Joseph Aoun

Joseph Elie Aoun (Arabic: جوزيف عون) (born March 26, 1953 in Beirut, Lebanon) is the seventh president of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, where he took office on August 15, 2006. Previously, Aoun was dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California. He joined USC in 1982 in the Department of Linguistics, and during his time at USC served as head of the academic Senate.

As a theoretical syntactician, he is known for his work on logical form and wh-movement.

Aoun's 2016 salary was $1,311,729, with an additional $204,775 per year in other compensation.

He is married to Zeina and has two sons, Adrian and Joseph Karim.

• PhD: Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1981
• Diploma of Advanced Studies: General and Theoretical Linguistics, University of Paris VIII, 1977
• Masters: Oriental Languages and Literature, Université Saint-Joseph, Beirut, Lebanon, 1975

Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence was published and released in 2017 by MIT Press. The book appeared over a year after Aoun wrote a commentary for the Chronicle of Higher Education that shares the first part of the book's title.

In Robot-Proof, Northeastern University president Joseph Aoun proposes a way to educate the next generation of college students to invent, to create, and to discover—to fill needs in society that even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence agent cannot.

A "robot-proof" education, Aoun argues, is not concerned solely with topping up students' minds with high-octane facts. Rather, it calibrates them with a creative mindset and the mental elasticity to invent, discover, or create something valuable to society—a scientific proof, a hip-hop recording, a web comic, a cure for cancer. Aoun lays out the framework for a new discipline, humanics, which builds on our innate strengths and prepares students to compete in a labor market in which smart machines work alongside human professionals.

The only certainty about the future is change. Higher education based on the new literacies of humanics can equip students for living and working through change. He argues for the need for better and continuous education to keep up with changing technology.

Aoun said, "Beyond simply conferring degrees, the foundational purpose of colleges and universities must be to educate — and that means equipping people of all ages, at all stages of their careers, to build successful and fulfilling lives. This means we need to take several important steps to make our students robot-proof."

• Chevalier de La Légion d’honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor): French Government, 2018
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2013
• Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, 2011
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2010
• Doctor of Humane Letters: Anatolia College, 2009
• Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa: Hebrew Union College, 2007
• Chevalier de L'ordre des Palmes Academiques (Knight of the Order of the Academic Palms): French Government, 2006
• Endowed Chair, Anna H. Bing Dean's Chair in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

• MIT Robert A. Muh Alumni Award in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, 2011
• USC Associates Award For Creativity In Research And Scholarship, 1997
• USC Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award, Award for The Syntax of Scope (with A. Li), 1993
• USC Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award, Award for A Grammar of Anaphora, 1988