During the Morning Exercises of
the 362nd Commencement, on May 30, Harvard will confer honorary
degrees on six men and three women, the University reports—among them a preeminent environmental
economist, a public-health leader, a long-serving mayor, a Gnostic scholar, a
loyal Harvard benefactor, and an international media celebrity. (The honorands
are listed here in alphabetical order, not in the order of conferral of
degrees.)
José Antonio Abreu,
pianist and educator, Doctor of Music. A native of Valera, Venezuela, José
Antonio Abreu studied economics and earned a doctorate in the field. He served
as a deputy in the Chamber of Deputies in his country’s Congress, and later
served as minister of culture. He also studied piano, and in 1975 founded El
Sistema (the Foundation for the National Network of Youth and Children
Orchestras of Venezuela), using music as the vehicle for children’s social and
intellectual development.
In
a 2012 account in The New York Times,
“Venerated Priest and Humble Servant of Music Education,” Daniel J. Wakin
’83 reported:
As he slowly walked through
the adoring and bubbling crowd of young people, the frail elderly man brushed a
cheek, clasped an arm, bestowed a smile. He lingered affectionately with
members of a choir composed of disabled youngsters.
For anyone who observed Pope
John Paul II in action amid third-world crowds during the later years of his
papacy, it was a familiar sight: the charisma, the smiles, the contrast of
stooped holy man and spirited youngsters, the solicitousness for the weak.
But on this February day at the Teresa Carreño Theater here, the
center of attention was not a pope. It was José Antonio Abreu, the founder and
influential leader of a classical music education program called El Sistema.
Mr. Abreu was showing off some of its orchestras to visiting Americans in an
elaborately choreographed showcase.
“It is possible
to extrapolate that a good part of El Sistema’s success,” Wakin wrote, “is due
to…the single-minded focus on spreading the gospel of social action through
music.” El Sistema, he reported, had absorbed “hundreds of thousands of young
Venezuelans into orchestras and other ensembles, providing intensive musical
training as an antidote to the ills of poverty, an enveloping reality in this
country despite its oil wealth”—and now producing internationally recognized
musical performers. “Mr. Abreu is referred to by his loyalists as a father, a
saint, a visionary, a philosopher or, most often, simply as maestro.”
At the time of
the article, El Sistema, funded by the government, operated 280 centers in
Venezuela, in which 310,000 students were enrolled. Visit El
Sistema USA’s website
here.
Sir Partha Dasgupta, Ramsey
professor emeritus of economics, University of Cambridge, Doctor of Laws.
Born in Dhaka and educated in Varanasi, Delhi, and Cambridge, England, where he
earned his Ph.D. in economics in 1968, Sir Partha Dasgupta
helped to establish the journal Environment
and Development Economics, focusing on the interface of poverty and
environmental resources and aimed in part at helping scholars in developing
countries have access to an international journal for their research. It is an
apt illustration of his own focus on development economics and the economics of
population, environmental resources, malnutrition, and social capital. Among
his published works is The Control of
Resources (Harvard University Press, 1982), and he has collaborated with,
among others, Amartya Sen, Harvard’s
Lamont University Professor and a Nobel laureate. He was named Knight
Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II in 2002, and was co-winner of the 2002 Volvo
Environment Prize, as well as winner of the 2004 Boulding Memorial Award of the
International Society for Ecological Economics and of the 2007 Galbraith Award
of the American Agricultural Economics Association.
In a 2010
interview with Simon W. Bowmaker of New York University, Dasgupta said of
his early work at the London School of Economics with Sen, and their diverging
paths since:
Among my senior colleagues at the LSE, I saw much of
Amartya Sen, from whom I learnt how one might interpret economic development.…In
recent years our visions of what economics should be about have diverged
somewhat.…As far as I can judge he feels development economics should get
closer to moral philosophy…whereas I am convinced the subject’s greatest
weakness lies in [the fact] that it’s not informed by the natural sciences,
especially ecology. I don’t think the failure of official development economics
to successfully address extreme poverty and demographic distress in the poorest
countries has had anything to do with not knowing what poverty or justice mean,
rather it seems to me the answer lies in the fact that professionals have
neglected to uncover the pathways that determine the
poverty‐population‐environment nexus.
Describing
his own “applied theory” method of discovering problems to investigate and then
conducting research, Dasgupta said of his sources of inspiration:
By observation, I guess. On one occasion in the early ’80s,
when passing through Calcutta on my way to visit my parents in Santiniketan, I
noticed that the baby of a mother beggar on the sidewalk was being molested by
flies. I thought, “That’s odd. Why isn’t the baby swatting the flies?” Then it
dawned on me that the baby was conserving energy. That eventually triggered my
joint work with Debraj Ray on malnutrition and the capacity to work. Of course,
he had been thinking along similar lines before we met at Stanford, which is
how we came to collaborate, but it was a casual observation that led me to seek
a theory that would cover what I had observed.…
If you travel by train in West Bengal, you will notice
that every village has a pond, supplying water for drinking, washing, and
cultivating root crops. On several such journeys I observed that villagers have
built their homes very close to one another around their pond. Why? One answer
is that you have more land for cultivation if you crowd the huts. It occurred
to me that another possible answer was that closeness would enable people to
observe each other’s behavior easily.…There are few private property rights to
those commons, so presumably communities have had to devise norms of behavior.
And norms of behavior involve sanctions for misbehavior. But how do you know
somebody has misbehaved? You have to observe it. Those problems led me to the
then nascent literature on social capital, and I tried to understand the
concept in terms of modern resource allocation theory.
Of the challenges to contemporary economics, he said:
Bringing Nature into economics will prove to be the
biggest challenge, largely because whenever Nature is mentioned, the
hard-boiled economist says “externalities” and suppresses a yawn. Economics has
established bad cultural practices. The profession doesn’t reward someone who
may be doing vital work estimating those yawn‐generating externalities in, say,
a situation where forests in the uplands of a watershed are being cut down and
damaging farmers downstream. The profession rewards empirical work in socially
acceptable fields, such as education, health, labor, insurance, and various industries
producing private goods. But when it comes to natural capital, they give it a
thumbs‐down.…If there has been a recurrent theme in my own work, it’s been the
attempt to introduce Nature (natural capital) into economics in a seamless way;
in many ways to re‐construct economics. Sustainable development is a buzz world
among intellectuals. But that doesn’t make it a bogus word. Until economists
take Nature seriously, we will not know how current policy will affect future
people. We have to understand humanity’s relationship with Nature at different
levels of economic development. In order to do that, we need to make contact
with neighboring disciplines. The profession isn’t prepared to do that as yet.
…It’s taken me years to appreciate how deeply interconnected
our social systems are with the natural system, and how we have also isolated
ourselves from Nature via the market. We need to be constantly aware of the
unintended consequences of that isolation.
We’ve got to really engage with a whole group of different,
but related disciplines. We’re not doing enough of that at the moment, and we
don’t have the willingness; our entire training process and subsequent career
go against it. I can’t help thinking that we economists are missing the most
significant problems of our time, or for that matter of anybody’s time, by
avoiding them.
Donald R. Hopkins, M.P.H.
’70, vice president, health programs, The Carter Center, Doctor of Science.
Donald
R. Hopkins, a graduate of Morehouse College, earned his medical degree from
the University of Chicago and his master’s in public health from Harvard. During
two decades at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he served as
deputy director (1984-1987) and acting director (1985); he has been an
assistant professor of tropical public health at the Harvard
School of Public Health (which recognized him with its 2012 Alumni Award of Merit),
and directed the program to eradicate smallpox and control measles in Sierra
Leone from 1967 to 1969. He is the author of Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (reissued in 2002 as The Greatest Killer: Smallpox in History).
At the Carter Center, which he joined in 1987, he oversees
international health and mental-health programs in Africa and Latin America. Previously he directed its efforts to
eradicate Guinea worm disease and river blindness—work for which he won a MacArthur
Fellowship in 1995 (he now serves on that foundation’s
board of directors).
In
an account accompanying a PBS series, Hopkins said he would never forget
his first sight of a Guinea worm: “It was as awful as I imagined it to be. And that was a gentle
introduction. I can show you pictures of a worm emerging from the back of a
child’s head. Another Guinea worm once came out under a man’s tongue. The
swelling was so painful he couldn’t swallow, and he starved to death.” The
disease is transmitted through drinking water infested with microscopic fleas
that carry the worm larvae. Inside the body, the larvae can grow into worms
three feet long; they emerge through the skin in painful blisters. Eradication
depends on treating drinking water and educating people about the transmission
of the disease. (In some interpretations, the rod of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing and medicine, is entwined with a Guinea worm—extracted from the body by winding around a stick.)
In an April New York Times profile of Hopkins, titled “Another Scourge in His
Sights,” Donald G. McNeil Jr. wrote about seeing a bottled specimen of a Guinea worm in
Hopkins’s home office—along with statues of the Hindu smallpox goddess and the
Yoruba smallpox god, reminders of a disease he helped eliminate. The several
hundred remaining cases of Guinea worm disease are found in ravaged countries:
South Sudan (now at peace), northern Mali (riven by war this year), Ethiopia,
and Chad. Of Hopkins, McNeil wrote, “Choosing a life’s work that requires
visiting remote villages around the world seems counterintuitive for someone
who, by his own admission, is terrified of snakes, rats, bats, airplanes,
heights, and food poisoning.”
In “Disease Eradication,” a review article
published this January in the New England
Journal of Medicine, Hopkins wrote about the special challenges of eliminating any
disease, including those—drawn from his own experience—far beyond the medical
and scientific:
Political instability and insecurity, which are usually
outside the realm of public health professionals and can be avoided in a
program designed to control disease, are inescapable challenges in an
eradication program. Smallpox eradication succeeded despite civil wars in
Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sudan, and the programs to eradicate dracunculiasis and
poliomyelitis face similar challenges.
Lord Robert M. May, professor,
Oxford University, Doctor of Science. Robert M. May,
Baron May of Oxford, has served as president of the Royal Society (2000-2005)
and chief scientific advisor to the British government and head of the Office
of Science and Technology (1995-2000). A researcher who has investigated the
structure and dynamics of ecosystems, as
well as how populations are structured
and respond to change (especially with respect to infectious diseases and
biodiversity), he has received the Royal Swedish Academy’s Crafoord Prize, the
Japanese Blue Planet Prize, and the Royal Society’s oldest and most prestigious
award, the Copley Medal. He was awarded a knighthood in 1996, and created a
life peer in 2001.
Lord May’s research interests reflect both his original
training in chemical engineering and theoretical physics at the University of
Sydney, and his later investigations—as a lecturer in applied mathematics at
Harvard (1959-1961) during his postdoctoral years, and as Class of 1877 professor of zoology at Princeton. He is recognized as a leading scholar in the application of mathematics to problems in ecology and biodiversity.
In a
2002 interview with Kathy A. Svitil of Discover
Magazine, he discussed his views on the complexity of ecosystems and
his work on modeling them mathematically:
There are people who say that reducing biological diversity will cause
essential ecosystems to collapse. But we don’t know that. It is entirely
possible that we could be clever enough to live in a world that was greatly
biologically impoverished in species and yet managed to deliver the natural
services that we want. It would be the world of the cult movie Blade Runner. The question is, do you
want to live in such a world? Personally, I think ethical and esthetic
arguments are the strongest arguments we have for preserving biological
diversity.
Addressing
genetically modified foods and biodiversity, he said:
We need to
think about the possible health effects, as we would with any other new food,
but it doesn’t unduly concern me. Some groups project alarmist scenarios about
creating GM “super weeds” or invasive organisms. I do worry about
invasive organisms. However, the problem isn’t with GM crops or conventional
crops but with inadequate control over what you can sell in garden centers. The
plants already in garden centers have become real pests in Britain.
I am also worried about the devastating effects of agriculture on
biological diversity. In Britain, most populations of farmland birds are in
decline, the underlying insect populations are also undoubtedly in decline, and
a quarter of our hedgerows were lost in the decade from the early 1980s to the
early 1990s. GM crops could be used in a careful and thoughtful way to produce
environmentally friendly crops, or they could simply ramp up the
intensification of agriculture.
Of science and
policymaking, May said:
We need to do a better job thinking about what choices to make. What
doors to open, which doors not to. We need to get the scientific facts and the
scientific uncertainties clear and then have a value-driven, belief-driven,
feelings-driven debate, rather than just letting things happen.
Thomas M. Menino, mayor
of Boston, Doctor of Laws. Thomas
M. Menino, who was born in Boston’s Hyde Park neighborhood, is completing
his twentieth year and fifth full, elected term as mayor of Boston. He was
first elected in November 1993, having previously served as acting mayor,
succeeding Ray Flynn, who became U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. He is the
city’s longest-serving mayor, and has been a supporter of the University’s
planned academic development on its landholdings in Allston, consistent with
neighborhood wishes and needs.
In
The New York Times report on his
decision this past March not to run for another term, Katherine Q. Seelye,
IOP ’03, and Jess Bidgood wrote, “His
departure after a 20-year run gives the city a chance to celebrate him and his
achievements and to reflect on its transformation from a gritty parochial town
to the high-powered economic engine of a region that has bounced back from the
2008 recession ahead of much of the nation.” They noted that Menino remained
immensely popular, with nearly three-quarters of the respondents to a recent Boston Globe poll saying that the city
was heading in the right direction (in sharp contrast to surveys of public opinion
about the state of the nation). In a warm tribute at the honorands’ dinner in Annenberg Hall Wednesday evening, President Drew Faust hailed him as “the honorable, the admirable, Thomas Menino,” and The Boston Globe celebrated the honor with a front-page leak in its Thursday morning edition.
Elaine Pagels, Ph.D.
’70, Paine Foundation professor of religion, Princeton University, Doctor of
Laws. Elaine
Pagels, author of the National Book Award- and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning The Gnostic Gospels, is a preeminent scholar of Gnosticism, early
Christianity and its orthodoxies and heresies, and late antiquity. Her Harvard doctoral dissertation was
entitled “The hermeneutical debate between Origen and Heracleon in Origen’s
Commentary on the Gospel of John,” a suggestion of Pagels’s sustained scholarly
interests and her close study of period texts.
Her recent works include Beyond
Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas; Reading
Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, co-written with
Karen King,
Hollis professor of divinity at Harvard; and Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation.
In
his review of the latter, Dwight Garner of The
New York Times noted Pagels’s “calm, sane, supple voice,” one of the
attributes that makes her “America’s finest close reader of the apocrypha.” The
book “packs in dense layers of scholarship and meaning”:
The Book of Revelation,
attributed by Ms. Pagels to John of Patmos, is the last book in the New
Testament and the only one that’s apocalyptic rather than historical or morally
prescriptive. It’s a sensorium of dreams and nightmares, of beasts and dragons.
It contains prophecies of divine judgment upon the wicked and has terrified
motel-room browsers of the Gideon Bible for decades.
Ms. Pagels places the book in
the context of what she calls “wartime literature.” John had very likely
witnessed the skirmishes in A.D. 66, when militant Jews, aflame with religious
fervor, prepared to wage war against Rome for both its decadence and its
occupation of Judea.
She deepens her assessment of
the Book of Revelation by opening with a troubled personal note.
“I began this writing during a time of war,” she says, “when some who
advocated war claimed to find its meaning in Revelation.”
“One of her great gifts,” much in evidence here, is “her
ability to ask, and answer, the plainest questions about her material without
speaking down to her audience.…She must be a fiendishly good lecturer.” Garner concludes:
John’s book has caused great
mischief in the world, Ms. Pagels suggests, but it is a volume that can be
clasped for many purposes. It has given comfort to the downtrodden, yesterday
and today.
John, Ms. Pagels writes, “wants to speak to the urgent question that
people have asked throughout human history, wherever they first imagined divine
justice: How long will evil prevail, and when will justice be done?”
C. (Clemmie) Dixon Spangler
Jr., M.B.A. ’56, entrepreneur and philanthropist, Doctor of Laws. C. Dixon Spangler Jr.
has been involved in the banking, motel, and construction industries—he ran
National Gypsum, the wallboard and building-supplies company—and also served as
president of the University of North Carolina system from 1986 to 1997. (Following
that educational service, Spangler
wrote to his successors on the university’s governing board in 2010 to oppose a
proposed increase in student fees at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte to cover a deficit in the football program. In that letter, he
observed that Article IX, Section 9, of the North Carolina constitution
directed that the benefits of the university “shall be extended to the people
of the State free of expense, as far as practical,” and that “There is no way
our founding fathers could have written this thinking the Football Fees being
proposed by the ‘Football Committee’ make good sense.” Although the football
program was approved, Spangler’s official UNC portrait shows him with a laptop
computer open to that constitutional reference.)
He was elected to Harvard’s Board of Overseers in 1998, and
served as president during the 2003-2004 academic year. Harvard
Business School’s Spangler Center, the student hub, bears his name, as does
the Spangler Family professorship of business administration. He was awarded the
Harvard Medal in May 2005. Spangler also chaired
the Campaign for Harvard Business School during the middle of the last
decade.
JoAnne Stubbe,
Novartis professor of chemistry and professor of biology, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Doctor of Science. JoAnne Stubbe, a
microbiologist and biochemist, has been widely recognized for work on the
processes by which cells use free radicals, for advancing new cancer
treatments, and for pioneering research on enzymes. She received the National
Medal of Science in 2009, and the Welch Award—which honors basic chemical
research and recognizes chemical research contributions for the benefit of
mankind—in 2010. She describes general research interests extending from the
structures of drugs bound to DNA to bioengineering techniques to create
biodegradable polymers. The
reactions she studies play a critical role in DNA replication and repair,
among other important problems.
Alongside the technical references, her research group website
features a drawing and a photograph of “Top Dog” Dr. McEnzyme Stubbe, who displays
both a very pink tongue and well-groomed grayish-white fur and, apparently, has
his own dedicated e-mail address: zymie[at]mit [dot] edu.
Oprah Winfrey, global media figure, Doctor of Laws. Oprah
Winfrey, the famous talk-show host, now operates her own Oprah Winfrey Network.
She is best known for her Oprah Winfrey
Show, nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. Her background
is described more fully in Harvard
Magazine’s report on the announcement that she would be the Commencement
speaker at the Afternoon Exercises in Tercentenary Theatre on May 30—the
annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. Faust noted on Wednesday evening that the honorand is “recognized by her first name, and indeed by her first letter,” worldwide.