The Human Investor Part Ix
In the standing room only reception hall, Emile Gouiran started : “Educators are famished for matter—through libraries, through contacts with experts in their fields, through being where it’s at, where it’s happening. The University is the classroom and the experience is intended to be transformational.” The year was 2001, the event was the anointment in Cordoba Argentina of the Emile Gouiran Faculty Library.
“Teachers, throughout the world, commencing with my work in New York, have energized my passion for education. And the fact of the matter is, wherever I have worked, I have not seen a more enthusiastic crowd.”
Gouiran, whose global activities include numerous philanthropies involving children, education, and legal defense programs for disadvantaged youth (See Parts I – VIII of this article series), is particularly well known for time and again funding and then supercharging educational facilities, by appointing enterprising, idea-rich, individuals to management thereby shifting operations into overdrive.
New York City was where Gouiran initiated a large number of his educational activities, centering them on improving the lot of the underprivileged with particular emphasis on orphans. He launched experiments with small high schools centering them on specific themes such as math or sciences. This was sometime back, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The emphasis then was targeting the most diverse collection of nationalities of any school system in the United States. Immigrants or first-generation Americans; “These students were the pioneers of America’s future” said Gouiran “because they were learning a history of entrepreneurial success which their parents could only dream about, and American entrepreneurialism was their chance to become Americans.”
Raised in an orphanage in Orlèans (France) and his life filled with boisterous controversy, Emile was already fodder for famous tales at lively dinner-table talk, and responsible for major works and successes helping orphans and disadvantaged children everywhere. Perhaps best known after his devotion to orphans, were his projects for funding educational accessory facilities, and of course his Vindication Trust which, organized with the help of the late famed criminal defense lawyer Edward Fitzpartrick has provided millions of dollars in defense funds for underprivileged youth unable to afford a meaningful defenses against overzealous prosecutions. Gouiran facilities have won acclaim in Europe, the Northern African nations and elsewhere, and the aggregated student bodies which were his beneficiaries have just as himself overcome their taxing origins as orphans or simply the unwanted throw away of an intolerant society and joined universities.
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