Sanford J. Ungar
Sanford J. Ungar became the tenth President of Goucher College on July 1, 2001. Founded in 1885, Goucher is a traditional liberal arts college in Baltimore, Maryland, with 1475 undergraduate students and several hundred others studying for Master’s degrees. Originally a woman’s college, Goucher has been coeducational since 1986.
Prior to assuming his position at Goucher, Mr. Ungar was Director of the Voice of America, the U.S. government’s principal international broadcasting agency, for two years. In that capacity, he oversaw more than 900 hours a week of VOA broadcasts in English and 52 other languages to some 100 million people around the world. From 1986 until 1999, he was Dean of the School of Communication at American University in Washington, DC.
He is the author, most recently, of Fresh Blood: The New American Immigrants, which was the result of more than four years of research among immigrant groups around the United States. A previous book, The Papers & The Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle over the Pentagon Papers, won the George Polk Award in 1973. Another, Africa: The People and Politics of an Emerging Continent , was a best seller in the 1980s. Mr. Ungar’s other books include Estrangement: America and the World, a collection of essays he edited while a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and FBI: An Uncensored Look Behind the Walls, published in the 1970s and still regarded as a valuable source on that agency and its history.
Mr. Ungar’s experience in print and broadcast journalism spans four decades. Between 1980 and 1983, he was the host of several programs on National Public Radio, including the award-winning “All Things Considered.” He has also often appeared on public, commercial, and cable television, frequently as a commentator or as the moderator of debates.
The author of many magazine and newspaper articles on topics of political and international interest, Mr. Ungar has spoken frequently around the United States and in other countries on issues of American foreign policy and domestic politics, free expression, human rights, and immigration.
Sanford Ungar has been Washington editor of The Atlantic, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, and a staff writer for The Washington Post . He was a correspondent for United Press International in Paris and for Newsweek in Nairobi, and for many years contributed to The Economist, as well as The New York Times Magazine.
Mr. Ungar obtained his B.A. in Government magna cum laude from Harvard College and a Master’s degree in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was a Rotary Foundation fellow. In May 1999 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by Wilkes University in his hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He has traveled widely in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia; he is fluent in French and also speaks Spanish. He serves on the boards of the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies, the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs, and the World Trade Center Institute of Baltimore. He is currently chair of the Maryland Independent College and University Association. Mr. Ungar is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In June 2000, at its annual convention in Buenos Aires, the Rotary Foundation gave him its Scholar Alumni Achievement Award.