Penrose, Stephen B. L. (Stephen Beasley Linnard), 1908-1954

The following edited excerpts are from the October, 1991 essay "Stephen B.L. Penrose, Jr.: A Biographical Tribute" by Frances Copeland Stickles and from the introduction to the 1993 publication of this collection by Lawrence L. Dodd.

Full text of the 1993 printed guide

Much of the work of Stephen B.L. Penrose,Jr. can be found to be as applicable today as it was when his speeches were experienced first-hand and his writings newly printed, especially when considering his defense of Palestinian rights just as the modern state of Israel was forming. In 1942, he wrote to his parents from New York about the danger to the Allied cause by an attempt to get a Jewish army organized in Palestine. He believed it would set off an Arab revolt. Until the day of his untimely death in 1954, he continued to voice his concern about Arab-American relations and the rights of the Palestinians. He had just completed six years as president of the American University of Beirut when he died at forty-six. As the Palestinian representative at the United Nations cabled Penrose’s widow Margaret “Peggy” Penrose: "The Palestine Arab refugees lost a champion and hero."

At the time of his death, Penrose was America's best-known advocate of Palestinian statehood. He wrote worked tirelessly for better understanding between the Arab World and the United States. "America's stake in the Middle East is fundamentally the possibility of losing World War III before a shot has been fired," he warned an audience at the Delmonico Hotel in New York in January 1951. Two years later, in May 1953, Penrose testified before the United States Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East that, "It is no exaggeration to say that upon the solution to the problem of Palestine rests not only the peace of the Middle East but very possibly of the entire world . . . The refugee problem is a psychological one and should not be attacked on a purely statistical basis."

Penrose was the youngest son of Whitman College's president from 1894-1934, Stephen B.L. Penrose, Sr., and Mary Shipman Penrose. Penrose, or "Binks," was born and grew up on the Whitman campus and graduated magna cum laude from that college in 1928, majoring in Greek and chemistry. He went immediately after commencement to Beirut where he taught physics at the American University of Beirut for three years. Among his friends during the Beirut years were Charles Malik, later the Lebanese Ambassador to the United Nations and the United States, and Emile Bustany, an internationally respected engineer and businessman. At Columbia University, where Penrose gained a Ph.D. in philosophy, he met Peggy Dale, who received her M.A. in Spanish studies. They were married in Mexico City so that her parents, American missionaries to the Mexican Indians-her mother a medical doctor and her father an educator-could be present. The new Penrose family had three children: Margaret Dale, Mary Shipman (Polly), and Stephen Beasley Linnard (Stevie) Penrose, III.

Margaret Penrose received her B.A. from Erskine College and her M.A. from Columbia University. Her educational training was in the romance languages and before marrying Penrose she taught, for less than one year, in the American Community School in Mexico City. After marriage she taught Spanish at Whitman College and then began a career of helping her husband and raising a family. Following her husband's death, Margaret was Dean of Students at Scripps College, Claremont, California, from 1956-1962. She then became the assistant to the Dean of the School of Public Health and Director of the Shattuck International House, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, from 1962-1978.

The road to Beirut for the Penrose family was circuitous, as they followed Stephen Penrose as his career path developed. After stints of teaching philosophy and psychology at Whitman College and Rockford College, he took a job with the Near East College Association in New York City as Assistant Director. In this position, the American University of Beirut was one of the six American institutions for which he coordinated recruiting, funding campaigns, and personnel support. He also wrote the history of the first seventy-five years of American University of Beirut, That They May Have Life . It is still in print.

After World War II broke out, Penrose joined the Office of Strategic Services and went to Cairo, where many of those he recruited to work for him had been his teaching colleagues in Beirut a decade earlier. He added Arabic to his language arsenal. He returned to Washington, D.C. as Deputy Chief of Secret Intelligence, and later became chief. This endeavor transferred him to the European theater and when the war was over, he was decorated by the Dutch and Polish governments and received the Bronze Star from the United States. He was decorated by the Lebanese government posthumously. After the war, Penrose became Special Assistant to U.S. Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal. When Penrose resigned to return to Beirut, Forrestal wrote him, "I am grateful for your assurance that you will be available to assist us in the future. I only hope that world conditions will never require us to interrupt you in this new venture."

The "new venture" was to be inaugurated as the fourth president of the American University of Beirut. The Penroses arrived in Lebanon in 1948 soon after the partition of Palestine. The third General Conference of UNESCO met in Beirut that fall and Penrose was immediately plunged into cooperative affairs as Advisor to the United States Delegation. These associations continued throughout his presidency. The day before he died he chaired a meeting of UNESCO's International Committee for the Translation of the Classics into Arabic. He was a corporate member-at-large of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions and kept up ties with Phi Beta Kappa, the American Philosophical Association, and the Royal Central Asian Society of London. His interests were wide-ranging and the contacts and associations, so essential to any fund-raiser, which he brought to bear on his new job, were legion. The Ford Foundation soon became a major donor to the university, and the first American government grant was made to American University of Beirut in 1950. Later his colleagues would say of him that "he steers the University with steadfast faith to a position of renewed strength and esteem throughout the Arab World."

During his six years as president, Penrose established an Arab Studies Program, Schools of Engineering and Agriculture, the Department of Public Administration, an Institute of Economic Research, School of Public Health, the Office of Dean of Students (he had served a year as assistant Dean of Men at Whitman College), and an effective Student Council. New buildings changed the look of the campus-on-the-Mediterranean: the Bechtel School of Engineering, the Jafet Memorial Library, the Gulbenkian Infirmary, faculty apartments, a new wing for the University Hospital, and a classroom building and farm complex for the School of Agriculture. Two Arab vice presidents were appointed.

At the same time, Penrose continued to be a public spokesman for Arab-American relations and to brief every American tourist who ventured to Beirut. Some of these tourists arrived by cruise ship, others on motor bike, and still others, like Dorothy Thompson the journalist, on assignment. The alumni family of Jafet came from Rio de Janeiro to see their library dedicated. Helen Keller came to visit schools for the blind in Lebanon and addressed a university chapel session.