A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, a former New Hampshire governor and a Nobel Prize-winning physician are three of the luminaries who will receive honorary degrees at the Commencement ceremonies on June 8.
In addition to Commencement speaker and Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen '64, who will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree, seven other Commencement guests will receive honorary doctoral degrees from the College.
The recipients will be Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, postcolonial author Sir V.S. Naipaul, African-American historian Nell Irvin Painter, former New Hampshire Governor Walter Peterson '47, Smith College President Ruth Simmons, Nobel-Prize winning National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus and sociologist William Julius Wilson.
Nominations for honorary degree recipients are accepted from faculty, students, and alumni beginning in the late summer, said History Professor Margaret Darrow, a member of the College's Council on Honorary Degrees.
The council whittles the list down to about 20 names, which are then passed on to the College's Board of Trustees for approval, Darrow said. Also included on the list are 50 to 100 nominees approved in previous years by the Trustees, but who have yet to accept an offer from the College.
"Once you're on the list, you don't get off until you die," she said.
The number of honorary degree recipients varies each year, based on the availability of nominees, College President James Freedman said.
"These people lead very busy lives," he said. "It's really chance. It depends on how many people accept our invitations."
The council aims for recipients from diverse backgrounds, and looks for people whose accomplishments go beyond their chosen discipline.
"They're interested in people making major contributions in their own field and contributions that go beyond their own field and profession, to humanity at large," Darrow said.
Edward Albee
With three Pulitzer Prizes, two Tony awards, and one Obie award to his credit, playwright Edward Albee ranks among the giants of American drama.
Although perhaps best known for the drama "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Albee has also won acclaim for the plays "A Delicate Balance," "Seascape," and "Three Tall Women." In 1996, Albee was awarded Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts.
Freedman, who said he saw "Three Tall Women" in New York last year, called Albee a "stunning" playwright. He will receive an honorary doctor of letters degree.
V.S. Naipaul
According to Martin Favor, Naipaul is "is perennially a Nobel Prize candidate." Author of more than 20 published novels, collections of essays, and travel books, Naipaul is widely regarded as one of the giants of modern literature.
Born in Trinidad in 1932, he won a scholarship to Oxford in 1949 and has lived in England ever since. His works include "A House for Mr. Biswas," "An Area of Darkness," "A Bend in the River," "Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey," "The Enigma of Arrival," "India: A Million Mutinies Now," and "A Way in the World."
Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel "In a Free State." In 1990, he was knighted by the Queen of England. In 1993, he received the David Cohen British Literature Award for lifetime achievement.
Favor, who led the English Department's Foreign Study Program to Naipaul's native Trinidad last fall, said the author's work "walks an interesting and complex tightrope" between colonialism and post-colonialism.
Naipaul will receive an honorary doctor of letters degree.
Nell Irvin Painter
As an American History professor at Princeton University, Painter has carved out a reputation as one of the leading scholars of the Progressive and Reconstruction eras, focusing particularly on the South and on the African-American experience.
Her works include accounts of post-Reconstruction Black migration to Kansas and the Progressive era, and biographies of Sojourner Truth and Hosea Hudson.
Painter has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.
She has also has received the Coretta Scott King award from the American Association of University Women and the Brown Publication Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians.
She will receive an honorary doctor of letters degree.
Walter Peterson '47
In addition to being awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree by the College, former New Hampshire Governor Walter Peterson, will be celebrating his fiftieth reunion.
Before completing Dartmouth, Peterson served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
In 1961, he was elected to the first of four terms in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, where he eventually became majority leader and speaker. In 1968, he was elected governor and served for four years. His political career was capped by a term as President of the New Hampshire Constitutional Convention from 1974 to 1975.
Peterson then served as President of Franklin Pierce College in Concord before stepping down in 1995 to serve as interim president of the University of New Hampshire for a year.
Ruth Simmons
As President of Smith College, Ruth Simmons is among the highest-ranking African-American women in academia and one of only a handful of women heading a major American college.
Simmons is currently a member of both the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study and the Council on Foreign Relations.
In 1996, she was named Glamour Magazine's "Woman of the Year" and "Most Inspiring Woman" by NBC-TV Nightly News. She will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree.
Harold Varmus
As a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1989 and as the current director of the National Institutes of Health, Harold Varmus is one of the foremost scientists in the nation.
But he had a long road to travel. The Amherst English major received a master's degree in English literature from Harvard before deciding to become a doctor.
Varmus was rejected twice from Harvard Medical School before being accepted to Columbia.
As a faculty member at the University of California at San Diego in 1976 , he and colleague Michael Bishop discovered that human cells contain genes that malfunction to produce cancer.
The discovery would earn them the Nobel Prize in 1989. Four years later, Varmus was elevated to head of the NIH, where he heads a staff of 16,000 that spends nearly $12 billion a year on medical research.
He will receive an honorary doctor of science degree.
William Julius Wilson
A professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Wilson is one of the foremost sociologists in the nation.
As the author of the popular books "The Declining Significance of Race," "The Truly Disadvantaged," and "When Work Disappears: The World of the Urban Poor," Wilson has argues that class and economics, rather than race, have played a crucial role in determining urban poverty.
In 1991, Wilson became one of a handful of social scientists elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He also has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
In 1996, Wilson was named one of Time magazine's 25 most influential Americans, in part due to his work as an advisor for President Bill Clinton and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.
Wilson will receive an honoary doctor of letters degree.
