Commencement Speaker and Recipients of Honorary Degrees

The Board of Trustees and President James W. Wagner announced the 2008 Commencement speaker and recipients of honorary degrees.  The Commencement address and conferral of degrees will occur at Emory's one hundred sixty-third Commencement ceremony on the Quadrangle on May 12.

2008 Commencement Speaker

Bernard Marcus

Home Depot co-founder and renowned philanthropist Bernard Marcus will deliver the keynote address at Emory's one hundred sixty-third Commencement.  He will receive an honorary doctor of humane letters degree.

"Bernard Marcus embodies the excellence of mind, strength of character and passion for the common good that exemplify the Emory vision," says Emory University President James Wagner. "His success in business is a tribute not only to his brilliance but also to his capacity to form and build on lasting partnerships. And his philanthropy on behalf of children, medical research, the Jewish community and the people of Georgia grows out of a very large heart. He will be a very compelling speaker for our graduating class."

Bernard Marcus is co-founder of The Home Depot, Inc., the world’s largest home improvement retailer.  His company revolutionized the home improvement business with its warehouse concept.  He served as chairman of the board until his retirement in 2002.

He remains director emeritus and Home Depot’s largest single stockholder.

From 1972 to 1978, Mr. Marcus was Chairman of the Board and President of Handy Dan Improvement Centers, Inc., a home center retail chain.  Prior to Handy Dan, Mr. Marcus was President of O’Dell’s, a manufacturing conglomerate, and Vice President of Hard Goods Merchandising for Vornado, Inc., a retail chain.

Marcus’s personal civic involvement has been translated into the creation of The Marcus Foundation where he serves as chairman of the board.  His areas of focus include Jewish causes, children, medical research, free enterprise and the community.

A centerpiece of his desire to give back to the community is the Georgia Aquarium, which opened in Atlanta in November of 2005.  This $290 million dollar attraction is dedicated to the people of Georgia and the associates, customers and shareholders of The Home Depot.  With a total of 550,000 square feet and 8 million gallons of water, it is the largest aquarium in the world, and houses more than 125,000 animals from 500 species.

In 1991, he and his wife Billi established The Marcus Institute, which provides programs for children and adolescents with disorders of the brain and their families.  An additional commitment in 1998 led to a national expansion when The Marcus Institute joined forces with the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore.

Among his important philanthropies is the founding of the Israel Democracy Institute located in Jerusalem.  This non-partisan and non-political think tank serves as an important resource and change agent, dealing with the complex issues facing Israeli democratic society.  Former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz serves as Honorary Chairman.

Mr. Marcus serves in numerous leadership roles including The Shepherd Center, The City of Hope, The Marcus Jewish Community Center, and Business Executives for National Security.  Some of his most recent awards include:  the inaugural award recipient for Inc. 500’s Bernard A. Goldhirsh Award, induction into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame, Jewish Federation of Great Atlanta’s Lifetime of Achievement Award, the Golden Plate Award from the Academy of Achievement at the International Achievement Summit, and the Anti-Defamation League’s America’s Democratic Legacy Award.

A native of Newark, New Jersey, Mr. Marcus received his B.S. degree in Pharmacy from Rutgers University. 

Ernest J. Gaines

Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa

The National Endowment for the Arts has named A Lesson Before Dying as part of its 2008 Big Read National Reading Program while Mr. Gaines’ novels are regularly chosen as part of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book One Book Community Reading Programs. 

Ernest J. Gaines received from President Clinton on December 20, 2000, one of the highest honors the United States can confer: The National Humanities Medal.  On the craft of writing, Mr. Gaines says, “Sacrifice time; put a lot of time into your work.  If you are a writer, read good writers, whether they are white or black, Chinese or Japanese, or Russian or writers from Mars.  Read the best to see how they do things because any good writer can help you.  So, study hard, and spend a lot of time at the desk.  Read, read, read!  Write, write, write!”

Ernest J. Gaines was born on January 15, 1933 on the River Lake Plantation in Oscar, a hamlet in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional work.  His novel, A Lesson Before Dying, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993, has sold two millions copies.  It is the story of a young black man wrongly condemned to Louisiana’s electric chair by a white jury in 1948 and of the teacher who tries to help him meet his death–as a man and not as “a hog,” the characterization given him by his defense attorney’s summation to the jury.

Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, A Lesson Before Dying won in 1994 the Best Fiction Award by the National Book Critics Circle, the Southern Writers Conference, and the Louisiana Library Association, and was the October 1997 choice of Oprah’s Book Club.  HBO premiered the TV film in 1999, which subsequently received two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Made-For-Television Movie and Outstanding Writing for a Mini-Series or Movie (South African writer Ann Peacock).  Romulus Linney wrote the play, also a Southern Writers’ Project, based on the novel and having the same title.  Its World Premiere took place at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in January 2000 and Off-Broadway in September 2000.

Raised by his maternal aunt, Augusteen Jefferson, who served as the principal role model for his best-known character, Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest Gaines is the oldest of 12 children. At the age of fifteen, he rejoined his mother and step-father in California to continue his education since there was not a high school he could attend in Pointe Coupee Parish and because it was against the law in Louisiana in the 1940's for people of color to enter public libraries!

Ernest Gaines visited a public library for the first time at age 16.  He says, “I discovered the Russians, Turgenev, Gogol, who spoke of the peasants.  Then the French, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola.  But no one was telling me the story of my people.  Thus, a teenager, I decided to write.  At San Francisco State University I continued reading, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.  I studied creative writing at Stanford University with Wallace Stegner and worked and worked.”

Ernest J. Gaines is also the author of Catherine Carmier (1964), the relationship between a black man and a sheltered Creole woman; Of Love and Dust (1967), a black Romeo and Juliet tragedy; Bloodline (1968, re-printed by Vintage in December 1997), five short stories, one of which “The Sky Is Gray” became a PBS film; The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), whose TV movie adaptation by CBS won nine Emmys; A Long Day in November (1971), on rites of passage between the young and old; In My Father’s House (1978), the double life a minister/civil rights leader; and A Gathering of Old Men (1983), twelve men conspire to protect a killer, made into a television film in 1993.  Alfred A. Knopf released in October 2005 Mozart and Leadbelly, a collection of stories and essays.

Offering understanding for readers of all colors, background and class, Ernest Gaines’ novels are set in the plantations of the Deep South.  His works tackle the issues of manhood for men of color, the breakdown in personal relationships as a result of social pressures, the history and folklore of a distant past, and illustrate the thirty years before the civil rights era.

Book reviews in the Washington Post Book World, Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Time have credited Ernest Gaines with “the ability to convey through his work the insidious effect of racism–without moralizing” and “the utter lack of overwrought emotion with which questions of race relations are treated.”                                

Of his books, Professor Gordon Thompson of City College of New York says, “Gaines has written with great sensitivity and insight some of the most significant fiction on the folkways, language and local culture of blacks in Louisiana, particularly in and around the plantation on which he was raised, endearing them to the hearts of countless millions.  The incomparable skill with which he describes the strange timelessness of this beautiful country has few equals.  He writes about the small-minded and misguided only if he can love them; and of the big-hearted and the patient, he composes portraits of a love so boundless that even as he describes inexcusably- ably inhumane situations, his prose remains unequivocally serene.”

Mr. Gaines has received many honors.  They include The National Humanities Medal, The Louisiana Center for the Book’s Louisiana Award, The National Governor’s Association Award for Distinguished Service in the Arts, The Louisiana Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement, and The Louisiana Writers Award given annually to honor a Louisiana writer whose body of work represents a distinguished and enduring contribution to Louisiana’s literary heritage (all in 2000), election to The American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998), France’s Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1996), The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1993) for lifetime achievements, a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1971), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1971).  Bard College, Brown University, Denison University, Dillard University, Louisiana State University, Loyola University, Savannah College of Arts and Design, Tulane University, the University of Miami, the University of North Carolina-Asheville, the University of the South (Sewanee), and Whittier College have conferred honorary doctorates upon him.  Professor Gaines is Writer-in-Residence Emeritus at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He is married to Dianne Saulney Gaines, an attorney.

Mary Jane England

Doctor of Science honoris causa

Mary Jane England, M. D., is President of Regis College, Weston, MA, her alma mater (class of 1959). Taking a medical degree from Boston University in 1964, she launched a national and international career as a child psychiatrist, the first commissioner of the Department of Social Services in Massachusetts (1979-83), associate dean and director of the Lucius N. Littauer Master in Public Administration Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1983-87),  president of the American Women’s Medical Association (1986-87) and of the American Psychiatric Association (1995-96) and corporate CEO (Prudential, 1987-90, Washington Business Group on Health, 1990-2001). During this time Dr. England also launched a family, and she is the mother of three (two daughters and a son) and grandmother of two.

 In March, 2002, Dr. England was sought out to become a member of the blue-ribbon taskforce of professional experts in the new Commission for the Protection of Children in the troubled Archdiocese of Boston.  During 2003, she received an ABCD (Action for Boston Community Development) award in Boston for her community service and outstanding contributions to protecting at-risk children and families.  Early in 2004 she received both the annual Elizabeth Blackwell Award for a distinguished American woman physician from the American Women’s Medical Association and also the Saul Feldman Award at the Summit of the American College of Mental Health Administration. During 2004-2005, Dr. England chaired the IOM (Institute of Medicine) committee that produced the “Crossing the Quality Chasm” report on adaptation to mental health and substance use. Currently, Dr. England continues to serve on the Board of Visitors of the Boston University School of Medicine, on Mrs. Rosalynn Carter’s Task Force on Mental Health, and the on National Academies/IOM Board on Children and Families.  This past year, as the nation explores the needs of higher education in this century, Dr. England has begun a term on the Commission on Effective Leadership (2006-2009) in the American Council on Education (ACE).  During 2007-2008 she is chairing an IOM group working on depression.

Under Mary Jane England’s leadership Regis College, a Catholic women’s college for eighty years, adopted a “case for growth” in 2006 that allowed the College to go co-ed on the undergraduate level, to develop a two-school model (School of Arts and Sciences and School of Nursing and Health Professions), to expand graduate programs to serve the needs of the healthcare industry, and to re-imagine the curriculum for students of the 21st century.  In the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy in April, 2007, Dr. England published an op-ed in The Boston Herald  (April 28, 2007) written from the dual perspective of both a college president and a psychiatrist. This confirmed her leadership role with other Massachusetts educators addressing issues of campus safety, and in mid-June, 2007, she gave the keynote address, “Inventing the Future, or Balancing Freedom and Responsibility by Coordinated Campus Safety,” at the first state-wide joint conference for campus officials, law enforcement, and health and human services personnel, which was held at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.

Edward O. Wilson

Doctor of Science honoris causa

Edward O. Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1929. He received his B.S. and M.S. in biology from the University of Alabama and, in 1955, his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, where he taught for four decades, receiving both of its college-wide teaching awards. He is currently University Research Professor Emeritus and Honorary Curator in Entomology of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.

Wilson is the author of 25 books two of which won Pulitzer Prizes, Human Nature (1978) and The Ants (1990, with Bert Hölldobler). He is the recipient of more than 100 other international medals and awards, including the National Medal of Science; the International Prize for Biology from Japan; the Catalonia Prize of Spain; the Presidential Medal of Italy; the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, given in fields of science not covered by the Nobel Prize; and for his conservation efforts, the Gold Medal of the Worldwide Fund for Nature and the Audubon Medal of the National Audubon Society.

Six of Wilson’s books compose two trilogies. The first, The Insect Societies, Sociobiology, and On Human Nature (1971–78) founded sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The second, The Diversity of Life, The Future of Life, and The Creation (1992–2006) organized the base of modern biodiversity conservation

. Wilson has served on the Boards of Directors of The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and the American Museum of Natural History, and gives many lectures throughout the world. His most recent books includes Consilience (1998), which argues for the uniting of the natural sciences with the humanities. Wilson lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, with his wife, Irene.