Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., May 24, 2001–Robert E. Rubin, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, will be principal speaker at the college’s 212th Commencement on Sunday, June 3. President of the College Morton Owen Schapiro will confer five honorary degrees at Commencement: William G. Bowen, William H. Gray, III, Robert E. Rubin, Nancy Spero, and James N. Wood. William H. Gray, III, president of United Negro College Fund will be the baccalaureate speaker on Saturday, June 2.
Robert E. Rubin
Doctor of Laws
Mr. Rubin served as Secretary of the Treasury from 1995 to 1999. He is given much of the credit for the Clinton administration’s economic policies, including the budget cuts that helped set the nation on course for the first balanced budget in decades, for shaping the global economy, and for guiding the economy through a period of sustained growth.
Prior to joining the administration, Mr. Rubin spent three decades on Wall Street. He joined Goldman Sachs & Co., one of the world’s leading investment firms, in 1966, and successfully managed the firm’s stock and bond trading departments, and revived its commodities subsidiary. He was named to its management committee in 1980. Rubin was vice chairman and co-chief operating officer from 1987 to 1990 and served as co-senior partner and co-chairman from 1990 to 1992. Before joining Goldman, he was an attorney at the firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York City.
From 1993 to 1995, he served in the White House as Assistant to the President for Economic Policy. In that capacity, he directed the activities of the National Economic Council. Two years later, he was named Secretary of the Treasury.
After stepping down as Treasury Secretary in 1999, Mr. Rubin joined Citigroup, the world’s largest financial company, as chairman of the executive committee of the board of directors of Citigroup, Inc.
He continues to maintain his personal involvement in public policy issues, including serving as chairman of the Local Initiative Support Corporation, and as a member of the Board of Mt. Sinai Medical Center. His previous activities included membership on the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange, Harvard Management Company, New York Futures Exchange, New York City Partnership, and the Center of National Policy. He has also served on the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, among others.
A product of public schools, Mr. Rubin graduated from Harvard College in 1960 with an A.B. in economics. He received a L.L.B. from Yale Law School in 1964 and attended the London School of Economics.
William H. Gray, III
Doctor of Laws
Mr. Gray has been president and chief executive officer of The College Fund/United Negro College Fund since September 1991. As head of America’s oldest and most successful black higher-education assistance organization, Mr. Gray has led the United Negro College Fund to new fundraising records while cutting costs and expanding programs and services to a consortium of 39 private, accredited four-year historically black colleges and universities.
Prior to his selection as president of UNCF, he served in the U.S. Congress. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1978, Gray was the first African American to chair the House Budget Committee. He also served as chairman of the Democratic Caucus and as Majority Whip. He was a leading advocate for strengthening America’s educational systems and co-sponsor of the Black College Act, which provides formula-driven federal funds for the enhancement of historically black college and university programs, faculty, and facilities. He played a key role in implementing economic sanctions against South Africa as the author of the 1985 and 1986 sanction bills.
He also served as a special advisor on Haiti to the President of the United States in May 1994. In that role, Mr. Gray assisted the President in developing and carrying out policy to restore democracy to Haiti.
He has been a faculty member and professor of history and religion at St. Peter’s College, Jersey City State College, Montclair State University, Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Temple University.
Mr. Gray attended Franklin and Marshall College, where he earned a B.A. in 1963. He received a master’s degree in divinity from Drew Theological Seminary and a master’s degree in theology in 1970 from Princeton Theological Seminary. He has been in the ministry since 1964, when he pastored his first church, Union Baptist Church of Montclair, N.J.
He is the recipient of many awards, including the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Freedom of Worship Medal, and was listed in the December 1999 issue of Ebony Magazine as one of the 100 Most Important Blacks in the World in the 20th Century.
William G. Bowen
Doctor of Humane Letters
A renowned economist and educator, Mr. Bowen is president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, one of the nation’s chief supporters of religious, charitable, scientific, literary, and educational institutions.
Before assuming the foundation’s presidency, Mr. Bowen was president of Princeton University, where he had been a member of the faculty since 1958. He also served Princeton as provost before serving as president from 1972 to 1988.
In his first address as president of Princeton, he discussed his philosophy of education: “May we be the prisoners of our best instincts; may we strive always … to create an atmosphere in which real learning takes place; in which the search for truth is pursued relentlessly but in an atmosphere marked by love, compassion, and good humor as well as hard work; in which each is encouraged to take full advantage of the opportunities for personal development as well as intellectual growth … ; and in which each strives always to bring out the best qualities in his own person, in others, and in the university.”
He is the author of numerous books, including “The Shape of the River,” with former Harvard University President Derek Bok and, most recently, “The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values,” with James Shulman. Both books draw on data compiled by the Mellon Foundation that closely tracked the academic records, careers, and attitudes of 30,000 students of all races who entered 28 elite public and private colleges and universities in 1976 and 1989.
He received his bachelor’s degree from Denison University in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1958.
Nancy Spero
Doctor of Fine Arts
Ms. Spero pioneered the introduction of female-based imagery in North American art, and in so doing emerged as a cultural force.
She has spent more than 40 years as a working artist, “illuminating dark corners of the human character, hidden recesses of cultural forgetfulness, and crippled forms of artistic practice” and “slipping her women out from under the constraints of the male gaze (the only gaze in town).”
From the late 1950s, she was consistently concerned with showing how the idea of woman as man’s inferior had become inherent in male-dominated Western history.
In the 1960s she began to work on paper, portraying the violent abuses of an imbalance of power relations.
In the 1970s, first appearing in her “Codex Artaud” (owned now by the Williams College Museum of Art), she started to incorporate the printed and typed word in her collages, explicitly underlining the patriarchal system’s isolation and rejection of those it saw as outsiders.
In the 1980s she promoted the possibilities for reordering history and reformulating women’s identities through her collages, employing the ancient format of the scroll and depicting the human body in pictographic language.
The project that has occupied much of her time since 1997 is a site-specific installation for the New York City subway station at Lincoln Center, in her own words “introducing the feminine into the New York subway system.”
She received her B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 and then studied in Paris at the Atelier Andre Lhote and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
James N. Wood
Doctor of Fine Arts
Mr. Wood has directed the Art Institute of Chicago for 21 years, taking it from a dramatic state of disarray to prominence in the museum world. Under his leadership, all the museum’s departments have been renovated, a wing was built, a department of architecture founded, a constellation of conservation labs established, art museum membership boosted, and millions added to the museum’s endowment.
Mr. Wood began his career as director Thomas Hoving’s assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he also worked as assistant curator of the newly formed department of 20th century art.
He then served as curator and then associate director at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo from 1970 to 1975 and as director of the St. Louis Museum from 1975 to 1980, where he oversaw the renovation of a large portion of its historic building and the construction of a new wing.
In an article about the role of art museums in our society, he wrote, “Today, as in the past, our first responsibility is to demand aesthetic values from a culture that would more often than not prefer to avoid the question and judge itself by more materialist criteria.”
Mr. Wood has written on Asian art, modern museum architecture, Monet, and other post-impressionist painters and contributed to a variety of museum catalogs. He has served as president of the Intermuseum Conservation Association.
He received his B.A. from Williams in 1963 and his M.A. from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1966. He also studied at the Universita per Stranieri in Perugia, Italy.
END
Published May 24, 2001
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