Four Are Awarded Centennial Medals by GSAS

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

A college president, a banker, a Kantian scholar, and a poet received Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Centennial Medals at a ceremony on Wednesday, June 5, at the Faculty Club.

The 1996 Centennial Medalists are Leon Botstein, PhD '85, Victor K. Fung, PhD '71, Paul Guyer '69, PhD '74, and Maxine Kumin, AM '48.

The Centennial Medal was first awarded in 1989 at the 100th anniversary of the School. The medal honors alumni for contributions to society that have emerged from their graduate education at Harvard.

Born in 1946 in Zurich, Switzerland, Botstein attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City and entered the University of Chicago at the age of 16. He earned a bachelor's degree from that institution in 1967, then came to Harvard to pursue graduate work in history. He earned his master's degree in 1968 and his PhD in 1985.

After serving as special assistant to the president of the Board of Education of New York City, Botstein became president of Franconia College in New Hampshire at the age of 23, serving in that post for five years. He became president of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., in 1975, and in 1979 he became president of Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Mass.

Botstein has combined a career as an educator and scholar with a musical career, serving as principal conductor, White Mountains Music and Arts Festival, from 1973 to 1975. Since 1993, Botstein has been music director of the American Symphony Orchestra. He is principal guest conductor of the Hudson Valley Philharmonic and conductor of its chamber orchestra and has also been a frequent guest conductor with the London Philharmonic, with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, and with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra in Boston.

He is the author of more than 80 articles and reviews on history, music, cultural criticism, and higher education. His most recent books include Judentum und Modernität (1991) and Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870-1914 (forthcoming).

Fung was born in Hong Kong and earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in electrical engineering from M.I.T. in 1966 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in applied mathematics in 1971.

He served as assistant professor at Harvard Business School from 1972 to 1976, teaching managerial economics and corporate financial management.

In 1989, Fung was named chairman of Li & Fung Ltd., Hong Kong's oldest trading company, founded 90 years ago by Fung's grandfather to export silk, porcelain, fireworks, and other Chinese products to the United States. Fung and his brother William, MBA '72, have successfully transformed the firm into a multinational organization, reporting a profit of HK$533 million in 1994.

In 1986, Fung helped found Prudential Asia Investments Ltd., the Asian investment and merchant banking arm of the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, of which he serves as chairman. He also serves as chairman of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council.

In 1993 Fung was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in 1995 he was named Businessman of the Year in the South China Morning Post Business Awards.

Guyer was born in 1948 in New York City and earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1969, graduating summa cum laude. He earned his master's degree from Harvard in 1971 and his Ph.D. in 1974.

A specialist in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and his place in the history of philosophy, Guyer has written numerous books and articles, including Kant and the Claims of Taste (1979), which won the Franklin J. Matchette Prize of the American Philosophical Association. He has also written Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (1987) and Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (1993).

Guyer has also written on Locke, Hume, Leibniz, Schiller, Hegel and other German and British philosophers from the 17th to the 19th centuries. He is interested in epistemology, aesthetics, and moral and political philosophy throughout this period and particularly in the interconnections among these areas.

He is general co-editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant and is currently working on a new translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Guyer is currently the Florence R. C. Murray Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also taught at the University of Illinois-Chicago, the University of Pittsburgh, Princeton, and the University of Michigan.

Kumin was born in Philadelphia and earned her bachelor's degree from Radcliffe in 1946 and her master's in comparative literature in 1948.

Her first book of poetry, Halfway, was published in 1961. Since then, she has published nearly a dozen books of poetry, four novels, three books of essays, a book of short stories, and a number of children's books, several of them in collaboration with the poet Anne Sexton.

Her book, Up Country, won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and her most recent collection, Looking for Luck, won the 1995 Aiken Taylor Poetry Prize.

Kumin has served as visiting professor at a number of colleges, including Pitzer College, the University of Miami, M.I.T., Princeton, Washington University, Columbia, and Bucknell. She has been Poet Laureate of the state of New Hampshire, where she lives, and is currently chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.