by Gretchen Handwerger and Mary and Paul Slawson
Image Credit: Mary and Paul Slawson
Among CECI'S founders and earliest supporters were Paul and Mary Slawson. In 1993, AUP President Glen Ferguson, whom Paul had known when both were Peace Corps staff members, persuaded Paul to become Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the American University of Paris. When Ferguson stepped down as President the following year for health reasons, Slawson’s support and leadership sustained the University through a critical period of uncertainty and into a future of renewed promise. When Ferguson’s successor, Lee Huebner, stepped out of his interim role at AUP in 1997, Slawson helped establish CECI as an organization that would work closely with AUP in promoting the field of global media studies, and in sponsoring AUP scholarship students from the developing world, with the hope that they would return to their home countries as potential leaders in the field of journalism and international communications. Paul suggested that Huebner take on the role of Chairman of the new CECI organization.
Not to be outdone, Mary became a founding CECI Board member and they founded the Paul and Mary Slawson scholarship program to support deserving CECI students, primarily from Cambodia at the start, but also from other developing countries. The Asia Foundation, on whose Board Paul also sat, helped to identify and select some of the students, most of whom had never been outside their home country before coming to AUP. Altogether, 13 Cambodian students have participated in the program to date. For several years, a highlight for the alums who had returned to Cambodia was a yearly dinner with the Slawsons when Paul and Mary returned to Southeast Asia. The very first two CECi students , who arrived at AUP from Cambodia in 1997 were Kimseng Men, who went on to become a Communications Analyst for the United Nations Development Program and is is now working for Voice of American in Washington DC, and Vannak Chun, who received two Ph. D. degrees in Paris after graduating from AUP and is now a Professor at Pnom Penh University. Another early (1999) awardee was Ana Nov. She returned to an prominent career in the journalism,and public relations fields in Cambodia. .
Paul had degrees from the US Naval Academy and the Fletcher School of Diplomacy before joining the newly-founded Peace Corps in 1961 as Associate Director in Pakistan where he met Mary, then serving as one of the first Peace Corps Volunteers. Mary was a graduate of Immaculata College in Portland, Oregon.Together they lived in six different countries before settling in the San Francisco Bay area and Napa Valley while also maintaining their international interests. Two of their three children and two of their six grandchildren were born outside the US. Although the CECI program remains close to their hearts, Paul and Mary have also sponsored comparable programs at the UK Royal Geographic Society, the Fletcher School at Tufts University and Harvard University.