Biz school’s award gala to honor Geratys, seed endowment

On Thurs., Oct. 26 at the Riverside Convention Center, the Zapara School of Business will present its first Lifetime Achievement Award to Gillian and Larry Geraty in recognition of their transformative work within Adventist higher education and their local and global communities. With a variety of performance and routines, the gala will provide windows into the Geraty’s intercontinental lives and careers spanning 10 countries between them.

Larry Geraty, a noted archaeologist, biblical scholar and administrator, served as La Sierra University’s second president between 1993 – 2007 following the university’s separation from Loma Linda University in 1990. He is now La Sierra University’s president emeritus and executive director of its foundation which he established during his leadership of the Riverside institution. Gillian and Larry Geraty arrived to Southern California following Larry’s eight-year presidency of the former Atlantic Union College (AUC) in Massachusetts where he tripled enrollment, built a base of experienced faculty members, formed community bridges, and forged an identity as a progressive administrator.

While at La Sierra, the Geratys have worked to foster inclusion, in particular through the support of women in ministry, and have substantially bolstered the university’s local image through participation in Riverside’s civic and community life. Their contributions garnered multiple recognitions, including Larry Geraty’s award in 2007 as Citizen of the Year from the Greater Riverside Chambers of Commerce, a congressional acknowledgement in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Geraty’s honor as Family of the Year by the nonprofit Family Service Association in 2009. In 2001, Larry Geraty was honored with a Charles Elliott Weniger Society award for his contributions to Adventist education and exemplification of Weniger’s ideals.

As La Sierra’s second president, Larry Geraty formed strong connections with Riverside’s civic, business and education circles and spearheaded a vision and strategic plan for the fledgling university which included an objective to foster the spiritual life of the campus. In one of his most important moves, he led the redevelopment of 330 acres of university agricultural property into land sales and leases comprising the Riverwalk developments, resulting in a university endowment that now exceeds $100 million.

Gillian and Larry Geraty’s dedication to Adventist education is rooted in their upbringing within the SDA educational system in which both of their fathers served as teachers and administrators in China, Hong Kong, Lebanon, and the United States.

“We're the product of Adventist education and it's made us what we are,” Larry Geraty said. “And we feel blessed as a result of that. And [we will do] anything we can do to help make that possible for other people.”

Gillian Geraty noted, “being in an Adventist school environment created a sense of belonging to a community.”

Gillian, formerly Keough, was born in England but raised in Lebanon when her father, Arthur Keough, was called to start Middle East College in Beirut as part of the Adventist denomination’s decision to provide higher education to its young people in the Middle East. Gillian earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Andrews University to compliment an earlier teacher education degree she earned from Easthamsted Park College in England after initially attending the Adventist system’s Newbold College. Her family later moved to the United States where Arthur Keough taught in the religion department of Columbia Union College in Maryland, now Washington Adventist University.

Larry Geraty was born in California, the eldest of three children whose missionary parents took him at the age of four months to serve in China at the behest of the Adventist denomination’s General Conference. The upheaval of World War II forced the family to relocate first to Burma, now known as Myanmar where they worked in a Chinese language school before relocating back to interior China in the face of the Japanese military’s advancement. When Geraty was 11, his father Thomas Geraty, an ordained minister and educator, accepted a call to serve as president of Middle East College in Beirut, Lebanon, which Gillian Geraty’s father had started in 1939. It was there that the future couple would meet for the first time in grade school, beginning a friendship that blossomed at Newbold College and culminated in marriage at St. Helena, California, in 1962.  

Larry Geraty’s family eventually moved to Washington D.C. where his father held top posts with the General Conference Department of Education including serving as editor of The Journal of Adventist Education. He then moved his family to Michigan where he headed the School of Education at Andrews University and started the first doctoral program in the Adventist educational system.

During his college years, Larry studied in Adventists schools in France and England before graduating from Pacific Union College in Angwin, California in 1962. He earned a B.D. and an M.A. from Andrews University in Michigan followed by pastoring in Santa Ana, California. He earned a Ph.D. in Syrio-Palestinian Archaeology and Hebrew Bible from Harvard University in 1972.

Larry’s graduate studies while at Harvard took him to Germany and to Israel where he was a Fulbright Fellow at Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 1970 - 1971.

Upon arriving at Harvard, Larry’s first academic foray outside of the Adventist school system, a professor impressed upon him the importance of understanding evidence and using it objectively and fairly.

“And that is what was important to me for La Sierra,” Geraty said. “I wanted its professors to be really good at what they do and who not only know what's been discovered in their fields, but through their own research and writing and work can contribute to that body of knowledge, and that they're fair to the evidence.”

During these years, the Geratys were also instrumental in fostering intellectual discourse within the Adventist community and helped create the Association of Adventist Forums in 1969 which publishes Spectrum Magazine. The forum’s stated purpose “is conversation toward Seventh-day Adventist renewal.”

Archaeological adventures

While serving in higher educational capacities, Larry Geraty was also forging a prominent career as an archaeologist participating in and leading significant excavations in Israel and Jordan over the span of more than 30 years. His archaeological endeavors took substantive root under eminent Adventist archaeologist Siegfried Horn at the Tall Hisban dig in Jordan in 1968. Geraty’s work expanded in the mid 1980s when he jointly initiated the Madaba Plains Project which included Hisban and two new sites – Tall al-‘Umayri and Tall Jalul. His reputation as a diligent investigator of Jordanian cultural heritage led to his service as an archaeological advisor to  Jordan’s Crown Prince Hassan.

A widely published scholar and international lecturer, Geraty in 2000 was awarded the P.E. MacAllister Field Archaeology Award by the American Schools of Oriental Research. He served as president of the organization between 2002 -- 2006. Now known as the American Society of Overseas Research, in 2018 it established the Lawrence T. Geraty Community Archaeology Endowment to support the development of community archaeology in Jordan toward spurring local support and ownership of cultural heritage while creating economic opportunity.

Geraty’s archeological work over the years and that of longtime colleague Doug Clark and others has provided La Sierra with a collection of ancient artifacts from the Levant that is believed to be the largest of its kind in the United States.

In 2012, with Clark as director and Geraty associate director, the Center for Near Eastern Archaeology opened at La Sierra University with lab space, classrooms and meeting rooms for its growing archaeology program that now offers a graduate program. Geraty, currently serving in a part-time role with the university’s Advancement office, is working to raise funding for a museum project at the campus that will house its archaeological, natural history and anthropological collections.

Unexpected invitations

Throughout his college presidencies, both the result of unanticipated offers, Geraty learned valuable lessons such as the importance of being willing to make tough choices, of decisiveness, and of the benefit of gut instinct. He also came to know the particular burden that comes with holding the top post. “As a president, you don’t always know who to talk to,” he said, “It can be a lonely life in some ways. Everybody’s seeking to get your approval for things but you don’t always have the ability to talk to people in confidence.”

After Harvard, Geraty, acting on a job offer from Andrews University in Michigan, returned to its theological seminary where he taught archaeology and Hebrew Bible beginning in 1972. Geraty initiated the Adventist church's only doctoral curriculum in biblical archaeology, founded the Institute of Archaeology and directed a museum honoring Horn. He and Gillian also assisted in the formation of a global, cosmopolitan Adventist congregation there.

Gillian Geraty, who is also a piano teacher and musician, established the first kindergarten program at Andrews University’s elementary school.

In 1985 Larry received a surprising call from the leadership of the Atlantic Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in Massachusetts. They were impressed with his archaeological career and his achievements at Andrews University, they said, and wanted him to assume the presidency of Atlantic Union College. After some hesitation, Geraty ultimately accepted the invitation.