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CONFERRAL OF HONORARY DEGREES
Commencement 1999
June 10, 1999
He has spent the rest of his life proving
himself wrong.
A graduate of the City College of New York, he abandoned several ideas for his doctoral thesis at Columbia before seizing on one that intrigued him.
He set out to find a way in which the differing preferences of individuals could be combined into a systematic model of collective choice.
But his analysis proved this to be mathematically impossible. And his discovery--termed the impossibility theorem--transformed the field of social choice theory.
Known for his extraordinary breadth of knowledge and his concern for social justice, he is considered one of the most inventive economic thinkers in the world.
His theoretical advances, in fields that include general equilibrium theory and incentive theory, are marked by their power to explain real-world phenomena and to inform equitable public policy.
He has spent most of his career at Stanford, but Harvard was fortunate to be his academic home from 1968 to 1979.
During that time, part of it as the Conant University Professor, he provided great stimulus to a cadre of young economic theorists, while forging new bonds between his own discipline and other fields.
His collected papers, published by Harvard University Press, fill six volumes, and his long list of awards includes the 1972 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Let us welcome a humane social scientist of the first rank, Kenneth
Arrow.
PRESIDENT: Kenneth J. Arrow, Doctor of Laws
A scholar who fathoms the impossible,
he distills wisdom from the flux of economic currents,
and applies it in pursuit of a fairer world.
Born into a family of Louisiana cotton farmers, he served in World War II and, with help from the GI Bill, studied economics at the University of Washington.
A Fulbright Fellow in India, he received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard.
Now Barrett Professor of Economics at UMass, he has taught at the Harvard Business School, the Wharton School, and Michigan State, where a former student, now Assistant Secretary of Labor, called him "the most exciting teacher I ever had."
In the early 1960s, as a Commerce Department official, he prepared testimony demonstrating the burden of racial segregation on interstate commerce, testimony cited by the Supreme Court in upholding the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In 1966 President Johnson named him to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the first African-American so appointed.
In the mid-1970s, he founded the economic consulting firm that bears his name, and over which he still presides.
In the early 1990s he co-chaired a national commission probing the origins of the savings-and-loan crisis.
Twice a Harvard Overseer, and a mainstay of nonprofit and corporate boards, he has written widely on banking and international finance, as well as economic development in the African-American community.
In 1995 President Clinton called on him to rescue the nation's capital city from bankruptcy, as chairman of a new financial control board.
"Why should I produce drama when I can produce action?,"
he said of that experience, and with characteristic resolve led
Washington back to solvency.
It is an honor to welcome back Andrew Brimmer.
PRESIDENT: Andrew F. Brimmer, Doctor of Laws
Pathbreaking public servant and wise trustee,
inspiring educator and capital problem-solver,
he resolutely points the way toward prosperity and opportunity.
UNIVERSITY MARSHAL: [HERBERT BLOCK]
Born and educated in Chicago, by age six our next guest was adorning
the sidewalk with chalk caricatures of Kaiser Wilhelm.
"While [he] appreciates virtue," Ken Galbraith said of him, "his real interest is in awfulness."
He began drawing editorial cartoons for the Chicago Daily News in 1929.
He went on to Clevelandís Newspaper Enterprise Association Service and, after World War II, launched a career at The Washington Post that has spanned half a century.
Widely esteemed as the most gifted political cartoonist of our time, he is the only living cartoonist whose work hangs in the National Gallery of Art.
Cartoons, he says, serve to "kick the big boys who kick the underdog."
His own cartoons have kicked their way into our national consciousness with countless indelible images of folly, hypocrisy, and injustice.
The winner of four Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he has been credited with coining the term "McCarthyism," and his image of "Mr. Atom" focused attention on the danger of nuclear weapons.
Eleven American Presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, are among the scores of public figures who have been drawn--and often quartered--by his barbed pen.
He claims that the highest compliment you can pay him is to hang his work on your refrigerator.
Mr. President, lacking the appliance so to compliment our guest
on this stage, I invite you instead to present this honorary degree
to Herblock -- Herbert Block.
PRESIDENT: Herbert Block, Doctor of Arts
An icon of iconoclasts,
whose artful irreverence, arresting images, and irrepressible conscience
mark him as our modern-day Daumier.
Our next guest's career puts that claim to rest.
He has been called "the statesman of statistics" and the "greatest living statistician."
His many contributions include a potent model for weighing the various factors that affect the duration of life, a form of analysis with far-reaching practical value for the social and medical sciences.
For his work, he became the rare statistician to receive the Kettering Prize for cancer research, one among his many honors.
Educated at Cambridge and the University of Leeds, he worked in industry before launching a distinguished academic career.
He served for more than two decades as professor at Imperial College, London, and more recently as Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford, where he remains an honorary fellow.
For twenty-five years the editor of the prestigious journal Biometrika, he has nurtured students and helped shape departments of statistics across Britain and the US.
Joining theoretical and applied statistics, his ideas have made their impact felt from medicine to manufacturing, from physics to economics to psychology.
Former President of the Royal Statistical Society and the International Statistical Institute in The Hague, he would tempt us by his stature to call him "peerless," had he not been knighted in 1985.
Mr. President, I proudly introduce Sir David Cox.
PRESIDENT: David Roxbee Cox, Doctor of Science
Sage of the statistical, nobleman of the numerical,
whose ingenious models shape his field,
enlarging its reach and marking our lives.
Born in Bulgaria, she studied linguistics in Sofia.
Then, on Christmas Eve 1965, with five dollars in her pocket, she arrived in Paris as a scholarship student.
There she immersed herself in the intense intellectual ferment of the times, mixing elements of Russian formalism, French structuralism, and psychoanalysis.
Her doctoral thesis, The Revolution in Poetic Language, became a landmark in literary studies, drawing forth the political dimensions of avant-garde poetry through insights from psychoanalytic theory.
Her later works have explored subjects as diverse as the situation of women in China; the interplay of language and desire; the meaning of "foreignness"; and the nature of melancholy, horror, and love.
A professor at the University of Paris, a practicing psychoanalyst and, more recently, a novelist, she is legendary for her erudition--crossing and transcending the borders of literary theory and history, philosophy and sociology, linguistics and semiotics, feminist theory and even neuroscience.
"I am one of those," she says, "who think that
in spite of the technical era in which we live . . . there exists
a life of the psyche which to me is still the essential value
of our civilization."
Mr. President, mindful of the ultimate
unfathomability of something so indeterminate as text, we nevertheless
present this honorary diploma to Julia Kristeva.
PRESIDENT: Julia Kristeva, Doctor of Laws
Perspicacious reader of modern life, boldly traversing different domains,
she excavates meanings beneath the surface of language
and ennobles the life of the mind.
Literature, he has said, is "fire--"a form of permanent insurrection."
And so it is that his own works, in incandescent prose, challenge established structures of authority, while exploring the chasm between archaic and modern, and the complex ambiguity of human experience.
His twelve novels, honored across more than four decades, draw on his own varied and eventful life.
He attended military academy as a young man, and later studied literature in Lima and Madrid.
His professional pursuits, besides that of novelist, have included journalist, broadcaster, essayist, critic, playwright, film director, professor, and advocate of free expression.
In 1990, as leader of the reformist Liberty Movement party, he finished second in a vigorous campaign for the presidency of Peru -- what he called "the most dangerous job in the world."
Two years later, Harvard welcomed him as the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies.
His fiction plumbs the turbulent experience of the nation he has called "the country of a thousand faces," probing the collision of cultures in his homeland -- with stories that aim, in his phrase, to "open [the] heart more forcefully than fear or love."
The mission of literature, he tells us, is "to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep [us] in a constant state of dissatisfaction with [ourselves]."
We honor a novelist who keeps us from complacency, Mario Vargas
Llosa.
PRESIDENT: Mario Vargas Llosa, Doctor of Letters
Stirring storyteller and impassioned defender of democratic ideals,
he fuels his imagination on the perplexity of reality,
in quest of contradictory truths.
Born in Hartford, educated at Williams and Harvard, he joined the faculty some forty-five years ago.
The rest is Harvard history.
His many roles here have included editor of the John Harvard Library, director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Phillips Professor of Early American History, and the first Adams University Professor.
He has inspired generations of students to strive for what he calls a "realistic understanding of the past, free of myths, wish fulfillments, and partisan delusions."
Thanks to his nuanced and literate scholarship, we are able to imagine anew America's colonial and revolutionary history, and the passage of people and ideas to our shores.
His landmark work The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution won the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes in 1968.
For his biography of Thomas Hutchinson, colonial governor of Massachusetts, he received the National Book Award, and for his Voyagers to the West, a second Pulitzer Prize.
A colleague describes his work as "exquisitely written, delicate in insight and imbued with a wisdom about men and affairs that is the true hallmark of a great historian."
Just last year he was honored as the nation's Jefferson Lecturer
in the Humanities, and the White House welcomed him to deliver
the first Millennium Lecture.
History, he reminds us, is not simply a field of academic inquiry,
but an essential means to "social sanity."
Mr. President, I present one of Harvard's wellsprings of sanity,
Bernard Bailyn.
PRESIDENT: Bernard Bailyn, Doctor of Laws
Brilliant expositor of a budding nation's beginnings,
exemplar of the historian's craft,
he reveals the sparks that kindled America's sacred fire of liberty.
An oracle in the eyes of many, he says self-effacingly that his years in public life have taught him simply "to mumble with great incoherence."
Or, as he once put it, "If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said."
The son of a stockbroker, he began orchestrating economic enterprises early, handling the finances of a 1940s swing band in which he also played saxophone and clarinet.
In 1954, with three degrees from NYU, he became chairman and president of a New York economic consulting firm, which he led for thirty years.
President Ford enlisted him to chair the Council of Economic Advisors in the mid-1970s.
Leaders in Washington called on him to chair the National Commission on Social Security Reform in the early 1980s.
And since 1987, at the behest of Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, he has served as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a role in which he is often described as one of the world's most influential leaders.
During his distinguished tenure, amid tectonic shifts in the global economic landscape, inflation has dropped, unemployment has dipped, consumer confidence has risen, and the US economy has enjoyed one of its greatest periods of sustained growth.
And when he speaks, however measured and oblique his words, people
listen.
For instance, a few years ago -- with stock prices climbing to
unprecedented heights -- he sent markets into a temporary tailspin
by suggesting that share values might reflect a degree of what
he termed "irrational exuberance."
Such exuberance, to be sure, is a trait that our guest himself
seldom puts on public display. But I trust that we may be forgiven
our own rational exuberance as we join in welcoming Alan Greenspan.
PRESIDENT: Alan Greenspan, Doctor of Laws
An estimable figure of compelling interest and quintessential reserve,
whose steady hand is visible in markets worldwide;
with his watchful eye on a wide span of trends,
he keeps America green.