COMMENCEMENT
2002:
Sketches of the Honorary Degree Recipients
Joan
Ganz Cooney
| Eric Hobsbawm | Irwin Jacobs
| Jim Lehrer | Richard E. Smalley
Joan
Ganz Cooney
Joan
Ganz Cooney is a visionary television producer and media executive
who pioneered educational uses of television for children. In
1968, believing that it would be possible to use television to
communicate basic skills, model social behavior, and encourage
a love of learning among inner-city preschoolers, Mrs. Cooney
co-founded the Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop)
and launched the first episode of Sesame Street in 1969.
Since that time,
"Sesame Street" has been continuously broadcast in the
U.S. on more than 300 PBS stations and in 140 countries around
the world, including more than 18 foreign-language co-productions.
Sesame Workshop programs, including Sesame Street, The
Electric Company, 3-2-1 Contact, Square One TV,
Ghostwriter, CRO, Big Bag, and Dragon
Tales, have won more than 79 Emmys.
Mrs. Cooney received
a B.A. from the University of Arizona and began her career as
a reporter for a Phoenix newspaper before moving to New York to
work as a television publicist. She produced several award-winning
public affairs documentaries for New York's public station WNET/Thirteen
before conducting the Carnegie Corporation-commissioned study
about children and television that led to the founding of the
Children's Television Workshop.
Mrs. Cooney is
active as a trustee to not-for-profit institutions and on the
board of directors of Fortune 500 companies. She has been named
to several presidential commissions and has received numerous
honorary degrees. Among her awards are a Daytime Emmy for Lifetime
Achievement, induction into the Television Academy Hall of Fame,
a Founders Award from the International Council of the National
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and the Annenberg Public
Policy Center's award for Distinguished Contribution to Children
and Television. Mrs. Cooney was awarded the Presidential Medal
of Freedom in 1995, the nation's highest civilian honor, and was
inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1998.
Eric
Hobsbawm
Eric
Hobsbawm is generally considered to be the most influential historian
alive today. His work includes a magisterial four-volume series
on the modern world beginning with The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848
and continuing through The Age of Capital, 1848-1875;
The Age of Empire, 1875-1914; and The Age of
Extremes, 1914-1991. Smaller studies have included innovative
and acclaimed works on labor movements, working class culture,
jazz, Italian social movements, bandits, nationalism, "invented
traditions," and left politics.
Credited with
profound erudition and cosmopolitanism, piercing insight, and
a limpid, elegant prose, Professor Hobsbawm's works have been
translated into at least 37 languages. Making his professional
home at Birkbeck College, University of London--as Lecturer, Reader,
and eventually Professor of Economic and Social History and subsequently
at the New School for Social Research--he has been a visiting
scholar at MIT, Cornell, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, and the Collège de France. He has given seminars
and lectured in more than 30 countries and territories on four
continents.
Having lived
in Berlin at the time of Hitler's rise to power, Professor Hobsbawm
served in the British Army from 1940 to 1946. Following his military
service he returned to King's College, Cambridge--where he had
earned a bachelor's degree in 1939--to receive his Ph.D. in 1951.
Among his professional distinctions, Professor Hobsbawm is President
of the Society for the Study of Labour History, co-founder and
Vice-President of the influential journal Past & Present,
member of the Comité Scientifique auprès du Ministère
de l'Education Nationale, and member of the European Council
of History Museums.
Professor Hobsbawm
was made a Companion of Honour of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland in 1998, awarded the Order of the Southern
Cross by the Federative Republic of Brazil in 1996, and made a
Chevalier of the Palmes Académiques of the French Republic
in 1993. He is a fellow of the British Academy, an honorary fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member
of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Accademia
delle Scienze di Torino (Italy). He has 16 honorary degrees
from universities and colleges in nine countries.
Irwin
Jacobs
Irwin
Jacobs is an innovative engineer whose triumphs as an entrepreneur
and chief executive make him a role model for the successful transition
from academia to the world of business. Dr. Jacobs' pioneering
work on Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) led to its commercialization
and continuing success as the world's fastest-growing, most advanced
digital wireless communications technology.
Qualcomm, the
company that Dr. Jacobs co-founded in 1985 and which he leads
as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, currently holds 400 patents
and has more than 900 pending patent applications. More than 95
companies have licensed CDMA for the manufacturing of wireless
devices, network equipment, and integrated circuits.Under his
leadership, Qualcomm has been selected as a Fortune 500 company,
included in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index, and traded
on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.
Dr. Jacobs received
a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Cornell in 1956 and
M.S. and Sc.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT. From
1959 to 1966 he was a professor of electrical engineering at MIT
where he co-authored a basic textbook in digital communications,
still used today. In 1966 he moved to the University of California,
San Diego, as associate professor of computer science and engineering.
He left UCSD in 1972 to devote himself full-time to Linkabit,
the communications company he co-founded in 1969 with a few part-time
employees. He oversaw the company's growth until its 1985 merger
with M/A-com, at which time it had 1,400 employees.
Dr.
Jacobs is a member of a number of industry and community boards
and committees. Among his many awards are a 1992 Entrepreneur
of the Year Award from the Institute of American Entrepreneurs,
the National Medal of Technology in 1994, the 1998 Medal of Achievement
from the American Electronics Association, the 1999 Ernst &
Young Leadership Award for Global Integration, the Bower Award
in Business Leadership from the Franklin Institute in 2001, and
election as fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
in 2001.
Jim
Lehrer
Jim
Lehrer is one of the most respected television journalists in
the U.S., having moderated nine presidential debates in the last
four elections and serving as the sole moderator for all presidential
debates in both 1996 and 2000. The MacNeil/Lehrer Report
(subsequently renamed The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and,
since Robert MacNeil's departure in 1995-96, The NewsHour with
Jim Lehrer) has been a fixture on public television stations
for more than 25 years and won more than 30 awards for journalistic
excellence.
Mr. Lehrer teamed
up with Robert MacNeil in 1973 to provide continuous live coverage
of the Senate Watergate hearings in a collaboration that won an
Emmy for producer National Public Affairs Center for Television
(NPACT). Mr. Lehrer continues his partnership with Robert MacNeil
in MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, co-producing The NewsHour
as well as producing other programs and series for public, commercial
and cable television, including a recent Emmy-award nominated
documentary about presidential and vice presidential debates.
Mr. Lehrer is also the author of 12 novels, two memoirs, and three
plays.
Mr. Lehrer received
an A.A. degree from Victoria College and a B.J. from the University
of Missouri in 1956, before joining the Marine Corps. He began
his journalistic career as a reporter, becoming the city editor
of the Dallas Times-Herald in 1968. He made the transition
to television at Dallas' KERA-TV, serving as executive director
of public affairs, as well as on-air host and editor of a nightly
news program. He subsequently moved to Washington, D.C., to serve
as the public affairs coordinator for PBS, member of PBS Journalism
Advisory Board, and fellow at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Mr. Lehrer has
received numerous awards for journalism including the 1999 National
Humanities Medal. Also in 1999, Mr. Lehrer was inducted into the
Television Hall of Fame with Robert MacNeil and into the Silver
Circle of the Washington, D.C., Chapter of the National Academy
of Television Arts and Sciences. He has won two Emmys, the Fred
Friendly First Amendment Award, the George Fost Peabody Broadcast
Award, the William Allen White Foundation Award for Journalistic
Merit, and the University of Missouri School of Journalism's Medal
of Honor. In 1991, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences.
Richard
E. Smalley
Richard
Smalley's research in chemical physics has led to the discovery
of a third elemental form of carbon, adding "fullerenes"
to graphite and diamonds. He has built on his discovery and characterization
of C60
(Buckminsterfullerene), a soccerball-shaped molecule, by generating
fullerenes with metals trapped on the inside and by producing
tubular single-fullerene molecules--"buckytubes"--in
the form of a fiber 100 times stronger than steel at one-sixth
the weight.
Buckytubes have
extraordinary potential for all technologies involving the flow
of electrons. Assembled in close-packed crystalline arrays, these
tubes will serve as "seed crystals" for the direct,
continuous growth of super-strong, lightweight membranes, plates,
tubes, and other structures made entirely out of carbon. In addition
to these epochal discoveries, Dr. Smalley has pioneered new experimental
techniques--such as super-cold pulsed beams; ultrasensitive laser
detection; laser-driven source of free radicals, triplets, metals;
and metal and semiconductor cluster beams--and applied them to
a broad range of vital questions.
Dr. Smalley received
his B.S. from the University of Michigan in 1965 and, after an
intervening four-year period working with the Shell Chemical Company,
his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1973. During postdoctoral work with
Lennard Wharton and Donald Levy at the University of Chicago,
he pioneered supersonic beam laser spectroscopy, which has become
one of the most powerful techniques in chemical physics. He moved
to Rice University in 1976, co-founded the Rice Quantum Institute
in 1979, was named to the Gene and Norman Hackerman Chair in Chemistry
in 1982, and was appointed director of the new Center for Nanoscale
Science and Technology at Rice in 1996.
Dr.
Smalley has received the 1992 International Prize for New Materials
(jointly with R. F. Curl and H. W. Kroto), the 1992 E. O. Lawrence
Award of the U.S. Department of Energy, the 1993 William H. Nichols
Medal of the American Chemical Society, the 1994 Europhysics Prize,
the 1996 Franklin Medal, and the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Dr. Smalley is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Joan
Ganz Cooney
| Eric Hobsbawm | Irwin Jacobs
| Jim Lehrer | Richard E. Smalley