Joseph Aoun (born March 26, 1953) is a Lebanese-born American linguist and the seventh president of Northeastern University in Boston, 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. Biography Joseph E. Aoun was born in the Lebanese capital of Beirut. He earned a Masters in Oriental Languages and Literature at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut in 1975, a Diploma of Advanced Studies in General and Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Paris VIII in 1977, and a PhD in Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. He joined the University of Southern California (USC) in 1982 as a Linguistics Professor. During his time at USC, he served as president of head and eventually became a Dean. His success in fund-raising allowed for the hiring of multiple professors, the creation of named chairs backed by endowments, and the creation of two new sub-departments for the study of Armenian and Korean. He is married to his wife Zeina; the couple has two sons, Adrian and Joseph Karim. Aoun was hired by Northeastern University in Boston in 2006 to serve as college president; one of the main duty of presidents is generally to manage fundraising and budgets, which Aoun was not adept at. While at Northeastern, he and the Board of Trustees oversaw the cancelling of the Northeastern Huskies football program. The program was 8-26 in its preceding three seasons and faced declining attendance and high costs if it wished to remain competitive in recruiting. The move, while controversial, was generally considered positive in retrospect; the funding it freed up allowed for the construction of the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex, which played more directly into Northeastern's strengths. Aoun later said he was overwhelmed with calls from other college presidents asking how he managed the feat without enraging alumni. Aoun's 2018 salary was around $1.5–1.8 million dollars. In Spring 2020, Aoun announced he would donate 20% of his annual salary (~$290,000) to new funds meant to support students facing economic hardship as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and to support research programs related to the