William H. Luers

William H. Luers (born May 15, 1929, Springfield, Illinois) is the Director of The Iran Project^[3] and an adjunct Professor at The School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He has been a Naval Officer, a career diplomat in the U.S Foreign Service (32 years), The President of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC (13 years), and President of the United Nations Association of the United States of America (10 years). He is also a writer/commentator on world affairs. He has written articles for magazines, newspapers, and contributed essays for books since the mid-1960s. He has served on many corporate and not-for-profit Boards.

Education

Mr. Luers received a Bachelor of Arts from Hamilton College and a Master of Arts from Columbia University.

Diplomatic career

Mr. Luers entered the US Foreign Service in 1957 and served in Naples, Italy; Germany, Moscow, and Caracas, Venezuela. He also had several tours in the State Department in Washington DC including Deputy Director of Soviet Affairs, Deputy Executive Secretary of the Department, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican Affairs, Deputy Assistant Secretary for European Affairs. He was appointed American Ambassador to Venezuela in 1978 and then as Ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1983. He retired from the Foreign Service in the 1986 to accept the job as President of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Career as Director of The Iran Project

During his time at UNA-USA in 2002, Mr. Luers initiated, with Stephen Heintz, President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund,^[4] and several former diplomatic colleagues, a back channel effort to encourage official U.S. contact between the U.S. and Iranian officials. He and his colleagues initiated a long term effort that became an active Track 2 effort to deal with Iran. In 2009, when Luers stepped down as President of UNA-USA, he continued the work as “The Iran Project” and established it separately as a project of the Foundation for Civil Society,^[5] in NYC, with the continuing support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. As early as 2008, Luers and the core members of "the Project” called for a revised approach to the nuclear stand-off with Iran.

Career in the Arts and Museums

Mr. Luers' second career began when he become President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he served for 13 years as Chief Administrative Officer. Following his departure from the Met in 1999, in 2001, Mr. Luers was selected as the American International Adviser to the Praemium Imperiale, an arts prize given annually to five artists from around the world in five arts disciplines. It is known as the Nobel Prize for the Arts. He became a member of the Board of the Rubin Museum of Art, a member of the Advisory Board of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, a member of the Board of the Howard Gilman Foundation and serves on the American Advisory Board of the Christies. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Trust for Mutual Understanding which provides travel funding for cultural exchanges between the U.S. and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Career as President of the United Nations Association of the USA

Mr. Luers was elected President of the United Nations Association of the USA in January 1999. UNA-USA is a grass roots advocacy not-for-profit that seeks support throughout the U.S for the work of the United Nations. During his time at UNA-USA, Mr. Luers worked closely with two UN Secretaries General, Kofi Annan and Ban Ki Moon to improve relations between the UN and the US. Under his leadership UNA-USA started a program called “Global Classrooms” a new way to use Model UN to teach foreign affairs in public schools in the US and around the world. He stepped down as President in 2009 after ten years as its head.

Career as an Adjunct Professor

In the 1960s and early 1970s he taught a graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins SAIS and then at George Washington University on the Soviet Political System. In the early 1980s, while he was Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, he taught a graduate seminar at the Woodrow Wilson School on US Policy toward Central America. In 2009, he began to teach a course entitled Talking with the Enemy, at the Tufts School and Hamilton College Undergraduate, as well as graduate seminars at Seton Hall University and Columbia University (SIPA) where he presently teaches.

Career as a writer/commentator

Since 1966, Luers has been a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers commenting on foreign affairs. While in the Foreign Service, he published under two pseudonyms. He became more active and public during the late 1980s and 1990s writing on Gorbachev and the changes In the Soviet Union and on the Velvet Revolution after 1989. He has published several articles in Foreign Affairs, and other magazines and his essays have been carried in several collections on the USSR, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the United Nations. His many articles since 2009 have dealt with his work on Iran.

Corporate Board Member

Luers has served on numerous corporate Boards since the 1980s. He was on the Board of Superior Pet Products, (Boston, MA), The Discount Corporation of New York, Transco Energy Company (Houston, TX), Wicks Lumber Company (New York, NY), IDEX Corporation (Chicago, IL), a Board member of a number of Mutual Funds under Scudder Stevens and Clark then Deutsch Bank, Board member of AOL-Latin America (NYC), The StoryFirst Corporation (San Francisco, CA), and Riverside Corporation (Jacksonville, Fl).

Not-for-Profit Boards

Since returning to New York in 1986 he has served on many not-for-profit Boards including The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, The Rubin Museum, The National Museum of Natural History, IREX, Chairman of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, Chairman of the Center for Public Diplomacy, The Annenberg School, USC, Los Angeles, and Chairman of “St. Petersburg 2003” (from 1992 to 2003).

References

Cultural offices
Preceded by William B. Macomber, Jr.	President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1986-1999	Succeeded by David E. McKinney