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PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date: January 31, 1996
Contact: Jacquelyn Savani (609) 258-3601
Donald Obordorfor Jr., Cornel R. West to Receive Top Alumni Honors
Princeton, N.J. -- Journalist Donald Oberdorfer Jr., Class of 1952, and scholar and orator Cornel West, who received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1980, will receive the university's highest honors for alumni and give lectures on Alumni Day, which is Saturday, Feb. 24.
Oberdorfer, the former diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, will receive the Woodrow Wilson Award, given annually to the alumnus or alumna who exemplifies Wilson's phrase, ``Princeton in the Nation's Service.''
West, the former director of Princeton's Afro-American Studies Program, will receive the James Madison medal, awarded annually to an alumnus or alumna of the Graduate College who has had a distinguished career, advanced the cause of graduate education or achieved a record of outstanding public service. West is now a member of the faculty at Harvard.
The 1996 Alumni Day program will be preceded by Opening Ceremonies for Princeton's 250th Anniversary Celebration. President Emeritus Robert F. Goheen will speak at the event, which will begin at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 23, in Richardson Auditorium, Alexander Hall.
On Alumni Day, West's speech, Race Matters: Facing the Challenges of a Shared Future, will begin at 9:15 a.m. Oberdorfer's speech, A Journalist's Life: Reflections on the Power and the Glory, will begin at 10:30 a.m. Both honorees will appear in Richardson Auditorium.
Members of the press are invited to attend all Alumni Day lectures and panel discussions. Biographies of the 1996 Alumni Day honorees are attached.
Donald Oberdorfer
Don Oberdorfer spent 38 years at The Washington Post, including 17 as the newspaper's diplomatic correspondent. Before that, he covered the White House from 1968 until 1972, and he was the Tokyo-based correspondent covering Northeast Asia from 1972 until 1975.
Oberdorfer, a native of Atlanta, Ga., graduated from Princeton in 1952 and served as a U.S. Army lieutenant in Korea immediately after the 1953 armistice. He began his career in journalism in 1955 at The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. He later worked for the Saturday Evening Post and as a national correspondent for Knight Newspapers.
He won many awards, including the 1981 and 1988 Edwin M. Hood Award for diplomatic correspondence given by the National Press Club. He is also a two-time winner of Georgetown University's Edward Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting.
During the fall semesters of 1977, 1982 and 1986, Oberdorfer served as the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton. From 1986 until 1989, he was chairman of the advisory committee of the Washington Center of the Asia Society. He is the author of Tet!, (1971), a history of the 1968 battle in Vietnam; and The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era (1991), a history of U.S.-Soviet diplomacy from 1983 to 1990.
When Oberdorfer retired from The Washington Post in April 1993, he began a second career of special assignments and projects. One was Princeton University: The First 250 Years, a book celebrating the university's 250th anniversary. Starting in January 1994, Oberdorfer spent several months on campus researching the text. The result of Oberdorfer's collaboration with illustrations editor J.T. Miller '70 is a colorful, readable 272-page history that tells Princeton's story through an interview with President Harold T. Shapiro and a group of current Princeton students.
Oberdorfer is currently the journalist-in-residence at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. Under SAIS sponsorship, Oberdorfer is writing a history on North-South relations in Korea since 1972. He is also president of Overseas Writers, a professional association of American and foreign journalists who cover U.S. diplomatic efforts.
Oberdorfer is married to the former Laura Klein, a lecturer at American University. They have two children: Dan is an attorney in Minneapolis, and Karen, owns a small business in the San Francisco area.
Cornel R. West
Cornel West is a leading voice in the national dialogue on race relations. His published works and speeches, notably the 1993 best-seller, Race Matters, challenge Americans to think critically about the role of race in society and to build bridges through discussion and action. West's gifts as a teacher and writer have enabled him to gain both academic stardom and a foothold in the popular culture.
West served as director of Princeton's Afro-American Studies Program from 1988 until 1994, and during this period both the scholar and the program gained national recognition. West led the search for answers to the questions that flowed from the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and he explored the roots of the upheaval in Race Matters. Newspapers and forum organizers have borrowed the book's title as an invitation for thoughtful discussions on race relations.
Born in Tulsa, Okla., West spent most of his childhood in Sacramento, Calif. There, he was captivated by the Baptist Church and the Black Panther Party, and these two seemingly incompatible influences would later mark much of his scholarly work. West went to Harvard in 1970 and graduated in three years. He received his master's degree from Princeton in 1975 and taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York while completing his doctoral dissertation. He accepted a full professorship at Yale Divinity School in 1984 and returned to Union in 1987, only to be lured to Princeton a year later.
West is the author of seven books and scores of essays and articles. His 1980 dissertation, ``Ethics, Historicism and the Marxist Tradition,'' laid the groundwork for one of his most important books, The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought. (1991) West told The New Yorker that while he is not a Marxist, he wished to defend the relevance of Marxist thought, including its ethical dimensions after the end of the Cold War.
Though trained as a philosopher, West's writings and speeches cross the boundaries of philosophy and religion into politics, law and music. West bases his ``prophetic pragmatism'' on a belief that the best criticism transcends the narrow boundaries of traditional disciplines. West was thus a perfect match for the program Princeton envisioned when it launched Afro-American Studies.
However, West ultimately was wooed by the chance to nurture his ideas in Harvard's schools of education, divinity and law. He now holds a joint appointment in the Divinity School and the Afro-American Studies Department. His current interests include addressing the problems of the black urban underclass and rebuilding the dialogue between African-Americans and Jews.
West lives in the Boston area with his wife, Elleni Gebre Amlak, to whom he dedicated his 1994 book of essays, Keeping Faith. He has a son, Clifton.