Eleven to receive honorary degrees at Commencement

Eight men and three women will receive honorary degrees in Harvard’s 349th Commencement Exercises this morning, including Amartya Sen, who also will deliver this year’s Commencement Address along with Seamus Heaney, who will deliver a special poetry reading.

In alphabetical order, the recipients are Nicolaas Bloembergen, Doctor of Science; Noam Chomsky, Doctor of Laws; Frank O. Gehry, Doctor of Arts; Andrew S. Grove, Doctor of Laws; Judith Coleman Richards Hope, Doctor of Laws; Katherine B. Loker, Doctor of Humane Letters; Maclyn McCarty, Doctor of Science; Constance Baker Motley, Doctor of Laws; Kenzaburo Oe, Doctor of Letters; Seiji Ozawa, Doctor of Music; Amartya Sen, Doctor of Laws.

Nicolaas Bloembergen

Doctor of Science

Nicolaas Bloembergen is Gerhard Gade University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Born in Dordrecht, The Netherlands, he received his doctoral degree from the University of Leiden. In 1951, he joined the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, where he served for four decades until his retirement in 1990. An inspirational teacher to two generations of undergraduates and nearly 60 Ph.D. candidates, Professor Bloembergen trained many of today’s leading physicists. He is known for outstanding contributions in three areas of modern physics: nuclear magnetic resonance, solid state masers and lasers, and nonlinear optics and spectroscopy. In addition to his scholarly activities, he served as Vice President and then President of the American Physical Society, giving strong testimony before Congress on funding issues vital to the physics community. Among his many honors are the National Medal of Science (1974) and the Nobel Prize in Physics (1981).

Noam Chomsky

Doctor of Laws

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and was a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows before joining the M.I.T. faculty in 1955. He is widely regarded as the father of modern linguistics, having developed a pioneering approach to our understanding of language, and of the ways in which the mind generates and comprehends the complex structures that we call “sentences.” His many publications include Syntactic Structures (1957), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), and The Minimalist Program (1995). His most recent book is titled New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (2000). He has received numerous honors, including the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association and the Kyoto Prize for Basic Sciences.

Frank O. Gehry

Doctor of Arts

Frank Gehry is the design principal of Frank O. Gehry & Associates Inc., which he founded in 1962. Born in Toronto, he received the Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California and studied city planning at Harvard. He has produced remarkable public and private buildings in America, Europe, and Asia, that powerfully express the dynamism of contemporary urban life. He is celebrated for bold designs and dazzling metal structures, including the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minnesota, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in California. His drawings, models, and designs have been exhibited in major museums throughout the world. Among his many honors are the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the National Medal of Arts, the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, and the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Royal Gold Medal for Architecture.

Andrew S. Grove

Doctor of Laws

Chairman and former CEO of Intel Corporation, Andrew Grove helped to formulate the microchip technology that made his company an industry leader. A Holocaust survivor, he came to the United States from his native Hungary in 1956. He graduated first in his class at the City College of New York in 1960, and received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. One of the founders of Intel, he became known for applying exacting management skills that helped define the culture of the digital age. He has written more than 40 technical papers, and his first book, Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices (1967), became one of the standard textbooks for the semiconductor industry. In 1997, he received the “Technology Leader of the Year” award from Industry Week and was named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.”

Judith Richards Hope

Doctor of Laws

Partner in the international law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, and former Fellow of Harvard College, Judith Richards Hope is a distinguished lawyer whose work has focused on federal litigation, regulatory disputes, and the mediation of complex cases. A graduate of Wellesley College and Harvard Law School (Class of 1964), she became the first woman elected as a member of the Harvard Corporation in 1989, and went on to serve the University’s executive governing board for 11 years before retiring this spring. She has taught law at Harvard, Georgetown, and Pepperdine. Her record of civic service includes appointments in the administrations of Presidents Ford and Reagan, and service as both President of the International Law Institute and General Counsel of the District of Columbia Bar. She now serves as Chairman of the National Housing Partnership Foundation, and as President of RiboPharm Inc.

Katherine B. Loker

Doctor of Humane Letters

A devoted friend of higher education, Katherine B. Loker was born in San Pedro, Calif., and received her B.A. from the University of Southern California in 1940. In partnership with her late husband, Donald P. Loker, Harvard Class of 1925, she became increasingly interested in the philanthropic support of higher education, scientific and medical research, and the arts. She has contributed to the strength of many institutions, including Harvard, the University of Southern California, the Donald P. Loker Cancer Treatment Center, the California Medical Center, the California Museum of Science and Industry, the Los Angeles Music Center, and the U.S. Olympic Team. Her recent philanthropy brings new vitality to two of Harvard’s proudest buildings, Memorial Hall and Widener Library. National Co-Chair of Harvard’s University Campaign, she received the 1996 Harvard Medal in honor of her service to the University.

Maclyn McCarty

Doctor of Science

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Professor Emeritus at The Rockefeller University, Maclyn McCarty is a molecular biologist whose work was instrumental in launching modern molecular medicine. A graduate of Stanford University, he received his M.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. In 1941, he joined the faculty of what was then known as The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and from 1946 until his retirement in 1981, he headed the laboratory that studied the biology of hemolytic streptococci and the pathogenesis of rheumatic fever. Early in his career, he and his colleagues performed the landmark experiments that led to the demonstration that DNA, a major component of chromosomes, is the substance that transmits hereditary information. Dr. McCarty is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Wolf Prize in Medicine and the Lasker Special Public Health Award.

Constance Baker Motley

Doctor of Laws

A leading figure in the civil rights movement and in the federal judiciary, Constance Baker Motley is Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. A graduate of New York University, she received the LL.B. from Columbia University in 1946. For 20 years she served as associate counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), litigating major civil rights cases, including Brown v. Board of Education, and winning nine of the 10 cases she argued before the Supreme Court. She was the first African-American woman elected to the New York State Senate, the first to become Borough President of Manhattan and, in 1966, the first to serve in the federal judiciary. She became Chief Judge of the Southern District Court of New York in 1982, and Senior Judge in 1986. Her many honors include the LDF’s Equal Justice Award and the James Weldon Johnson Medal.

Kenzaburo Oe

Doctor of Letters

Considered by many the finest writer in Japan today, Kenzaburo Oe creates mythical stories from intensely personal experiences. Born in a small village on Japan’s Shikoku Island, he graduated from Tokyo University with a degree in French literature in 1959. He has taught at the Colegio de México, Mexico City, and the University of California at Berkeley, and currently holds the Samuel Fisher Professorship at the Free University of Berlin. His many works include Hiroshima Notes, A Personal Matter, The Silent Cry, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, and The Flaming Green Tree. Strongly influenced by the “grotesque realism” of Rabelais, Mr. Oe’s stories are touching, unsettling, painful, and tinged with black humor. He has won almost every international honor for literature, including the 1989 Prix Europalia and the 1994 Nobel Prize.

Seiji Ozawa

Doctor of Music

Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1973, Seiji Ozawa has advanced the orchestra’s distinguished reputation both at home and abroad. Mr. Ozawa was born in 1935 in Shenyang, China, and studied music in Tokyo’s Toho School of Music under Hideo Saito. He won first prize at the International Competition of Orchestra Conductors in Besançon, France, in 1959 and the Koussevitzky Prize at the Tanglewood Music Center in 1960. He has served as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Ravinia Festival, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony. In more than a quarter century with the BSO, he has promoted new music, furthered musical education, and brought the orchestra’s music to audiences around the world. Recipient of Japan’s Inouye Award for lifetime achievement in the arts, he plans to take up the baton at the Vienna State Opera in 2002.

Amartya Sen

Doctor of Laws

Amartya Sen is Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Harvard’s Lamont University Professor Emeritus. Born in India, he studied at Presidency College in Calcutta and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He served as Professor of Economics at Delhi University, Drummond Professor of Political Economy and Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford, and Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics before joining the Harvard faculty in 1987. Regarded by some as the “conscience keeper” of the world of economics, Professor Sen is considered one of the world’s preeminent experts on social choice theory and welfare economics. With strong interests in poverty, famine, and inequality, he has written more than a dozen books and has received various honors, including the Bharat Ratna, the highest honor awarded by the President of India, and the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics.