A former CEO, an Emmy Award winner and a Nobel Prize laureate will be among the eight recipients of honorary Dartmouth degrees at this year's Commencement ceremonies, according to an Office of Public Affairs press release.
Richard Hill '41 Tu'42 and Ralph Manuel '58 will receive doctorates in law and humane letters, respectively. After graduating from Dartmouth and serving as a lieutenant commander in the Navy during World War II, Hill became chairman and chief executive officer of the First National Bank of Boston in 1971. He has served on several companies' board of directors, including that of Polaroid, and is currently chairman emeritus of Dartmouth's Board of Trustees.
Manuel, also a Navy veteran, served in the Navy and Naval reserve for 23 years and reached the rank of commander. In 1962, he came to Dartmouth as assistant director of admissions. After leaving the College to pursue a doctorate at the University of Illinois-Champaign, he returned to Dartmouth in 1971 as associate dean of freshmen, becomming dean of freshmen for Dartmouth's first coeducational class in 1972. Manuel served as dean of the College from 1975 until 1982, when he moved to Indiana to become head of schools for the Culver Academies, a high school, until he retired in 1999.
Also among the honorary doctorate recipients will be Nobel laureate Thomas Cech, who will receive a Doctor of Science. Cech earned the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1989 for discovering self-splicing strands of RNA, which laid the foundation for new theories about life's origins. After earning his Ph.D at University of California, Berkeley, in 1975, Cech became president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, among the world's largest medical research institutions, in 2000.
Evelyn Fox Keller, professor emeritus of history and philosophy of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will also receive an honorary doctorate. After earning a Ph.D from Harvard University in 1963, Keller conducted research about gender and science and the history and philosophy of biology. Her numerous publications include Reflections on Gender and Science and The Century of the Gene.
Cicely Tyson will receive a doctor of arts. A stage, television and movie actress, Tyson has won three Emmy awards, received an Oscar nomination for her role in the movie, Sounder, and was honored by Oprah Winfrey at her Legends Ball. Tyson is involved in charitable organizations such as Save the Children and UNICEF.
The College will also recognize Martin Feldstein and Ada Deer with doctorates of law for their accomplishments in government and academia. After graduating from Harvard in 1961 and Oxford University in 1967, Feldstein worked in the White House as Chief Economic Advisor to United States President Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1984. In addition to being president and CEO of the National Bureau of Economic research, Feldstein has taught economics at Harvard since 1969 and was named to the George F. Baker professorship in 1984.
Deer has been involved with the Native American community since the 1970s, when she studied and taught classes about multiculturalism and Native American issues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She later become the University's director of American Indian studies. After unsuccessfully running for Congress in 1992, Deer was named head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, becoming the first Native American woman to hold the post. Her career also includes a successful effort to garner federal recognition of Wisconsin's Menominee tribe, of which she is a member.
In addition to delivering the keynote address, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, president of Liberia, will receive a Doctorate of Laws at Commencement. In 2005, the Harvard-educated, World Bank economist became the first woman elected to lead an African nation. President George W. Bush awarded Johnson-Sirleaf the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.
