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Honorary degree recipients

Week of 6 June 2003· Vol. VI, No. 32
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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.

Honorary degree recipients Karen Elliott House and Van Cliburn line up for the processional. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Honorary degree recipients Karen Elliott House and Van Cliburn line up for the processional. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

 
 

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.

Lukas Foss receives a warm greeting from Chancellor John Silber. Photo by Vernon Doucette

 

Lukas Foss receives a warm greeting from Chancellor John Silber. Photo by Vernon Doucette

 

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.”

Nasser David Khalili, who received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree, with his wife, Marion. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Nasser David Khalili, who received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree, with his wife, Marion. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

 
 

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 . . .”

Jon Westling acknowledges the affectionate applause of the University community. Photo by Vernon Doucette

 

Jon Westling acknowledges the affectionate applause of the University community. Photo by Vernon Doucette

 

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.”

Gerald Tsai, Jr. (CAS’49, GRS’49) is hooded by Trustee James Howell and Chancellor John Silber. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Gerald Tsai, Jr. (CAS’49, GRS’49) is hooded by Trustee James Howell and Chancellor John Silber. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

 
 

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.”

Commencement speaker George Will, who received a Doctor of Letters degree. Photo by Vernon Doucette

 

Commencement speaker George Will, who received a Doctor of Letters degree. Photo by Vernon Doucette

 

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.

       

6 June 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations