HONORARY DEGREES
The following individuals were awarded honorary degrees by the University
during Commencement exercises on May 27. Each profile is followed by an
excerpt from the award citation.
Dr. Benjamin Solomon Carson Sr.
Pediatric Neurosurgeon
DOCTOR OF MEDICAL SCIENCES
Dr. Benjamin Carson may be the best-known surgeon on the staff of the Johns
Hopkins University and Hospital as a result of the national publicity he
received in 1987 when he headed the team that successfully separated conjoined
twins using an innovative surgical technique. A 1973 graduate of Yale College
with a major in psychology, Dr. Carson received his medical degree from the
University of Michigan. In 1984, at age 33, he was named Hopkins' director of
pediatric neurosurgery, becoming the youngest person in the country and one of
only three African-Americans to hold that position.
At Hopkins, he is also an associate professor of neurological surgery,
oncology, and plastic surgery, an assistant professor of pediatrics, and
codirector of the Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Center. He has served as a
role model to countless youth and encouraged them to pursue higher education
and to strive for high goals, whether in medicine or other careers.
"You have combined creative scholarship, innovative contributions to
neurosurgery, and brave responses to medical and social problems.
Since graduating from Yale College, you have pursued a career in academic
medicine, developing complex surgical techniques that help save the lives of
the youngest and sickest patients. Through your shining example of community
service, you are a role model for African-American youth. You have embraced
challenges: in the operating room, in the lives of disadvantaged children, and
in your own life. ..."
Charles T. Close
Artist
DOCTOR OF FINE ARTS
Chuck Close began painting human faces in the late 1960s, using photographs
of family members and artist-friends to create the enormous canvases for which
he is famous. Over the years, his work evolved from black-and-white portraits
in the photorealist style, to equally monumental color portraits that are
built from incremental units produced with the use of a grid. Today he is
producing gridded, visually complex portraits in which each two-inch square is
an independent abstract painting. In 1988, as the result of spinal damage, Mr.
Close was left a quadriplegic. He now paints with a special brace which
functions as a brush holder. Mr. Close holds a bachelor's degree from the
University of Washington and bachelor's and master's degrees in fine art from
Yale 1963 and 1964. His work is exhibited in the permanent collections of more
than 50 museums throughout the world. A major retrospective is scheduled for
1998 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
"In art, it is given to very few individuals to change and challenge the way
we experience the visual world -- to show us another way that art
can look. In your art, you have given us the faces of our times, as well as of
your family and your friends, interpreted and recreated, so they
challenge our ways of looking. And in overcoming your own challenges, you have
found new forms of expression for your artistic talent,
inspiring us by your creativity and serving as an example to all of us. Your
art is larger than life; so is your gift of artistic vision,
innovative adaptation, courage, and perseverance. ..."
Eleanor Jack Gibson
Psychologist
DOCTOR OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Eleanor Gibson is one of the 20th-century's leading American psychologists
studying perception and cognitive processes in children. Her most famous
experiment, the "visual cliff," which demonstrated that infants with limited
experience of space still avoid crawling over a glass panel across an apparent
sheer drop, argued for the importance of perception as an
essentially adaptive process. In addition, Professor Gibson was a pioneer in
appreciating the potential relationship between experimental psychology and
reading. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Smith College and a
doctorate from Yale in 1938. She has taught at Smith and at Cornell
University, where she was named the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Psychology in
1972. Her publications include "Principles of Perceptual Learning and
Development," a major work in the field, and "Odyssey," a collection of
research articles from her career. Professor Gibson's many honors include the
Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale, the National Medal of Science and the American
Psychological Association's Distinguished Contribution Award.
"By exploring the workings of the human mind, you have given us new insights
into our own development. You were a pioneer in the field of human perception
and have helped us understand how infants adapt to their environment. Your own
perceptiveness has marked you as one of the leading theorists and
experimenters in modern psychology. As a researcher, writer, scholar, and
teacher, you have influenced generations of psychologists past and generations
to come. ..."
Jack St. Clair Kilby
Scientist and Inventor
DOCTOR OF SCIENCE
In 1959, working with borrowed and improvised equipment, Jack Kilby conceived
and built the first monolithic integrated circuit, thereby laying the
conceptual and technical foundation for the entire field of modern
microelectronics. Mr. Kilby earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical
engineering from the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin,
taking off two years during World War II to serve in the Office of Strategic
Services. Mr. Kilby has worked for the Centralab Division of Globe-Union, Inc.
and for Texas Instruments, where he built the first electronic circuit. He is
the
co-inventor of the hand-held calculator and the thermal printer used in
portable data terminals, and holds more than 60 patents for his work in the
integrated circuit field. In 1970, he left Texas Instruments to work as an
independent consultant to the government and the electronics industry. His
honors include the National Medal of Science and the National Medal
of Technology. He has also been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of
Fame.
"Your inventive genius has changed our world. By creating a miniature
integrated circuit on a single silicon chip, you led the way to an
unimaginable wonderland of microelectronics, computers, and information
exchange. This technology has helped us keep pace with today's
flood of information. Your work in the field of integrated circuits has
resulted in more than 60 patents, including one for the hand-held
calculator. ..."
Richard A. Posner
Jurist and Scholar
DOCTOR OF LAWS
A noted academician and jurist, Richard Posner graduated summa cum laude in
1959 from Yale College and received a law degree from Harvard University. He
began his career with a Supreme Court clerkship for Justice William J.
Brennan, Jr.; he later worked for the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S.
Solicitor General's Office and was general counsel to the President's Task
Force on Communications Policy. He taught at Stanford University and the
University of Chicago, where he held the Lee and Brena Freeman Professorship
of Law and now serves as senior lecturer. In 1981, he was appointed circuit
judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago; in
1993, he was named its chief judge. Together with Guido Calabresi, former dean
of the Yale Law School and now a federal judge, Judge Posner is known as the
founder of the modern law and economics movement. His 25 books include
"Economic Analysis of Law," considered the leading textbook in the field.
"As a law professor for 29 years and a federal judge for 15, you have left a
deep impression on the legal imagination of your time. Your application of
economics to the law has shed fresh light on ancient doctrine and helped forge
the alliance between these disciplines that is a hallmark of contemporary
legal thought. In a remarkable series of books, you have brought your clear
intelligence to bear on the most mysterious subjects that the law must
confront. You have explored daunting topics with clarity and grace and the
optimistic belief that nothing in the field of human experience lies beyond
the power of reason to illumine. You are truly a master of your craft ..."
Stephan Ernst Schmidheiny
Business Leader
DOCTOR OF HUMANE LETTERS
Stephan Schmidheiny is considered one of the world's most environmentally
conscious business leaders. His belief that the cornerstone of sustainable,
ecologically sound development is open, accessible markets and more
streamlined regulatory systems is articulated in his international best-seller
"Changing Course." As principal advisor for business and industry to
the Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development in 1992, he established and chaired the Business Council for
Sustainable Development BCSD, which last year became part of the World
Business Council for Sustainable Development, composed of the leaders of 120
global companies. A citizen of Switzerland, Mr. Schmidheiny holds a doctorate
in law from the University of Zurich. He built a portion of his family's
business into three private international holding companies. When he acquired
a global company based on asbestos-reinforced concrete, he
introduced a new technology to replace asbestos in all its products. In 1980,
he reorganized his businesses, selling those that did not conform to his
environmental principles.
"Not content to be a steward of a family business, you have used your
corporate role to promote stewardship of the global environment.
You have made company decisions based upon the health of the planet,
introducing new technologies and ways of doing business that are
environmentally friendly. By bringing your message to leading industrialists
around the world, you have helped to create an attainable vision of a global
economy based on sustainable, ecologically sound development. ..."
Eunice Kennedy Shriver
Humanitarian
DOCTOR OF HUMANE LETTERS
For many years, Eunice Kennedy Shriver has crusaded to bring people with
mental retardation into the mainstream of American life. Her efforts on their
behalf helped inspire the larger disability rights movement. Mrs. Shriver is
director of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Foundation, which seeks to identify
the causes of mental retardation and to improve how society
deals with citizens with mental retardation. She persuaded her brother,
President John Kennedy, to set up a task force to create educational and
research programs on mental retardation, and she served as counsel to the
panel. She helped establish the National Institute for Child Health and Human
Development in 1962, and founded the Special Olympics, first held in
Chicago in 1968 with 1,000 U.S. and Canadian athletes. Last year's Special
Olympics Summer World Games in New Haven attracted more than 7,000
participants from 140 countries. Worldwide, over one million athletes
participate in the program annually. Mrs. Shriver earned a bachelor's degree
in sociology from Stanford University. Her honors include the French Legion of
Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest decoration
for civilian service.
"You have opened our eyes to see what people can do, rather than what they
cannot do. Your efforts began with the mentally retarded but have extended to
all of us whom you have educated about their -- and our -- collective
abilities. Through your tireless work to create the Special Olympics, first in
this country and then for the world, you have taught us to value and include
more fully the mentally challenged. You gave Yale and New Haven a great
occasion to celebrate last summer as host for the 1995 Special Olympics World
Games. ..."
Paul F. Simon
Singer and Songwriter
DOCTOR OF MUSIC
Paul Simon has remained one of this country's most prominent
singer-songwriters for more than three decades. Performing with his childhood
friend Art Garfunkel as Simon and Garfunkel, he was largely responsible for
writing, arranging and recording the duo's folk and rock songs -- many of
which are now standards. In 1971, Mr. Simon struck out on his own. His first
solo album, "Paul Simon," combined jazz, reggae, rock, and Latin music. He
went on to explore the "township jive" songs of black South African musicians
in the 1986 album "Graceland." Currently he is collaborating with poet and
Nobel laureate Derek Walcott on a musical show titled "The Capeman." Mr.
Simon, a graduate of Queens College in New York, has received 20 Grammy awards
and various other music-related honors, including a Dove Award from
the Gospel Music Association and an Emmy Award for the "Paul Simon Special,"
aired in the mid-1970s. He is cofounder of the Children's Health Project, a
national mobile medical-outreach program for homeless and indigent children.
"Troubadour to the world, you have taken the rhythms of life -- as they pulse
along, from the bridges of Manhattan to the banks of the Amazon -- and given
them back to us transformed into poetry. Your music captures the everyday pain
of memory, the pang of a broken heart; yet it has the power to make of this
sorrow something more than itself. Rather than a collapse into self-pity,
there is an indomitable exultation, "to life!" The philosopher Heraclitus
said, "into swirling and swirling waters, one cannot step twice;" the poet
Paul Simon has said, "after changes upon changes we are more or less the
same." Through changes upon changes, you have found an enduring voice, as
clear as it is true, which touches us all. ..."