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Former
AU president Joseph Sisco dies
BY
MIKE UNGER
Joseph
Sisco, who served as president of American University from 1976
to 1980, died last Tuesday of complications from diabetes at his
home in Chevy Chase. He was 85.
Sisco
came to AU from the State Department, where over the course of a
quarter century he worked on foreign policy issues involving countries
from Asia to the Middle East.
He
was motivated to become a university president because of the extreme
importance he placed in education, according to the Washington
Post. Sisco was the son of Italian immigrants, who raised him
and his four siblings in modest circumstances in Chicago.
Provost
Neil Kerwin taught in the Washington Semester program during Sisco’s
tenure. “Joe
brought a level of national notoriety and visibility to the university
by virtue of his really outstanding public service and the fact
that he was so prominent in the broadly defined international affairs
community,” Kerwin said. “He conducted, while he was president,
a considerable amount of outreach to communities he felt the university
would benefit from a relationship with.”
While
at AU, Sisco worked on toughening admissions standards and overhauling
the Board of Trustees, said professor of international relations
Abdul Aziz Said, who served on the search committee that selected
Sisco.
“Working with him you knew where you stood,” Said said.
“He was direct. He expressed himself clearly, he expressed
his needs clearly.”
Sisco
was born in 1919. His mother died when he was nine, so he was raised
primarily by his father, a tailor. He graduated from high school
in 1937, and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Knox
College in Galesburg, Ill. He worked as a teacher before joining
the Army and eventually earned a master’s degree and doctorate,
in Soviet affairs, from the University of Chicago.
Sisco
worked for the CIA for a year before joining the State Department,
where for the first 14 years of his career he worked as a foreign
affairs officer specializing in, among other things, United Nations
issues. In 1965 Secretary of State Dean Rusk appointed him assistant
secretary of state for international organization affairs.
Four years later, President Nixon appointed him assistant secretary
of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs.
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