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Boston University bestows seven honorary degrees
Van Cliburn
Doctor of Music
At the age of 23, Van Cliburn shocked the music
world by winning the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow
with his performance
of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor. “This
was a conquest in a capital devoted to the belief that Soviet man could
accomplish more than any other,” reads Cliburn’s honorary
degree citation. “An American musician, you arrived in Moscow,
and Russian judges recognized your preeminence. As you gave your hosts
joy, you gave your fellow Americans pride, and in the four and a half
decades since then you have continued to make us proud and to delight
the world.”
Born in 1934 in Shreveport, La., Cliburn was a child
prodigy, taught by his mother, herself a pianist schooled in the Lisztian
tradition.
He played piano by ear at age 3, made his recital début at age
4, performed with the Houston Symphony Orchestra at age 13, and at 14
played in Carnegie Hall. He then studied with Rosina Lhévinne
at the Juilliard School, earning a diploma in piano in 1954.
Cliburn’s
career was tremendously successful from the start. He earned numerous
awards as a young man, and in 1958, upon returning from
Moscow, he became the only classical musician ever honored with a ticker-tape
parade in New York City. He began his recording career that year with
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Opus 23. Conducted
by Kiril Kondrashin, it was the first classical recording to sell one
million copies.
Cliburn, who is famous for his flawless technique and
poetic, idiosyncratic playing style, toured the world after his Russian
triumph, performing
for royalty and heads of state. After a decade’s hiatus beginning
in the late 1970s, he returned to the concert stage in 1987, performing
at the White House at a dinner honoring Mikhail Gorbachev, and resumed
his international tours. He has played for every U.S. president since
Harry Truman.
Cliburn, who was inducted into the American Classical Music
Hall of Fame in 2001, has been concerned throughout his career with the
education
and encouragement of aspiring artists. In 1962 he established the Van
Cliburn International Piano Competition, held every four years, and in
1999 the biennial International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs.
He has endowed scholarship programs in Russia, Hungary, and throughout
America, and serves on the Board of Trustees for the Interlochen Arts
Academy in Michigan.
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Honorary degree recipients Karen Elliott House and Van Cliburn line up for the processional. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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Karen Elliott House
Doctor of Humane Letters
Wall Street Journal publisher and Pulitzer
prize–winning reporter
Karen Elliott House has “more international news experience at
all levels than any other top news executive in American journalism today,” reads
the citation to her honorary degree. “You have put that experience
to work. By centralizing the editing and layout of the I’s
American, European, and Asian papers, you have gained efficiencies and
freed reporters and editors around the world to pursue stories that crop
up on their beats. With the largest circulation of any American newspaper
and more foreign bureaus than its next five competitors combined, the
Wall Street Journal of your administration remains the undisputed
heavyweight of the world’s affairs.”
A native of the small
town of Matador, Tex., House graduated from the University of Texas at
Austin in 1970 and joined the Journal’s
Washington, D.C., bureau in 1974, covering energy, the environment, and
agriculture. Her passion, however, was international politics, and she
was named the paper’s diplomatic correspondent in 1978, becoming
assistant foreign editor in 1983, and then foreign editor in 1984. She
received a Pulitzer that year for a series of penetrating interviews
with Jordan’s King Hussein.
In 1989, House became vice president
of the international group of the paper’s parent organization,
Dow Jones and Company, and was named president of the group in 1995.
She returned last year to the I as publisher and now is a senior vice
president of Dow Jones and sits on the company’s executive committee.
House
has been a member of the BU Board of Trustees since 1989 and is currently
Board secretary. She is a former director and a current member
of the Council on Foreign Relations and a director of the Committee to
Protect Journalists. She also is a member of the board of trustees of
the nonprofit think tank RAND, and a fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences.
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Lukas Foss receives a warm greeting from Chancellor John Silber. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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Lukas Foss
Doctor of Music
CFA Music Professor Lukas Foss is widely considered
one of the greatest American composers of his generation, and his career
is especially noteworthy
for the fact that he also is a highly esteemed pianist, conductor, teacher,
and spokesman for serious music.
Foss, who began composing at the age
of 7, came to New York City with his family in 1937, when he was 15,
by way of France, from their native
Germany. He enrolled at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music,
and later studied conducting with Serge Koussevitzky at Tanglewood and
composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale. Foss was the youngest composer
ever to have a new work performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and
the youngest recipient ever of a Guggenheim Fellowship. By the age of
31, he had won the Prix de Rome and a Fulbright Scholarship, had taught
at Tanglewood, and had spent six years as the pianist for the BSO.
Foss devoted himself in his 30s primarily to composing, creating immensely
challenging and sometimes controversial pieces. His work often experimented
with atonality, featured improvisation, and employed nontraditional sound
sources — he might instruct musicians to stomp on the floor, shout,
or bang any object within reach. Foss’ work over the past two decades
has been less overtly avant-garde, combining experimental sounds and
textures with neoclassical form. “Freshness is not newness,” he
once told an interviewer. “The avant-garde is a bandwagon.”
Foss’ signature
compositions include the orchestral works Piano Concerto No. 2 (1950),
Baroque Variations (1967), and Renaissance Concerto (1986), and the children’s operas The
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1950) and Griffelkin (1955), a new recording of which was released
by Chandos Records in April. Foss still maintains an active conducting
and performing schedule in addition to teaching at BU. “As pianist,
conductor, teacher, and composer, you have instructed and delighted us,” reads
the citation to his honorary degree. “With each passing year, you
have introduced us to new musical possibilities. . . . To audiences unprepared
to interpret the music of the 20th century, you have brought understanding
as you have explained its complexities.”
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Nasser David Khalili, who received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree, with his wife, Marion. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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Nasser David Khalili
Doctor of Humane Letters
Nasser David Khalili is a scholar and
benefactor of Islamic art of international standing and owns one of the
world’s most important Islamic art
collections. A visiting professor in the department of art and archaeology
at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies,
he has devoted the past 30 years to assembling the Khalili Collections,
which include 20,000 pieces of Islamic art, in addition to collections
covering many other fields.
The Khalili Collections comprise more than
25,000 objects in total, one of the largest private art holdings ever
assembled. Khalili generously
shares his artworks with the public, exhibiting the collections throughout
the world, and has embarked on an ambitious project to present the collection
in a 50-volume scholarly publication, with essays contributed by leading
historians of art and architecture.
Khalili was born in Isfahan, Iran,
in 1945, and after completing his schooling and national service, left
Iran in 1967 for the United States,
where he continued his education, before settling in the United Kingdom
in 1978. He earned a doctor of philosophy degree 10 years later from
the School of Oriental and African Studies for his study of Islamic lacquerwork.
Also a philanthropist and a successful property developer, he has made
notable contributions to the scholarship of Islamic art, having founded,
under the auspices of the Khalili Family Trust, the Nasser D. Khalili
Chair of Islamic Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the
first chair devoted to the decorative arts of Islam at any university.
He has also endowed a research fellowship in Islamic art at the University
of Oxford.
Khalili is a member of the governing body of the School of
Oriental and African Studies and an honorary fellow of the University
of London. In
addition, he is the cofounder and chairman of the Maimonides Foundation,
which promotes peace and understanding between Jews and Muslims.
“
You have . . . matched the global reach of your collection with its display
through exhibitions around the world, in cities large and small,” reads
the citation to his honorary degree. “You have created a peripatetic
museum, the first of its size and importance. Your achievements in preserving
the riches of Islamic art and displaying them around the world give you
a place with the greatest collectors and benefactors in the history of
art . . .”
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Jon Westling acknowledges the affectionate applause of the University community. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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Jon Westling
Doctor of Humane Letters
In 1963, the 21-year-old Jon Westling
showed himself already a leader: while working a summer job in Washington,
D.C., he traveled to Danville,
Va., to protest peacefully the city’s Jim Crow laws. He was jailed
for two weeks before being freed on bail, and charges against him eventually
were dropped.
Westling’s sacrifice during the civil rights era demonstrated
an “essential
to lead a university: the courage to stand by the principles that animate
universities, no less than free societies,” according to his honorary
degree citation. From 1996 to 2002, Westling served as Boston University’s
eighth president; today he is president emeritus and a professor of history
and professor of humanities at the University.
Born in Yakima, Wash.,
Westling studied history and economics at Reed College, in Portland,
Ore. As a Rhodes scholar, he studied history at
Oxford University and later at the University of California at Los Angeles.
He taught at Centre College of Kentucky, Reed College, UCLA, and the
University of California at Irvine before BU President John Silber recruited
him in 1974.
Westling was appointed assistant to the president in 1976
and during the next two decades he steadily assumed increasing administrative
responsibility,
serving as associate provost, provost, executive vice president for administration
and academic affairs, acting president during Silber’s 1987 sabbatical,
and president ad interim when in 1990 Silber was on leave. Westling became
president-elect in January 1995 and president in June 1996.
As president,
Westling more than doubled annual giving to the University and increased
sponsored research awards by 80 percent. He launched an
ambitious
program to build the John Hancock Student Village and delivered balanced budgets
every year of his term. He also recruited some of the nation’s most accomplished
scholars to the University.
Westling’s “wide-ranging erudition and
deep immersion in the life of the mind,” both in his “native humanities
as well as in the sciences” helped make him a successful leader, his
citation states. “You
have lived that life with a commitment and capacity that has distinguished
every institution in which you have served. . . . After your three-decade detour
into administration, you now return to the classroom, where Boston University
students will encounter the deeply learned and eloquent scholar-teacher long
known to your administrative and faculty colleagues.”
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Gerald Tsai, Jr. (CAS’49, GRS’49) is hooded by Trustee James Howell and Chancellor John Silber. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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Gerald Tsai, Jr.
Doctor of Humane Letters
When Gerald Tsai, Jr., graduated from
BU in 1949, one of the buildings on its new Charles River Campus held “a
huge and grim lecture hall with a level floor that made generations of
Boston University students
crane their necks upward in the hope of catching sight of the lecturer,” reads
the citation to Tsai’s honorary degree. “Today, through your
farsighted generosity, this space houses The Tsai Performance Center,
a concert hall with superb state-of-the-art acoustics. The Tsai Center
has become an essential venue not merely for the University but the larger
community. Musicians and their audiences for decades to come will be
in your debt for this imaginative work of philanthropy.”
A native
of Shanghai, China, Tsai (CAS’49, GRS’49) attended
St. John’s Middle School and St. John’s University there
and came to the United States in 1947. After a semester at Wesleyan University,
he transferred to BU, where at the age of 20 he earned bachelor’s
and master’s degrees in economics. He began his distinguished investment
career in 1951 as a security analyst at Bache & Company. A year later,
he joined Boston’s Fidelity Management and Research Company, Inc.,
as a security analyst, ascending to director, and in 1963, to executive
vice president of the company. He subsequently held executive positions
in several of the nation’s most important financial institutions.
Today
Tsai is chairman of his own management and consulting firm, Tsai Management,
Inc., and chairman of the philanthropic Gerald Tsai Foundation.
His reputation as a businessman is rivaled only by his reputation as
a humanitarian. In addition to funding the Tsai Performance Center, his
family has given generously to BU’s John Hancock Student Village,
recognized by the recent naming of the Nancy and Gerald Tsai, Jr., Fitness
Center.
Tsai serves as well as a trustee of the New York University Hospitals
Center, the New York University School of Medicine Founda- tion, and
the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, which recently opened the Nancy
and Gerald Tsai Atrium.
An Associate Founder of BU, Tsai was a member
of the University’s
Board of Trustees from 1967 to 1977 and from 1988 to 2002; currently
he is an honorary member of the board. “A creator of wealth for
investors, yourself included, you have recognized that philanthropy is
no less an opportunity than an obligation,” reads his citation. “Your
gifts are as distinguished for their imagination as for their opulence.”
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Commencement speaker George Will, who received a Doctor of Letters degree. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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George
Will
Doctor of Letters
George Will, one of the most widely recognized writers in America — and
a 1977 Pulitzer prize winner for commentary for his newspaper columns
— is also a political commentator on ABC and has, since 1981,
been a regular panelist on ABC’s Sunday morning program This
Week.
Will’s newspaper column has been syndicated by the
Washington Post since 1974 and appears twice weekly in nearly 500 newspapers
in the United
States and Europe. In 1976 Will became a regular contributor to Newsweek,
providing a bimonthly back-page essay.
“
For a quarter of a century you have written about and for the Republic
with a depth, shrewdness, wit, and polish unusual in any forum and
almost without example in newspaper journalism,” reads the citation
for his honorary degree. “Moreover, you have exemplified these
qualities in television, a medium that seems to have been designed
to filter them
out before the first electron hits the picture tube. You have given
punditry a good name.”
Seven collections of his Newsweek and newspaper
columns have been published, the most recent With a Happy Eye,
But . . .: America and the World, 1997-2002 (The Free Press, 2002).
Will
has also written three books on political theory: The New Season:
A Spectator’s Guide to the 1988 Election (Simon & Schuster,
1987); Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (Simon & Schuster,
1983), a work of political philosophy that originally appeared as the
Godkin Lecture at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government
in 1981; and Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery
of Deliberative Democracy (The Free Press, 1992), which argues
for the need to limit
politicians’ time in office.
In 1990, his Men at Work: The Craft
of Baseball (Macmillan) topped the national best-seller lists
for more than two months. A collection
of
his baseball writings, Bunts: Curt Flood, Camden Yards, Pete Rose
and Other Reflections on Baseball (Scribner, 1998), was called “this
season’s baseball book of choice” by the Wall Street
Journal.
Will was born in Champaign, Ill., and was educated at
Trinity College in Hartford, and Oxford and Princeton universities.
Before entering
journalism, he taught political philosophy at Michigan State University
and the University
of Toronto, and served on the staff of U.S. Senator Gordon L. Allott
(R-Colorado). Prior to becoming a columnist for Newsweek, Will was
Washington editor of the journal National Review.
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June 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations