Amherst College presented diplomas to 409 seniors at Commencement May 22. |
Eight receive honorary degrees
This year’s Commencement on May 22 was far colder and wetter than usual, and the audience on the Main Quadrangle was punctuated with purple and white umbrellas, but the spirits of the 409 graduating seniors were undamped. John D. Pourciau, of Baton Rouge, La., chosen by his classmates to speak at the event, characterized the Class of 2005 by suggesting that it included both “future CEOs—and the future federal prosecutors who will indict them.” In addition to Pourciau’s speech and President Anthony W. Marx’s address (see page 16 for the full text), the Commencement ceremony included the awarding of honorary degrees to eight people. The recipients appear below.
A 1967 graduate of Amherst, Kazuo Asakai has served since 2002 as the Ambassador of Japan to the European Union. In his 35-year career with the Japanese Foreign Ministry, Asakai has confronted some of the most important and difficult problems of modern international diplomacy, serving as chief negotiator in discussions around trade, refugees, human rights and the environment. He also has worked to strengthen Amherst College’s ties with Japan; he is the senior member among some 30 Amherst graduates currently working with that country’s foreign ministry.
Doctor of Laws. Read Kazuo Asakai's letter to the Class of 2005.
Shigeru Ban is a visionary architect known for building strong, efficient and artful structures from nontraditional materials, including cardboard and paper. Working with the United Nations, he has used paper tubes to create emergency housing for refugees in Rwanda, among other places. In the U.S., he is perhaps best known as a principal of the THINK team, which designed one of the final entries in the competition for the new World Trade Center tower. He also is architect of the Nomadic Museum, an assemblage of shipping containers designed to house an exhibition by photographer Gregory Colbert; the exhibit, which initially covered much of Pier 54 in New York, was disassembled in June and will be rebuilt in Los Angeles, Beijing and Paris. Doctor of Humane Letters.
Natalie Zemon Davis is an innovative historian who is widely regarded as a fearless scholar, a talented teacher and an outstanding mentor. Focusing especially on previously neglected areas of history, she believes in the possibility of multiple and mutually inconsistent truths, and advocates for nontraditional narrative forms, including film and fiction, as viable vehicles for the presentation of history. Davis is perhaps best known as the author of The Return of Martin Guerre. She is also a past president of the American Historical Association. Doctor of Humane Letters.
Physician and medical anthropologist Paul Farmer is founding director of Partners In Health, an international charity that provides direct health care services to poor people and undertakes medical research and advocacy on their behalf. Dividing his time between Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital (where he is an attending physician in infectious diseases and chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities) and rural Haiti (where he serves as medical director of a charity hospital, the Clinique Bon Sauveur), Farmer draws primarily on active clinical practice and focuses on diseases that disproportionately afflict the poor. Doctor of Science.
John Glenn is a former fighter pilot, astronaut and politician. A member of the original group of Mercury astronauts for NASA, he was the third American to travel in space and the first to complete an orbit of the earth. When he lifted off for a 1998 flight on Space Shuttle Discovery’s mission STS-95, Glenn made history as the oldest person ever to go into space (he was 77 at the time). From 1974 until his retirement in 1999, Glenn represented Ohio for the Democratic Party in the Senate. During his tenure, he was chief author of the 1978 Nuclear Nonproliferation Act, and he chaired the Committee on Governmental Affairs from 1978 to 1995. Glenn also served on the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees and the Special Committee on Aging. Doctor of Laws.
Amy Rosenzweig ’88 is an associate professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology, and chemistry at Northwestern University. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2003, she is working to reveal the structural mechanisms for the metabolism of metals in living cells, investigating the relationship between structure and function in metalloproteins using X-ray crystallographic, biophysical and biochemical methods. Metals such as copper, iron and zinc play critical roles in much enzyme activity, but can be toxic if they accumulate out of control. Aberrant metal metabolism has been identified as the critical factor in such diseases as Menkes syndrome, Wilson’s disease and familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), and may represent an important element in Alzheimer’s and prion diseases. Doctor of Science.
Robert Stone is a writer whose novels and stories are preoccupied with what critic William H. Pritchard ’53 describes as “the unlovely underside of American life.” Stone’s first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, won the William Faulkner Award in 1967. Since then, several of his books have been nominated for National Book Awards, and his story collection, Bear and His Daughter, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The film Who’ll Stop the Rain? was based on his novel Dog Soldiers, and several of his other works also have become movies. A former visiting writer at Amherst, he writes, Pritchard says, “with a blend of heroic aspiration and mordantly defla-tionary irony [that] results in something like tragicomedy—maybe even something like Shakespeare, our best tragic comedian.” Doctor of Humane Letters.
William Julius Wilson, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University, has written widely on urban poverty, urban race and class relations, and social inequality in cross-
cultural perspective. Regarded for his nuanced thinking on the complex issues shaping our inner cities, he is past president of the American Sociological Association and the author of many books, including The Declining Significance of Race, The Truly Disadvantaged, When Work Disappears and The Bridge over the Racial Divide. Widely honored within the academy and by many national organizations, Wilson is the only noneconomist to receive the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy. Doctor of Laws.
Click here for information on honorary degrees awarded in a separate ceremony to former South African president Nelson Mandela and his wife, Graça Machel, the former minister of education in Mozambique.
Next: Secondary school teachers honored during Commencement weekend >>
Photo: Frank Ward
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