The College will award six honorary degrees at today's Commencement ceremony.
Commencement speaker and former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, former Spelman College President Johnetta Cole, Nobel-prize winning biochemist Stanley Prusiner, former Dartmouth Medical School dean Stephen Marsh Tenney, Nazi resister Freya von Moltke and Tony award winning director Jerry Zaks '67 will all receive honorary degrees today.
Degree recipients are chosen by the Council on Honorary Degrees, which aims to select recipients that represent a range of disciplines.
Each fall, the College solicits nominations and submits to the Board of Trustees a list of people who have worked to improve either the world or the College. The Trustees then select six or seven people from the list to receive degrees.
George Mitchell
Mitchell, also today's Commencement speaker, will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. He served as the U.S. senator from Maine for 15 years, the last five years of which as Senate majority leader. For six consecutive years he was voted "the most respected member" of the Senate by a bi-partisan group of senior congressional aides.
More recently, he chaired the historic 1998 peace negotiations in Northern Ireland, which produced an agreement to end decades of conflict in that nation. He also chaired a commission created by the U.S. Olympic Committee that investigated allegations of corruption in the selection of Salt Lake City as an Olympics site.
Johnetta Cole
Cole, who will also be awarded a Doctor of Laws degree, was the first African-American woman president of Spelman College in Georgia. While Cole was president at Spelman, U.S. News & World Report magazine named the college as the top liberal arts college in the South. A professor of anthropology, Cole left Spelman in 1997 and joined the faculty at Emory University in 1998. She was Dartmouth's Montgomery Fellow last spring.
In 1998, President Clinton appointed Cole to an 11-member commission on the celebration of women in American history.
Cole's book, "Conversations: Straight Talk with America's Sister President," was published in 1993. She has received honorary degrees from 41 other colleges and universities, including Princeton and Yale Universities and the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.
Stanley Prusiner
Receiving an honorary Doctor of Science degree today is Stanley Prusiner, a Nobel-prize winning neurologist. Prusiner was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1997 for his research on brain proteins called prions as "a new biological principle of infection." It was only the fifth time in nearly 40 years the prize has been awarded to an individual rather than a group.
Prusiner's work is controversial in the scientific community, with some scientists challenging the idea that prions cause disease. However, Prusiner's research could potentially be the key to cures for Alzheimer's disease, Mad Cow disease and other similar brain diseases.
He has won numerous awards for his research, particularly for his work searching for a cause and cure for Alzheimer's disease.
Prusiner is a faculty member of San Francsisco and Berkeley campuses of the University of California.
Stephen Marsh Tenney
Stephen Marsh Tenney, a 1944 graduate of Dartmouth Medical School and former dean of DMS, will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree. Tenney is credited with rebuilding DMS into a modern medical school for learning, research and patient care. Although he served as dean for less than two years in 1960 and 1961, Tenney affected sweeping change at the school, which at the time had only a two-year program with 48 students and six full-time faculty members.
In his time as dean, Tenney enlarged the student body, began accepting women and non-Dartmouth graduates as students and laid the foundation for the eventual reintroduction of the M.D. program at the school.
After stepping down from the dean's position in 1962, Tenney continued as a professor and chair of the newly formed physiology department. He served as acting dean twice more during his tenure, in 1966 and 1973.
He was named to emeritus status in 1988 and continues his research in cardiopulmonary physiology, for which he received the Presidential Citation of the American Thoracic Society in 1988.
Freya von Moltke
A member of the German resistance against Hitler, Freya von Moltke will be awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters degree today. Von Moltke is the widow of Count Hellmuth James von Moltke, who was executed by the Nazis in January 1945. Von Moltke's estate was one of the central meeting places of the German resistance movement. Her correspondence with Hellmuth has given scholars a chronicle of the German Resistance that would otherwise be unavailable.
This past year, von Moltke traveled to Poland to realize a plan to turn her estate into a European learning center where people can meet in peace and friendship to exchange humanitarian ideas.
Jerry Zaks
Jerry Zaks '67, a four-time Tony award-winning director, will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree. In his career he has been an actor and director in numerous stage productions. He has directed the New York productions of "Civil War," "Smokey Joe's Cafe," "Six Degrees of Separation," "Assassins," "The Foreigner" and many others, as well as the Oscar-nominated film, "Marvin's Room." He has also directed eight national tours.
Declared "the outstanding director of comedy in the American theater today" by New York Times critic Frank Rich several years ago, Zaks has also won the Drama Desk Award for Best Director five times and the 1996 Christopher Award for Excellence for "Marvin's Room."
