HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

11 To Receive Honorary Degrees

What happens when cultures collide? Throughout a prolific creative life, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has supplied illuminating answers in novels such as Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987).

Such works have made Achebe the most widely read author in the history of African literature. Things Fall Apart alone exists in more than 50 translations and 8 million copies. Achebe's hallmarks of dispassionate fairness and eloquently economical expression appear in this first novel, which University of Texas scholar Bernth Lindfors calls "one of the best answers to the story of Africa told by Europeans."

Achebe explained his point of departure in 1965. "What is of consuming interest to most Africans is the meeting, the confrontation of Europe and Africa. This is a big, tragic drama. [. . .] How did it affect individuals, the village man, the first British administrator?" (Current Biography 1992).

Behind these questions lies a childhood in an evangelical Christian family during British colonial rule. "The crossroads has a dangerous potency," Achebe told Karen J. Winkler (Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 12, 1994). "It's not a bad place for a writer."

Although best known for his novels, Achebe has also produced poetry, plays, short stories, children's books, essays, and anthologies. "He has played a key role in shaping African literature," Harvard scholar K. Anthony Appiah told Winkler.

Born on Nov. 16, 1930, in the Igbo (Ibo) village of Ogidi, Achebe earned his B.A. (1953) from the University of Ibadan (then part of the University of London). Afterwards, he worked with the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation and in 1961 became director of the Voice of Nigeria. The civil war between Nigeria and secessionist Biafra (1967-70) prompted Achebe to make the first of many visits to the U.S. He began his teaching career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1967. Since 1990, he has been the Charles Stevenson Professor at Bard College.

More than 20 international institutions have honored Achebe's literary achievements. Beware, Soul Brother and Other Poems, written in response to the Biafran War, shared Britain's first Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1972. Achebe also holds the Nigerian National Order of Merit, the country's highest intellectual distinction.

During an association with Harvard Medical School spanning more than 40 years, Harold Amos pursued the twin goals of advancing scientific research and advancing opportunities for minority groups to join the quest.

After Amos retired in 1989 as the School's Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, national recognition came for both endeavors.

In October 1989, Amos won the first $50,000 Dr. Charles R. Drew World Medical Prize of Howard University Hospital, given annually to two persons of color (one from the U.S., one from a developing nation) "who have made significant lifetime contributions to public health, health research, or the delivery of health care." Nominees included 87 candidates from 31 countries.

More recently, he accepted the 1995 Public Welfare Medal, the National Academy of Sciences' highest honor, "[f]or his tremendous success, for over 25 years, in encouraging and facilitating the entry and advancement of underrepresented minorities into careers in medicine and biomedical research."

A native of Pennsauken, N.J., Amos holds a Bachelor of Science degree (1941) from Springfield College, and an A.M. (1947) and a Ph.D. (1952) from Harvard. As a Fulbright Fellow, he did two years of postdoctoral work at the celebrated Pasteur Institute in Paris.

His teaching career began at Springfield College in 1947. Eight years later, he became an instructor in bacteriology and immunology at Harvard Medical School. A full professor by 1969, Amos assumed the Presley Professorship in 1975. He twice chaired the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and also served as Associate Dean for Basic Sciences. In 1971, President Nixon appointed him to the National Cancer Advisory Board.

In the laboratory, Amos focused on areas such as nutrition, enzyme synthesis, and the effects of hormones. "Perhaps his most influential discovery was the profound effect of starvation to increase glucose uptake activity in primary cells," notes Focus, newsletter of the Harvard medical institutions (Oct. 19, 1989).

Amos celebrates his 77th birthday on Sept. 7.

During more than half a century, Walter H. Annenberg has been making headlines -- if not as an editor, publisher, and broadcaster, then as a diplomat, art collector, or philanthropist.

Annenberg most recently made news in December 1993 with the announcement of the largest gift in the history of U.S. public education: $500 million to support public-school reform.

Six months earlier, he had distributed $365 million to four educational institutions, including $25 million to Harvard College that has created an undergraduate scholarship fund and transformed part of Memorial Hall into a newly opened dining hall for first-year students. Both are named for his late son Roger, Class of 1962. Over the years, Annenberg has also supported the Harvard College Fund, the Kennedy School of Government, the Law School, and the School of Public Health.

Annenberg gave his collection of works by Picasso, Monet, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and Cézanne to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1991.

The wellspring for this generosity is Triangle Publications, Inc., the Philadelphia-based family business of which Annenberg became president in 1940. Starting with the venerable Philadelphia Inquirer, the Daily Racing Form, and the Morning Telegram, Annenberg built an enormously successful media empire, creating major magazines such as Seventeen (1944) and TV Guide (1953) along the way.

Branching out with the purchase of several radio and television stations, Annenberg pioneered in educational-television broadcasting and earned numerous honors for his vision, including a 1986 Medal of Freedom (the nation's highest civilian honor), a 1987 George Foster Peabody Award, and 1992 induction into the Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame.

In 1958, Annenberg founded The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where he had earlier attended the Wharton School. He set up a school of the same name at the University of Southern California in 1971. From 1969 to 1974, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Triangle sold its holdings between 1970 and 1988 (when he retired), but Annenberg remains active as president and chair of the Annenberg Foundation, which chiefly benefits educational projects like those of 1993.

Born in Milwaukee, Annenberg turned 88 on March 13.

Since stepping down as U.S. Secretary of Transportation in 1977, William T. Coleman Jr. has been a senior partner of the internationally based corporate-law firm of O'Melveny & Myers. Early in his 22-month stint in the Ford Cabinet, Coleman produced A Statement of National Transportation Policy, "the first serious effort by an American government to formulate a comprehensive national transportation policy" (Current Biography 1975).

It was hardly Coleman's first leading distinction. After graduating summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania (1941) and magna cum laude and first in his Harvard Law School class (1946), Coleman became the first black to clerk for a U.S. Supreme Court Justice (Felix Frankfurter) in 1948.

Six years later, after working with law firms in New York and his native Philadelphia, he coauthored the legal brief that persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to abolish legalized segregation in the nation's public schools. Coleman's briefs and arguments have figured in more than a dozen other Supreme Court cases on issues as varied as interstate banking, interracial marriage, and labor protection.

During the civil-rights movement of the late '50s and early '60s, Coleman defended Freedom Riders and other civil-rights activists in Southern courts. He currently serves as board chair of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc.

Coleman has also been adviser to six U.S. Presidents. In 1964, he served as senior consultant and counsel to the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. He was later appointed to the U.S. Delegation to the 24th U.N. General Assembly (1969), the National Commission on Productivity (1971-72), and the Price Commission (1971-73). At Harvard, Coleman served on the Board of Overseers (one of Harvard's two Governing Boards) from 1975 to 1981.

He has shared his legal perspective in articles for law reviews at institutions such as Fordham, Harvard, Yale, and the universities of Pennsylvania and Illinois. More than 17 colleges and universities have conferred honorary degrees upon Coleman, who is also an Officer in the French Legion of Honor. Last fall, President Clinton awarded him the Medal of Freedom.

Coleman celebrates his 76th birthday on July 7.

"I have always been deeply concerned with and wanted to reach an audience wider than the narrow circles of scholarship," Natalie Zemon Davis once told an interviewer for The Historian (Spring 1991). "I want to be an historian of hope who makes people aware of possibilities in the future."

Davis, who retires next month after 18 years as Princeton's Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, has pursued those aims as a pioneer of interdisciplinary courses and as an adviser to historically inspired works of stage and screen. Using insights from anthropology and gender studies, she has illuminated the lives, values, and power relationships of artisans, peasants, women, and other groups often overlooked or undervalued by previous scholars of early modern Europe and Jewish history.

She gained international recognition with Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975) and its six translations. In Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (1987), Davis delves into stories designed to persuade the king to pardon capital offenses, discovering that "the lower classes had more choices and options than history has presented" (The Historian). Her most recent work, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (1995), focuses on Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant women who pursued activities unconventional for their time.

Davis reached her widest audience of all as historical consultant for the award-winning French film Le Retour de Martin Guerre (1982) and as author of The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), which boasts nine translations. She also did the advisory honors for The House of Martin Guerre, an opera by Leslie Arden that premiered three years ago in Toronto and opens in a new Chicago production next month.

Born in Detroit on Nov. 8, 1928, Davis earned a B.A. at Smith (1949), an A.M. at Radcliffe (1950), and a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan (1959). Davis helped found the journal Renaissance and Reformation at the University of Toronto, where this fall she will be the Northrop Frye Professor of Literary Theory and, afterwards, a senior fellow of the Centre for Comparative Literature.

Davis served as president of the American Historical Association in 1987 and won its Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award in 1994.

After almost 200 years, how much remains to be said about that exhaustively analyzed event called the French Revolution?

Plenty, according to François Furet. One year before the 1989 Bicentennial, Furet and coeditor Mona Ouzouf issued their Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution), a compendium of 99 articles -- 22 of them by Furet.

Surveying the results in English translation for The New York Times Book Review (Sept. 10, 1989), University of Pennsylvania scholar Lynn Hunt hailed Furet as "the most influential historian of the French Revolution in the world," who has developed "a whole new field of studies in which traditional narrative history, the history of ideas and political philosophy are combined -- in the spirit of Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt -- to investigate the philosophical foundations of modern democratic politics."

Claude Langlois waxed musical, noting how the editors "attempt to discover the original score of a misrepresented work, to render the original polyphony of the great performers on the revolutionary stage. [. . .] Two hundred years after the fact, in the context of the Bicentennial, they have composed the sole veritable 'Hymn to Reason' that anyone has dared to produce" (French Historical Studies, Fall 1990).

More generally speaking, University of Maryland scholar Donald Sutherland has credited Furet with helping to relegate Marxist takes on 1789 to the curious tool kits of yesteryear while persistently trying to "reconceptualize the causes and course of the Revolution" (FHS).

Furet's earlier influential books include L'Atelier de l'histoire (In the Workshop of History, 1982), Karl Marx et la Révolution française (1986), and La gauche et la Révolution au milieu du XIXe siècle (The Political Left and the Revolution Amid the 19th Century, 1986). Furet became a Knight of the French Legion of Honor in 1985 and last year won the Châteaubriand Prize for his contributions to French historical studies.

Since 1985, he has taught at the University of Chicago, becoming its Raymond W. and Martha Hilport Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in 1994. A past director of the Institut Raymond Aron in his native Paris (1985-93), Furet has been president of the Fondation Saint-Simon research institute there since 1982. He turned 69 on March 27.

"In motion, she blazes with a fearful intensity, hurtling through the air like a spear plunged into the heart of space."

So wrote Newsweek critic Hubert Saal, trying to capture the dynamic power, majesty, and grace of dancer Judith Jamison. Although she has danced with several companies (including her own Jamison Project), Jamison is best known for her enduring ties to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which she has directed since Ailey's death in 1989.

Born in Philadelphia on May 10, 1943, Jamison began taking dance lessons at the age of 6 at the Judimar School of Dance. (She also studied piano and violin.) Her versatility reflects early training in every style from acrobatic and ballet to jazz and tap. After three semesters on a scholarship to Fisk University, Jamison returned home to enroll in the Philadelphia Dance Academy (now the University of the Arts).

By 1964, the stage was set for Jamison's emergence: after spotting her at the Academy, Agnes de Mille gave her a title role in The Four Marys, a de Mille ballet premiering at New York's Lincoln Center. One year later, Jamison auditioned for a Harry Belafonte TV special. Donald McKayle did not pick her. But another observer found her "extraordinary." His name was Alvin Ailey. In late 1965, Jamison debuted with his seven-year-old company in Chicago.

Jamison was soon touring the world as the brightest star of a brilliant troupe. The classic solo Cry (1971), which Ailey created for her as a tribute to black women, became Jamison's signature piece, and she made an indelibly joyous impression while leading the company in Revelations (1960). In Ailey's Pas de Duke, she paired up with Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Broadway beckoned in 1980 with Sophisticated Ladies, and Jamison felt increasingly drawn to choreography. Ailey premiered her first piece, Divining Hymn, in 1984. She has since choreographed for Maurice Béjart and for companies throughout the U.S.

Jamison is the subject of the PBS-TV special The Dancemaker and of Olga Maynard's Judith Jamison: Aspects of a Dancer (1982). She has told her own story in Dancing Spirit (1993). Her many accolades include two awards from the city and mayor of New York, a 1972 Dance Magazine Award, and the 1982 Howard University Service Award.

The Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, D.C., exerts a unique hold on American hearts, drawing more than a million people annually -- a number unrivaled by any other work of contemporary public art in the nation.

Initially controversial in some quarters when dedicated in 1982, its now-familiar design came from a 21-year-old Yale undergraduate named Maya Lin. Like others in her course on funerary architecture, she had entered the national contest simply to complete a classroom assignment.

With its sunken black marble walls bearing the names of the more than 58,000 Americans claimed by the war, Lin's design emerged as the surprise winner among 1,420 entries. Time steadily vindicated her vision. Contest judges found the design "superbly harmonious," and it won numerous honors, including a 1984 Henry Bacon Memorial Award and a 1988 Presidential Design Award.

"Lin's Vietnam Memorial has become a place of pilgrimage and healing, functioning as a spiritual sanctuary" at which thousands have left personal tokens of remembrance, notes Judith E. Stein (Art in America, Dec. 1994). "It is a work that contains our most tragic secrets," writes Shirley Neilsen (Arts, Dec. 1984). "In a gentle but relentless way, it holds up a mirror not just to the single visitor but to an entire nation."

Lin has designed other major commemorative works such as The Civil Rights Memorial (1989) for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., and The Women's Table (1993) at Yale.

Less well known are her architectural designs and small-scale sculptures, which found a place in "Maya Lin: Public/Private" (1993-94), her first comprehensive show, at Ohio State University's Wexner Center for the Arts. There she also created Groundswell (1992-93), a permanent installation incorporating 43 tons of recycled safety glass. Recently, she completed Eclipsed Time (1994), a huge suspended timepiece in New York's Pennsylvania Station, and The Wave Field (1995), an earthwork sculpture for the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Born in Athens, Ohio, on Oct. 5, 1959, Lin earned her B.A. (1981) and M.Arch., cum laude (1986), from Yale, and studied for a year at Harvard's Graduate School of Design (1982-83). Since 1987, she has maintained a studio in New York.

An inspiring human-interest story emerged from the Deep South last summer as word spread of a remarkable gift from an unexpected source: 87-year-old Oseola McCarty had given $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi in her hometown of Hattiesburg.

In an age of multimillion-dollar gifts to higher education, such a donation ordinarily goes unheralded in the national press. But this time, personal details made the gesture extraordinary. Forced to leave school after the sixth grade to take care of an ailing aunt, McCarty earned a living for the next 75 years by quietly doing laundry.

Last summer, she decided to give most of her life's savings to help needy black students at an institution that had desegregated only three decades earlier. Local businesses soon seconded her effort with a campaign for matching funds. Stephanie Bullock, the first recipient, is now preparing for a business career.

"I wanted to do some good for somebody else's child," McCarty explains in the first video of a documentary series being produced by The American Benefactor, a magazine debuting this fall (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 15, 1996).

She did that -- and much more, as a New York Times editorial noted on Aug. 16: "Ms. McCarty, whose one major regret in life is that she never finished school after having to drop out in sixth grade, is living proof to impatient young people that dignity and reward in work is what you make of it. She exemplifies donors who struggled to achieve a measure of success in one generation and then reach forward to help the next generation."

That tribute proved only one note in a crescendo of praise. McCarty soon received the Wallenberg Humanitarian Award, the Community Heroes Award (National Urban League), the Living Legacy Award (National Caucus and Center on Black Aged), UNESCO's Avicenna Medal, and the Premier Black Woman of Courage Award (National Federation of Black Women Business Owners). President Clinton crowned it all with the Citizens Medal, the nation's second-highest civilian honor.

By nomination of the USM Air Force ROTC cadets, McCarty was one of 50 Mississippians who last month helped carry the Centennial Olympic torch on its cross-country odyssey to the Atlanta summer games.

Charles Slichter retired last year as Senior Fellow of the eight-member Harvard Corporation after a quarter century of service. At the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he has distinguished himself as a professor of physics and chemistry at the Center for Advanced Study.

As a member of the Corporation (the Harvard Governing Board that handles the University's major management and policy issues), Slichter helped guide Harvard through an era of rapid change. While serving on the Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, he encouraged joint meetings with faculty, students, and concerned alumni/ae as part of the process of developing University policies on thorny issues such as investments in tobacco companies and U.S. businesses operating in South Africa.

A founding member (1982-83) of the Joint Committee on Appointments of the Governing Boards, which reviews faculty and senior administrative appointments University-wide, Slichter championed the needs of junior faculty in career development and counseling.

At the University of Illinois, where he began teaching in 1949, Slichter has helped train at least 60 doctoral and 15 postdoctoral students. His own research has consistently won high honors. In 1969, the American Physical Society gave Slichter the Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics for his "innovation in the applications of magnetic resonance techniques to the understanding of the structural and dynamic properties of matter." Further recognition has come from the likes of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance (1986 Triennial Prize), the National Academy of Sciences (1993 Comstock Prize), and the U.S. Department of Energy (1984, 1992, 1993 awards for materials-science research).

Slichter has served on the President's Scientific Advisory Committee (1965-69), the President's Committee on the National Medal of Science (1969-74), and the President's Committee on Science and Technology Policy (1976) as well as on the National Science Foundation Board (1976-84).

His books include Principles of Magnetic Resonance (1961; third ed. 1992) and Solid State Physics in the People's Republic of China (1976; coedited with Anne FitzGerald '71).

Born in Ithaca, N.Y., on Jan. 21, 1924, Slichter earned all of his degrees at Harvard: A.B., magna cum laude (Class of 1945, conferred 1946), A.M. (1947), and Ph.D. (1949).

Harold Varmus and colleague J. Michael Bishop shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their 1976 discovery that normal cells contain genes that can malfunction to produce cancer. At least 50 cellular genes with this capacity have since been discovered, and the prize-winning research has opened major avenues to a broader understanding of disorders such as AIDS and breast cancer.

Four years after winning the prize, Varmus became director of the National Institutes of Health, whose 24 subdivisions make up the world's largest biomedical-research complex. He is the first Nobelist to hold the job.

Varmus's arrival coincided with a decline in money and morale. But by using a consensus-building style and emphasizing good science over politics, he soon earned high marks for boosting spirits, reducing paperwork, and recruiting top-level scientists. Overall, he is "doing a spectacular job for science," says M.I.T. geneticist Eric Lander (Science, Nov. 1995).

"Basic research does not mean research that has no practical purpose or research that only satisfies the curiosity of the investigator," Varmus explained in a Chemical & Engineering News interview (Jan. 3, 1994). "In my mind, it means research for which the practical applications cannot yet be predicted, where the immediate experimental goals are different from the ultimate goals in the applied arena.

"Chemistry is one of the components of what I call the biomedical curriculum where it is often quite difficult to guess about the applicability of basic research in finding the treatment for a disease. But ultimately, we get there."

Born on Dec. 18, 1939, in Oceanside, N.Y., Varmus earned his B.A., magna cum laude, from Amherst College (1961); his A.M., in English and American literature, from Harvard (1962); and his M.D. from Columbia (1966). In 1970, he began teaching as a lecturer in microbiology at San Francisco's University of California Medical Center. Before leaving the Center to head NIH, he had become a professor of microbiology and immunology also working in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

Varmus holds the 1982 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the 1982 California Scientist of the Year award, and the 1984 Armand Hammer Cancer Prize.