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Date: June 1, 1999
Seven Receive Honorary Degrees at 1999 Commencement
Princeton, N.J. -- President Harold T. Shapiro today awarded seven honorary degrees to Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations; Oscar Arias Sánchez, the Nobel Laureate and former president of Costa Rica; William J. Baumol, Princeton professor of economics, emeritus; Phyllis Lambert, founder of the Centre Canadien d'Architecture; Harvey Lichtenstein, president and executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music; the photojournalist Gordon Parks; and Harold Varmus, the Nobel Laureate and director of the National Institutes of Health.
Kofi AnnanDoctor of Laws
Appointed the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations in January 1997, Kofi Annan is the first Secretary-General from sub-Saharan Africa and the first to rise from UN ranks. He has served that organization for three decades in a series of key positions in international crisis resolution and administration, including Special Representative of the Secretary-General to the former Yugoslavia in 1996; Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations from 1993-1996; and assignments in Addis Ababa, Geneva and UN Headquarters in New York. During his tenure as Secretary-General, Mr. Annan has worked to restructure the UN to provide the organization with greater flexibility and efficiency.
University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana; Macalester College (B.A., 1961); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Master of Science in Management, 1972).
A consummate statesman, he has mediated international confrontations and internationalized civil wars while quietly working to keep the United Nations united and the world community on a principled course. Experienced in the high political arts of diplomacy and peacekeeping, he is deeply committed to the view that international peace must rest on a firm foundation of social and economic progress. Unpretentious, generous, a listener and a doer, he is a skillful leader "in the service of all nations," who gives hope to all those in and out of the UN who seek to reform, renew and rely on that world organization.
Oscar Arias SánchezDoctor of Laws
The 1987 Nobel Peace Laureate, Oscar Arias Sánchez served as President of Costa Rica from 1986 to 1990. Dr. Arias began his career as a faculty member in political science at the University of Costa Rica. He was appointed Costa Rica's Minister of Planning and Economic Policy in the early 1970s, and was elected President in 1986. His election coincided with a period of great regional discord: the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua was a source of contention in Central America; civil war was raging in Guatemala; aggravated internal unrest continued in El Salvador; and border tensions were high between Nicaragua and its neighboring states of Honduras and Costa Rica. In 1987, President Arias drafted a peace plan that brought greater stability to the region. His efforts were recognized by the Nobel Peace Prize that year. He used the award's monetary proceeds to establish the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, an organization that he continues to lead and whose mission is to build just and peaceful societies in Central America.
University of Costa Rica (Law and Econs., 1967); University of Essex, England (Ph.D., 1974).
For his country and its neighbors of Central America, he has persistently argued that peace, democracy, and development are indivisible, and are central to the stability of all of the Americas. Recognizing that democracy's victory would not be won by a war of arms or words, he sought and found the bases for mutual respect among governments and opposition leaders. He continues to fight for global disarmament, for victory of the ballot over the bullet, and for the basic human rights of liberty and equality so that the peace he enabled to take root in his homeland may flourish and spread throughout the world.
William J. BaumolDoctor of Humane Letters
William J. Baumol is the Joseph Douglas Green 1895, Professor of Economics, emeritus, at Princeton University. He joined Princeton's faculty in 1949 and served until his retirement in 1992. His research spans a wide area of interests, from industrial organization and regulation of industry, to welfare economics, environmental policy, and the economics of the arts. In each of these areas he has produced major contributions that have shaped subsequent research. A gifted teacher and writer, and also an accomplished painter and sculptor, he complemented his courses in economic theory with a course in wood carving that he gave under the auspices of our Visual Arts Program.
College of the City of New York (B.S.S., 1942); London University (Ph.D., 1949).
An early pioneer of mathematical economics, he led exploration into areas as diverse as welfare economics, competition, and the economics of the environment. He has complemented research into the economics of the arts with committed patronage of the arts and personal artistic achievements in painting and sculpting. To those who engaged him in the public sphere, he became a respected adviser; to those who had the good fortune to work with him as colleague, he often became a close friend; to those who had the privilege of being his students, he became an inspirational guide to that priceless treasure, a love of learning.
Phyllis LambertDoctor of Fine Arts
In 1979, Phyllis Lambert founded the Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Under her direction, it has become the preeminent architectural research center and museum, fostering the understanding of architectural ideas through advanced research, public exhibitions, and scholarly publications. At the beginning of her career she was instrumental in bringing a new vision of architecture and urbanism to New York City by sponsoring Mies van der Rohe for the design of the Seagram Building. Before there was any organized movement for historic preservation of the built environment, she put immense personal effort into saving the Old City of Montreal. She has taken a leadership role in such wide-ranging projects as the restoration of the biblical Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo and the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, and has established the first international prize competition for the design of cities. She has been a valued member of the Advisory Council of Princeton's School of Architecture.
Vassar College (B.A., 1948); Illinois Institute of Technology (M.S., 1963).
Architect, scholar, curator, and international activist in the cause of preserving our built heritage, she has been a tireless pathfinder for the promotion and preservation of architecture. This life-long project began with her advocacy of Mies van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building in New York. She then went on to create almost single-handedly the preeminent study center in architecture. Over the course of the last four decades, she has protected our architectural inheritance in her native Montreal and around the world, while, through her support of modern architecture, she has assured tomorrow's generation an architectural inheritance of diverse and commanding significance.
Harvey LichtensteinDoctor of Fine Arts
This summer Harvey Lichtenstein will step down as president and executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), America's oldest performing arts center. When he assumed leadership of BAM in 1967, he shifted its focus to the new generation of artists who were not receiving support elsewhere. Early in his career, BAM was the site of the New York premier of Alban Berg's Lulu. Merce Cunningham Dance Company's first major New York season performed there. The 1970s saw Peter Brook's landmark production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the introduction of minimalist composer Steve Reich. In 1983, Mr. Lichtenstein established the Next Wave Festival, which has gained recognition as the largest and most influential exposition of contemporary performing arts in the United States. Productions include Philip Glass'and Robert Wilson's Einstein at the Beach. Most recently BAM opened film theaters for the presentation of independent and foreign film. His many contributions to the performing arts have earned international acclaim, including awards from the governments of Germany and France.
Brooklyn College (B.A., 1951).
For a third of a century, he has translated his love of the arts into opportunities for artists and audiences to explore new horizons. For over thirty years at the Brooklyn Academy of Music he has provided an artistic home for some of this country's leading artists&endash;Merce Cunningham, Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris, Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson&endash;as well as for some of the world's best companies, directors, and choreographers&endash;Ingmar Bergman, Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, Zingaro, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Theatre du Soleil. The cutting edge work he has produced has prepared his audiences to catch the next wave into a new millennium, where, as we know, Einstein is already waiting for us on the beach.
Gordon ParksDoctor of Fine Arts
Best known as a photojournalist, Gordon Parks has mastered many artistic media. He began his career as a photographer in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Farm Security Administration. He was the first African-American photographer for Vogue magazine as well as for Life magazine, where he worked from 1949 until 1968. While with Life, he completed over 300 assignments and articles on subjects that ranged from the segregation of the South to the poverty of the slums of Brazil, from royalty and movie stars to sharecroppers and Black Panthers. He documented and participated in the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s; founded Essence magazine; wrote poetry and several autobiographical novels, including most recently Voices in the Mirror; and directed six films, including Shaft's Big Score, for which he wrote the musical score. His work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries throughout the country, and was recently the subject of a retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
In print and in photographs, in movies and in music, for over half a century this multi-dimensional artist has chronicled the richness of our human experience. Caught in the frames of his photographs, yet moving beyond their two-dimensional image, are the crushing weight of injustice and the hunger of poverty; the swagger of youth and the warmth of compassion. Through the lens of his camera we see our lives in sharper focus; through the story of his own life we see the courage of the human spirit that allows us to realize the promise of our destiny.
Harold VarmusDoctor of Science
Harold Varmus has been the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since November 1993. Previously he was professor of microbiology, biochemistry, and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, where he joined the faculty in 1970. Dr. Varmus shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for demonstrating that cancer genes (oncogenes) can arise from normal cellular genes. This discovery marked the beginning of the era of molecular oncology and revolutionized the approaches that were being used to study tumor cell development. As Director of the NIH, Dr. Varmus has successfully reinvigorated this federal research agency and has increased both its stature and its scope.
Amherst College (B.A., 1960); Harvard University (M.A., 1962); Columbia University (M.D., 1966).
Lured from literature to medicine in graduate school, he became first a healer and then an investigator, pursuing retroviruses to uncover the oncogenes through which normal cells turn cancerous. Known among his colleagues for his capacity to build consensus in a contentious field, he moved directly from the laboratory to leadership of the institution where his work began. Believing that the mission of the NIH is simply, but profoundly, "to do great science to further human health," he has urged the nation to increase its investment in the basic research that often finds answers where they were not sought. Setting goals rather than guidelines, he has challenged the scientific community to think creatively about the present and boldly about the future.