire salary is paid through that fund. I know of no other academic program in the same situation. Thus, our "community" is an integral part of the program. Furthermore, our Armenian Studies Advisory Board is one of the most active at CSUF and takes on more and more responsibility as the years go by. Through these activities and organizations, the Board, the newspaper, the website, the Annual Banquet and the Annual Fund, we are able to provide services to the student body and the community on a par with any of the departments and schools on this campus. But these activities, in addition to the revenue they generate and the many scholarships they fund, also create a tight bond between the University and you who are outside the campus. It is the community that has endowed the Hiag and Isabel Berberian chair which I hold and the newly created Henry Khanzadian Kazan Visiting Professorship in Armenian Studies as well as major endowments established by Pete Peters and Victoria and Henry Kazan. I am comforted by this close relationship because all these years, I/we have known that beside the students there is a community out there who cares about what we are doing on campus.

        Being chosen Man of the Year by the ANC clearly reinforces this symbiotic relationship and tells me and my colleagues and staff that the work I and we have done is important enough to the community to acknowledge it and honor it.

        At such moments it is customary to speak personally, about oneself. This is more difficult. I remember with fondness Richard Hovannisian talking about his personal relationship with Fresno and his family. I have always wondered what it would have been like to have lived and worked in or near one place; to have close ties or at least some connection with the place you were born and grew up in and with friends from your youth. Occasionally when I walk around Paris with my wife, I think how strange that she, after decades of roaming around the world with me in exotic places like Beirut, Istanbul, Cairo, and Fresno, can regularly pass by neighborhoods, houses and schools where she lived and worked. I also think of my teachers -- Prof. Michael Petrovich at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dr. George c. Miles of the American Numismatics Society, Prof. Nina Garsoian and Prof.Tibor Halasi-Kun of Columbia University and my M.A. thesis advisory, Karekin Vartabed, later Catholicos, Sarkissian.

        Where is my "hometown"? Tulcea in Romania where I spent my first five years, Chicago where I went to grammar school and half of high school, Racine where the family moved when I was 16 or Madison where for five years I was an undergraduate, perhaps the six years in New York where I earned my Ph.D. and met and married my wife. The two places where I have had the longest residence are Fresno and Paris. My university teaching career, which began 41 years ago, has taken me to Beirut (7 years), New York (3 years), Cairo (4 years), Paris (5 years), Fresno (22 years) and for single semesters to Yerevan and Berkeley. Our life has been divided between Fresno and Paris these past decades: our home is here and there as are our books, our belongings, our families, our friends.

        As I reflected on these things before this banquet in my honor, I concluded that the constants in my life are three: 1) a very loving and caring wife, a constant source of encouragement and inspiration, 2) years of accumulated research and the writing and reporting on it which never seems to come to an end, and 3) students, always new and eager students, ready to listen to what I have to offer them, ready to challenge me to make sense out of university education.

        I am being honor today by an organization, which has a mission, a clear purpose. For decades the Armenian National Committee has served as a promoter of what one might loosely call Armenian rights, both for the diasporan community in the United States and collectively for an entire nation that has suffered the catastrophe of genocide in this century. Its work on the local and national level in this country and through similar organizations in Europe has been especially directed toward resolving some of the confusion and distressed caused by the genocide and toiling to make sure that the act and its consequences are clearly understood by the governments of countries where Armenians reside today, or which have official relations with the Armenian Republic. In honoring once again a scholar from this community along with congressmen and diplomats, the ANC is saying something to me, or at least I would like to believe so.

        I hope that in addition to the close and personal relationship that I have and have had with individuals active in the ANC, my willingness to engage in matters vital to the well being of Armenians, to speak out as an academic on sensitive issues pertaining to our past and present history is also being recognized.

        It is a confusing time for Armenians, complicated by both the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the establishment of a democratic Armenia, and the continued denial by the Turkish government of the all determining event in our modern history, the liquidation of our nation and the theft of our ancestral homeland by an earlier Turkish government. For those engaged actively in the collective problems of our nations, like the members of the ANC or the Armenian Assembly, it must seem a constantly frustrating task. At moments like this we should step back and take inventory. Thanks to the efforts of the Armenian National Committee the dual questions of recognition of the genocide and its consequences and aid to Armenia are before the politicians of this country. Things are happening and at times so fast we cannot digest them all. It is true that there are set backs, as the recent decision of the French Senate not to consider the recognition of the Armenian genocide, already unanimously accepted by the French Assembly. On the other hand, aid to Armenia continues from our government despite the reluctance of our administration and many senators and congressman. We know whom to thank for that. And though the genocide is still denied officially by the government in Ankara, more and more Turkish voices are calling for a public discussion of the issue. Furthermore, even without Turkeys acknowledgement, there is a growing movement to legally claim rights and property lost because of a crime against humanity. A class action suit is now in progress for 3 billion dollars against New York Life and other insurance companies that never paid on tens of thousands of life insurance policies taken out by Armenians before 1915. Inquiry is being made into the whereabouts and ownership of the 32 tons of gold taken from Armenian victims by the Young Turks and shipped to Berlin for deposit, today worth $320,000,000, plus 85 years of interest. And the property, the houses, the factories, the farms, the land that was taken away during the deportation by Turkish authorities, who carefully registered all seized belongings and gave receipts to the Armenians who were sent away. Those inventories still exist in the Turkish archives and occasionally even with the children of the survivors. This will be the next class action suit. There is also the religious property, the 2500 churches, the 450 monasteries, and the 2000 schools that were illegal sequestered or destroyed. Clearly the Armenian Church has a right to demand restoration of those that still survive and reparations for those destroyed. Though the Patriarch in Istanbul is in a delicate situation, the Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia is in a position to exam the legal ramifications of this question and is doing so.

        For those among us who say it's so long ago, Armenians live a secure and prosperous life in this country, who is going to bother? The answer is that the ANC and the Armenian Assembly as well as individuals and the Church are going to bother, and even if they don't the lawyers are waiting in line to represent such a promising series of class action suits. The future will be full of wonders as unbelievable as the idea just a decade ago that Armenia would be an independent country.

        Even though my specialization is medieval history and art, I have never felt that I could enjoy the luxury of hiding behind my books and slides when it came to contemporary issues. I have spoken out on issues when I have had something useful to say. In class I sometimes get off the subject to engage issues of present day relevance to America, to the world, to Armenia, because education is precisely those things that are "off the subject." The privilege of university life is that society has agreed that those engaged in it can enjoy the gift of learning and discussing, of acquiring those skills that help people evaluate their lives as they live it. Being directly implicated in this process of learning and exchange for all of my adult life I feel that I have been blessed by my relationship with young minds. If I am being honored today for my efforts, if I know that my own understanding of what I have done and continue to do is the same understanding as those who have observed what I have done and do, then I rejoice. I thank you for this honor and promise to continue to be deserving of it.