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Date: Noon, June 2, 1998
Six Receive Honorary Degrees at Princeton Commencement
Princeton, N.J. -- Princeton University today awarded six honorary degrees at its 251st Commencement exercises. The University orator, Robert H. Rawson, Class of 1966, presented the candidates to University President Harold T. Shapiro, who conferred the degrees.
Linda Chavez-Thompson, Doctor of Laws
Executive Vice President, AFL-CIO. Linda Chavez-Thompson, a second-generation American of Mexican descent, is the first person of color to hold an executive office in the AFL-CIO (the nation’s largest union federation) and is the highest-ranking woman in the American labor movement. Daughter of a sharecropper, she worked in the cotton fields of Texas as a young woman; as a leader in the labor movement, she has helped to organize workers throughout the Southwest. After three decades’ experience with increasing responsibilities, she was elected to her current position in 1995. Ms. Chavez-Thompson also serves on the seven-member advisory board on race relations appointed by President Clinton.
Her first job was hoeing cotton in the fields of her native Texas for ten hours a day at 30 cents an hour. Outrage at her conditions harnessed to her exceptional energy and political savvy, led her to a career in labor organizing and eventually to the apex of the American labor movement. At a time of bewildering social and cultural change, she is a beacon of justice for all of America’s workers -- a woman who has dedicated her life not to rising above working people but to rising with them.
Athol Fugard, Doctor of Letters
Playwright, actor, director. One of the world's most celebrated dramatists, Athol Fugard describes himself as a "regional writer." Because his region is South Africa, he has become known as one of the principal literary witnesses to the horrors of apartheid in plays such as The Blood Knot, A Lesson from Aloes, and "Master Harold" ... And the Boys -- all essential works in the international theatrical repertoire. Now, during the post-apartheid period, he has reinvented himself as a first-person chronicler of the landscape of his own imagination. Fugard has developed close ties to the Princeton community. He has twice been a visiting professor in Princeton’s Program in Theater and Dance. And he has made McCarter Theatre his artistic home away from home -- the place where he stages the American premieres of his new plays, most recently this spring’s The Captain’s Tiger.
Port Elizabeth Technical College, 1946-50; University of Cape Town, 1950-53.
For over forty years Athol Fugard has told us stories -- stories about desperation and hope, injustice and liberation, hatred and love. Although his deceptively simple plays are deeply rooted in his South African experience, their emotional and intellectual range has earned them a unique place on the great stage of the world. Master storyteller and master teacher, he has awakened our consciences, educated our hearts, and delighted our senses. It is, as he says in his most recent play, "As simple as that."
Howard E. Gardner, Doctor of Humane Letters
Psychologist, educator, author. Howard Gardner is professor of education and adjunct professor of psychology at Harvard University and adjunct professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine. Professor Gardner’s work has had a major impact on K-12 education in the United States. He is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. Since 1972 he has been codirector of Harvard Project Zero, which seeks to design performance-based assessments, education for understanding, and the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curricula, instruction, and assessment. Among his 15 books are Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership, and Extraordinary Minds: Portraits of Exceptional Individuals and an Examination of our Extraordinariness.
Harvard University (A.B., 1965; Ph.D., 1971)
At once student and teacher of the entrepreneurial genius and the charismatic leader, of the artist and the scientist, of the brain-damaged and the gifted, he has revolutionized education from day care to graduate school throughout the world. Revealing the variegated powers of the human mind, his theory of "multiple intelligences" has opened our eyes to the different ways human abilities can flower, how they can blossom or lie dormant, how they can be stifled or cultivated. In teaching and research he has been a model of multiple intelligence and demonstrated how it can change the world.
Robert E. Kahn, Doctor of Science
President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. Robert Kahn is considered to be one of the founders of the Internet. He was part of a team of researchers who in 1969, with funding from the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), linked together computers at a handful of universities and research facilities, producing the first computer network (ARPANet). As part of this project, he pioneered many of the networking standards and protocols that have made the Internet possible. Dr. Kahn is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Public Service Award from the Computing Research Board, and, in 1997, the National Medal of Technology.
City College of New York (B.E.E., 1960); Princeton University (M.A., 1962; Ph.D., 1964)
As an architect of ARPANet, he helped open the lines of communication among different computers and then establish the protocols that enable networks to talk to one another, thus linking the various communities of computing in a worldwide Internet. Pursuing his vision of a "National Information Infrastructure," he now explores the promises and challenges of a medium in which the production and distribution of knowledge take place concurrently, as people exchange their thoughts in continuing conversation across the boundaries of time and space. Lest we become trapped in this world-wide web of information, he now designs "Knowbots" to travel around the Net, collecting information on our behalf and assisting us in creating it.
Matthew J. Perry, Jr., Doctor of Laws
Senior United States District Judge, South Carolina. Matthew Perry was appointed in 1979 to the U.S. District Court by President Carter and is the first and only African-American in South Carolina history to hold that position. As a lawyer during the 1960s he was a major force in the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina. He played a leading role in a number of significant legal cases, especially to assist activists who participated in sit-ins and other demonstrations and who were being criminally prosecuted. Among the cases he helped prepare were Edwards v. South Carolina, in which the United States Supreme Court established significant first amendment protections for demonstrators; Peterson v. City of Greenville, in which the Supreme Court enlarged the jurisdiction of federal constitutional protections over premises that had previously been thought to be outside federal antidiscrimination rules; and Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, one of the Supreme Court’s early interpretations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For many years he was the only lawyer available in South Carolina to represent African-American defendants in capital cases.
South Carolina State University (B.S., 1948; LL.B., 1951).
A pioneer whose tireless and skillful advocacy helped protect and propel the pioneering actions of others, he was the leading attorney for the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina. Often without pay, he provided knowledgeable, timely, and wise counsel to young activists we now rightly view as heroes. Inside and outside the courtroom, his legal acumen and his social vision helped to secure Constitutional protections for such freedoms as speech and assembly, and helped to replace discrimination with opportunity. As the first -- and so far only&endash;African-American judge on the federal district court in his native state, he extends a lifelong commitment to integrity and fairness, to liberty and justice for all.
John Wilder Tukey, Doctor of Science
Donner Professor of Science, emeritus; professor of statistics, emeritus, Princeton University. John Tukey is considered one of the world’s leading statisticians and a key architect of the information age. He is credited with coining the computer term "bit" in 1946 to define the basic unit of computer information. As chair of President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee, he led the first national study of environmental pollution. As associate executive director, research, at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he played a decisive role in shaping each major frontier of telecommunications science and technology, including the transistor, laser-based photonics, and earth satellite techniques. Professor Tukey joined Princeton’s faculty after receiving his doctorate in 1939. He was the first chair of the University’s Department of Statistics and retired from the University in 1985. He is the recipient of numerous professional awards, including the National Medal of Science in 1973.
Brown University (B.S., 1936; M.S., 1937); Princeton University (Ph.D., 1939)
When computers were new, his search for simplicity made a "bit" out of "binary digit" and provided the fundamental algorithm for digital signal processing. On the principle that "it is important to understand what you can do before you learn to measure how well you seem to have done it," he pioneered means of exploring complex data to detect simple patterns that point to deeper structures worth investigation. A self-described "miscellaneous type" in an age of specialization, he has forged robust statistical tools over the broad spectrum of the sciences and brought his quantitative insight to bear on public issues ranging from the depletion of the ozone layer and the quality of the air to the assessment of educational progress and the means of getting an accurate count of our population.