Professorships
Prior to receiving his PhD, Gregorian had already begun teaching European and Middle Eastern history at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) upon returning to California from Afghanistan in 1962. He left San Francisco State in 1968 and for a brief stint served as Associate Professor at UCLA. That same year he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained until 1972. He received the title of Professor at UT Austin, and also served as the Director of Special Programs there from 1970–1972.
Gregorian had been recruited to UT Austin by John Silber, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences who was eventually fired at the urging of the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the university, Frank Erwin, over a disagreement about whether to increase the university's student population and expand the university. Gregorian himself resigned in protest of the issue, but did not follow Silber and a number of other faculty members in their exodus to Boston University. Rather, in 1972, Gregorian accepted the position of Tarzian Professor of Armenian and Caucasian History and Professor of South Asian history at the University of Pennsylvania, an endowed professorship which allowed him to teach Armenian, South Asian, and European intellectual history.
In 1974, Gregorian was named Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, the first person to hold this position. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences brought together 28 departments, 33 graduate groups, eight special programs and offices, 528 faculty members, some 5,500 undergraduates and 2,500 graduate students, making it the largest single component of the university, In 1978, Gregorian became Provost, chief academic officer of the university.
In 1980, then-president of the University of Pennsylvania Martin Meyerson announced his retirement, and there was speculation that Gregorian would succeed him. In fact, Gregorian had been offered the chancellorship at UC Berkeley, but had declined because he had been Provost at Penn for only two years and did not feel it was an appropriate time to leave his post. But Gregorian was never appointed President of the University of Pennsylvania. While there was no commitment on the part of the university to appoint him president, Gregorian did receive assurances that he would be given the opportunity to withdraw his candidacy if the position was not going to be offered to him so that he would not be a liability to whoever was appointed president of the university. "The story generally accepted," writes one Stanford alumnus in a 2005 interview with Gregorian, "is that some Philadelphia mandarins on Penn's board couldn’t tolerate a foreign name and accent—someone they saw as insufficiently polished and pedigreed—as president of their Ivy League institution." In 1981, Gregorian resigned as Provost, and Sheldon Hackney was named President of the University of Pennsylvania that year.
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