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Columnist, commentator George Will to speak at 2003 Commencement
By David J. Craig
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| George F. Will Photo by Sigrid Estrada |
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George Will, columnist, television commentator, and author, will deliver the main address at BU’s 130th Commencement exercises on Sunday, May 18, at 11 a.m. at Nickerson Field. More than 20,000 people are expected to attend.
Will is one of the most widely recognized writers in America. He is a political commentator on ABC and has since 1981 been a regular panelist on ABC’s Sunday morning program This Week. His syndicated column appears in more than 450 newspapers, and he is a biweekly columnist for Newsweek.
“Over the past three decades, George Will has offered consistently penetrating, civilized, and literate political analysis,” says Chancellor John Silber. “He is distinguished especially by his ability to use television almost as if it had the same capacity to carry and stimulate thought as the printed page.”
In 1977 Will won the Pulitzer prize for commentary for his newspaper columns. His Newsweek columns have garnered awards, including a finalist citation in the essays and criticism category of the 1979 National Magazine Awards competition. He was the recipient of a 1978 National Headliners Award for his “consistently outstanding special features columns” in Newsweek, and the 1980 and 1991 Silurian Award for editorial writing. In January 1985, Will was named best writer on any subject in a readers’ poll conducted by the Washington Journalism Review.
And when that subject is baseball, Will has a reputation as possessing a scholar’s knowledge of the game, with enough appreciation of its subtleties and nuances to write two best-sellers on the sport.
Five collections of his Newsweek and newspaper columns have been published: The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts (Harper & Row, 1978); The Pursuit of Virtue and Other Tory Notions (Simon & Schuster, 1982); The Morning After: American Successes and Excesses, 1981-1986 (Macmillan, 1986); Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and at Home, 1986-1990 (The Free Press, 1990); and The Leveling Wind: Politics, the Culture & Other News, 1990-1994 (Viking, 1994).
“Will is an extraordinarily keen observer of the world scene,” wrote the Jerusalem Post in a 1992 review of Suddenly, “which he dissects with the skill of a surgeon, and the understanding of a seasoned journalist. And when he punctures the inept and the hypocritical, he does so with elegance.”
Will, 62, 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 was given 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’s love of baseball is so intense that he proposed to his wife, Mari, in 1991 at Camden Yards, when the Baltimore Orioles’ stadium was under construction. “Hey, call me romantic,” he writes in Bunts, “but I wanted Mari to know that in my heart she still ranks right up there with baseball.”
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 National Review, a leading conservative journal of ideas
and political commentary.
14
May 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations