October 14, 2025 | By Kirstin Fawcett (AGI27)

American University in Dubai president Dr. Kyle Long (AGI10) travels extensively by virtue of working in international higher education. Some of Long’s journeys, however—like a cross-country move from Indiana to Annapolis in his early twenties, precipitated by a book written by St. John’s tutor Eva Brann—have proven more fateful than others.

A graduate of Wabash College in Indiana, Long had majored in classical studies but left school in 2007 feeling like there was still much to learn. This hunch was confirmed in his first job as a research associate for Wabash’s Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts. While compiling a literature review, Long came across Brann’s Paradoxes of Education in a Republic: “By reading Eva’s book,” Long says, recalling Brann’s 1979 treatise on the civic importance of studying the humanities in a democracy, “I began to very clearly understand where the holes in my education existed. And I said, ‘Oh boy, I have got to go to St. John’s. I set my sights on the Graduate Institute, and I was there a year later.”

St. John’s Annapolis, where Long had the privilege of not just meeting but studying Plato’s Republic with Brann, was his first stop in a peripatetic path from Maryland to the Middle East and beyond. But the Program served Long not as a stepping-stone so much as a cornerstone: It was thanks to the Graduate Institute, for instance, that Long says he began finding his voice as a writer. “St. John’s was great because it started to pull questions out of me,” he recalls of crafting inquisitive essays on the significance of ignorance in the Republic and the underlying motives of Chaucer’s Pardoner, the openly corrupt church official-turned-pilgrim in Canterbury Tales. (His Plato essay, written for a Brann-led preceptorial on the text and submitted for publication at her encouragement, netted a proud milestone for the grad student as his first peer-reviewed paper.)

And it was Annapolis tutor and then-Graduate Institute director Marilyn Higuera who called Long in 2010, several months after he had completed the Program, with news that the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS) was hiring an assistant dean of students. Former St. John’s Santa Fe President John Agresto had helped found AUIS, a Western-influenced liberal arts school in Iraqi Kurdistan, in 2006. Higuera, meanwhile, had learned of the opening through the Johnnie network and thought that Long seemed like the type who would appreciate the chance to travel even further eastward in the name of the liberal arts. Would he, she asked, be interested in applying?

Long, who was indeed interested, had previously juggled his studies with a full-time job at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges in Washington, D.C. He knew that he wanted to continue his trajectory in higher education. What he didn’t know, despite AUIS’s ties to St. John’s College, “was anything about Iraq, the Middle East, or the practice of American higher education outside of the United States,” Long says. “But what I did know was that this was a very fascinating project, that there were a lot of like-minded people out there, and that I was looking for an adventure.”

Lest he fear feeling isolated at AUIS, several members of the greater St. John’s community, such as longtime tutor Louis Petrich, were on sabbatical there. Even better was that AUIS’s dean of students was a noted enthusiast of the St. John’s Program. “At the end of a 90-minute Skype call,” Long says, “he offered me the job. And then two weeks later, I was living in Iraq.”

Long spent the next several years living in the city of Sulaimani, engaging in its multinational intellectual community while continuing to do what Johnnies do best: asking plenty of questions, inwardly and outwardly. Many of his inquiries concerned the very concept of “American”-style higher education and its practice outside the U.S. Where and when did it originate, he wondered, and for that matter, why did so many global universities include the word “American” in their titles? “I couldn’t get answers after four years of living and working in Iraq,” Long says. “So, I took these questions to a PhD program at Columbia. That’s where I learned the methods, the tools, and the theory I needed to know to answer them.”

Long’s research at Columbia, where he earned his doctorate in international and comparative education, formed the basis of a PhD thesis that grew into a book: Emergence of the American University Abroad. It provides a cultural, geopolitical, and historical framework for these international campuses while analyzing their impact on the global academic community.

“I am a person who cares a lot about context,” Long says. “I hate walking into a conversation without knowing what happened before. What I was drawn to most about the St. John’s Program was the intellectual history—the idea that I can understand my time better by knowing how we got here. What are the ideas that animate our time? Where do they come from? And how have they changed? I care about context and helping people understand how we got here in my own work, as well.”

Working on his book solidified Long’s research agenda, which, in turn, led to related roles and professorships at institutions and schools such as Northwestern University, the United States Agency for International Development, and the George Washington University. His extensive track record in international higher education came full circle in 2024 when the American University in Dubai (AUD) hired Long as its president.

Full circle in some ways, that is, as Long knows better than anyone that “American” schools outside the U.S. are not a monolith. While researching his thesis-turned-book, he became the first scholar to identify every single American-style university around the globe, a herculean effort that tallied more than 80 schools across 55 countries.

Uniting these institutions, his book posits, are four things: a shared commitment to an American model of liberal education as well as an English-language curriculum, independent governance, and dedication to quality assurance via peer review. But despite their names (“American University of ... ”), these schools are not formally related on paper, nor are they in spirit. Take, for example, AUD, which was founded in 1995, more than a decade before AUIS’s formation in Iraq. The two schools are accredited differently, and their campuses are 1,400+ miles apart—more than twice the distance between Wabash College, Long’s undergraduate alma mater in Indiana, and St. John’s Annapolis.

One trait that AUIS and AUD do share, however, beyond the four pillars laid out in Long’s book, is an appreciation for the St. John’s Program. “There’s a lot of positive sentiment and attraction to St. John’s among our Arts & Sciences faculty,” Long says. “Our dean told me that he finds every conversation he has with Johnnies to be so refreshing and inspiring; the types of questions they ask, their approach to teaching and learning, is something that he thinks our faculty would benefit from considerably.”

Long has already explored potential collaborations between AUD and St. John’s new Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Classics program with President J. Walter Sterling and Associate Dean for Graduate Programs David Carl. On the undergraduate side, AUD is in the midst of adding a capstone segment to the core curriculum based on the Great Books model. Long, meanwhile, along with his colleagues, recently welcomed fellow Johnnie Camille Stallings (AGI07, EC16) to their ranks as an assistant professor of English.

At the end of the day—or, more specifically, a decade and change—Long “can draw a straight line from my experience at AUIS to my chair [at AUD] right now.” Or, if one wanted to go back even further, they could do so from Crawfordsville, Indiana, where Long first discovered the endlessly questioning wisdom of Eva Brann.