JawsBlog

This year’s commencement speaker and honorary degree recipients have been announced. And this year’s speaker is…

World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn . Mr. Wolfensohn has made sustainable
poverty reduction the World Bank’s overarching mission. Before becoming the
Bank’s ninth president, he established his career as an international investment
banker with a parallel involvement in development issues and the global
environment. Mr. Wolfensohn has highlighted the growing gap between the haves and have-nots between and within countries, and he has called for a new global balance with donor and developing nations both taking urgent steps to ensure that the United Nations Millennium Development Goals are met. Under Mr. Wolfensohn’s leadership, the World Bank has redoubled its efforts to monitor and combat corruption, give voice to clients living in poor communities, and magnify the return on development investments, including sponsoring a global dialogue on Scaling Up Poverty Reduction, which will culminate in a conference in Shanghai in May.

Here’s the summary version: He’s done “social justice” work.

And the honorary degree recipients:

honorand this year is former Congressman Kweisi Mfume, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Mr. Mfume, whose West African name means, “conquering son of kings,” was born, raised and educated in Baltimore, where he followed his dreams to impact society and shape a more humane public policy. He became politically active in college, won a seat on the Baltimore City Council in 1979 and was elected to Congress in 1986. Congressman Mfume served on the Banking and Financial Services Committee, and held the ranking seat on the General Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. He also served as a member of the Committee on Education and as a senior member of the Small Business Committee.

Translation: Remember the Justice incident?

The Pioneering scientist Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California San Francisco, who discovered the ribonucleoprotein enzyme telomerase. Dr. Blackburn is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an international learned society composed of the world’s leading scientists, scholars, artists, business people and public leaders; the Royal Society of London; the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Member of the Institute of Medicine.

Translation: This is really cool!

Lester Crown is the President of Henry Crown & Company, which manages
investments and/or operations in aerospace, transportation, oil and gas, cellular
phones, outdoor furniture, and resort properties. He is also chairman of the
Material Service Corporation, a major provider of construction materials, and a
director of General Dynamics Corporation. The Crown family’s philanthropy
generously supports Jewish interests, Chicago-based organizations, education,
arts and culture, health care, and community development. The Crown Center for Middle East Studies, which will officially open at Brandeis this fall, bears his name.

Translation: A very, very nice philanthropist.

Richard J. Goldstone is a justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He was chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In 1999 Justice Goldstone was appointed co-chairman of the Independent Commission on Kosovo, which examined key developments before, during and after the crises in Kosovo. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of Brandeis’s International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life.

Bernard Osher, a businessman and community leader in California, established the foundation that bears his name in 1977. His philanthropy has benefited a wide range of educational, cultural, environmental, and other organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Maine.

Born in Germany, the internationally celebrated artist Anselm Kiefer first studied law until he turned to art as a pupil of Joseph Buys in Dusseldorf. Over the past three decades, Mr. Kiefer has become internationally celebrated for imposing paintings and installations dealing with the historical, mythological and literary themes that animate post-war German culture.