2012 Honorary Degree Recipients & Speaker
Humanitarian Ben Carson to be speaker for graduates
By Beverly Clark
Internationally renowned neurosurgeon and humanitarian Benjamin Carson will deliver the keynote address at the University's 167th Commencement ceremony on Monday, May 14.
Carson is a full professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he has directed pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center for more than 25 years. He is well known for overcoming his troubled youth in inner-city Detroit, thanks to his mother's strong guidance and his own avid reading, to become a gifted neurosurgeon famous for his work separating conjoined twins.
"Few men or women have demonstrated to so inspiring a degree the transformational effect of liberal learning and the humanities. Dr. Carson has transformed lives both inside the operating room and beyond through his dedication to improve access to education. His story is one that will inspire and resonate with our students," says President Jim Wagner, who will preside over the ceremony for about 3,700 graduates. Commencement will take place on the Quadrangle with more than 14,000 expected to attend.
Some of Carson's career highlights include the first and only successful separation of craniopagus twins joined at the back of the head in 1987, among other groundbreaking surgeries. He is president and co-founder of the Carson Scholars Fund, which recognizes young people of all backgrounds for exceptional academic and humanitarian accomplishments, and has awarded more than $4.5 million dollars to more than 4,500 scholars.
Carson has received numerous awards for his accomplishments, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008, the highest civilian honor in the United States. He is the author of four books; a fifth book, "America The Beautiful," will be released this year.
2012 Honorary Degrees were also awarded to:
Camille Billops
Sculptor, Printmaker, Writer, and Filmmaker
Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa
Beginning her career as a sculptor and printmaker, Camille Billops has extended her artistic reach to include writing, publishing, and filmmaking. In 1975, together with her husband James V. Hatch, Billops founded the renowned Hatch-Billops Collection, an archive of African American cultural materials that they have donated to the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University. This collection includes interviews with nearly 1400 minority artists of all disciplines. Billops and Hatch have published 473 of these artists’ lives and descriptions of their work in 30 annual volumes of Artist and Influence. In conjunction with Randall Burkett, the curator of African American collections at Emory, they have established an endowment fund to assure that the collection will continue to grow in the future. Billops has exhibited her art throughout the world. She wrote and published The Harlem Book of the Dead, featuring the poetry of Owen Dodson and the photography of James Van Der Zee, with an introduction by Toni Morrison. Billops obtained her BA degree from California State University and her MFA degree from City College of New York. She has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Fellowship in Filmmaking and the Skowhegan Award for contribution in the arts. Billops, with her husband, has produced and directed six documentary films, including Suzanne Suzanne, chosen by the Museum of Modern Art for its New Directors Series in 1983; Finding Christa, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival in 1992; and A String of Pearls, chosen “premiere” film for the Planet Africa series at the Toronto Film Festival in 2002.
James V. Hatch
Writer and Professor Emeritus, Graduate Theatre Program, City University of New York
Doctor of Letters, honoris causa
James Hatch is the author of several books on African American theatre, including Black Theatre USA (coedited with Ted Shine) and the prize-winning biography Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson, which won the Barnard Hewett Award for “outstanding book in theatre history.” He has a PhD in theatre from the University of Iowa. His recognitions include the Skowhegan Award (with his wife, Camille Billops) for contributions to the arts, the Winona Fletcher Award for Outstanding Achievement in Black Theatre, the Life Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, an Obie Award for the Civil Rights musical Fly Blackbird, and a second Obie for his contributions to off-Broadway theatre. Hatch and Errol G. Hill co-wrote A History of African American Theatre, a book that the American Society for Theatre Research designated as the “outstanding book in theatre history in 2004.” Together with Camille Billops, Hatch established the Hatch- Billops Collection of African American cultural materials, which they have donated to the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory.
Catharine R. Stimpson
University Professor and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, New York University
Doctor of Letters, honoris causa
Catharine R. Stimpson is a leader in the advancement of graduate education. Widely known as a scholar of gender studies and feminist theory, she is the author of many works, including the novel Class Notes and a collection of essays, Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces. She has edited seven books and has written numerous essays, stories, and reviews for publications ranging from the New York Times Book Review to Critical Inquiry and the Nation, among others. Now the editor of a book series for the University of Chicago Press, she was the founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, an important journal in the field of gender studies. She served as chair of the New York State Humanities Council, the National Council for Research on Women, and the National Advisory Committee of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. She has also served as resident of the Modern Language Association and has lectured widely. She received an AB in English from Bryn Mawr College before going on to obtain a BA and MA from Cambridge University and a PhD with distinction from Columbia University. She has been awarded Fulbright and Rockefeller Humanities Fellowships. In 2011 she was awarded the Francis A. March Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession from the Modern Language Association. Prior to her 1997 appointment as dean of New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science, she was the director of the Fellows Program of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. An academic leader focused on shaping graduate education and the student experience, Stimpson has visited Emory University several times as a scholar and lecturer.
Muhammad Yunus
Chairman, Yunus Centre
Doctor of Letters, honoris causa
Muhammad Yunus established the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983, spurred by a vision for lifting people out of poverty. His objective was to create a new category of banking that would grant millions of small loans to poor people with no collateral. This endeavor helped to establish the microcredit movement across the developing world, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2006. That year, Yunus established the Yunus Centre as an economic policy resource center to disseminate his philosophy and practices. From Yunus’s personal loan of small amounts of money to destitute basket-weavers in Bangladesh in the mid-1970s, the Grameen Bank has advanced to the fore of a burgeoning world movement toward eradicating poverty through microlending. Replicas of the Grameen Bank model operate in more than one hundred countries worldwide. Born in 1940 in the seaport city of Chittagong, Yunus studied at Dhaka University in what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. He received a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University, where he received a PhD in economics in 1969. The following year he became an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University. Returning to Bangladesh after it achieved independence in 1971, Yunus headed the economics department at Chittagong University. Yunus has been a member of the International Advisory Group for the Fourth World Conference on Women, a post to which he was appointed by the United Nations secretary general, and he has served on the Global Commission of Women’s Health, the Advisory Council for Sustainable Economic Development, and the United Nations Expert Group on Women and Finance. Yunus is the recipient of numerous international awards for his ideas and endeavors, including the Nobel Peace Prize. He is a member of the board of the United Nations Foundation.
