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Lafayette will award honorary degrees to five distinguished leaders as part of the College’s 166th Commencement exercises, Saturday, May 19.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, will give the commencement address and will receive an honorary Doctor of Letters.
Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman, the founding rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple, Los Angeles, Calif., will deliver the baccalaureate address and will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity.
Alan R. Griffith, the vice chairman of the Bank of New York and a member of Lafayette’s Class of 1964, will receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.
Franklin D. Raines, the chairman and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae Corporation and former director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, will also receive an honorary Doctor of Laws.
Charles Coulston Gillispie, the Dayton-Stocker Professor Emeritus of History and professor emeritus of the history of science at Princeton University will receive an honorary Doctor of Science.
Alan R. Griffith, the recipient of Lafayette’s George T. Woodring ’19 Volunteer of the Year Award in 1999, will become chair of Lafayette’s Board of Trustees on July 1, 2001, succeeding Lawrence J. Ramer ’50.
Griffith has a long and distinguished record of service to Lafayette. A trustee since 1994, he has served as vice chair of the board’s committees on financial policy and athletics and student affairs.
He has been vice chairman of both The Bank of New York and The Bank of New York Company, Inc., since December 1994. He is also a director of the bank and the company and a member of the bank’s senior planning committee. He served as the bank’s president and the company’s senior executive vice president from 1990 to 1994.
Griffith is also responsible for the company’s international banking sector.
He began his career in 1964 as a management trainee with the Empire Trust Company and joined The Bank of New York when Empire Trust was acquired in 1966. He was appointed assistant treasurer in 1971, elected assistant vice president in 1972, and appointed vice president in December 1974. He was elected senior vice president in 1982, the year in which he organized the communications, entertainment, and publishing division, which has been one of the fastest-growing areas of the bank’s corporate banking business. The division is recognized as a leader in lending to the cable television industry, broadcasting companies, newspaper and magazine publishers, and the entertainment industry.
In 1985, he was elected executive vice president and named head of the special industries sector. He was appointed to the steering committee of the bank in 1986 and was elected senior executive vice president in 1988. In 1989 in addition to his other responsibilities, he was named the bank’s chief credit policy officer. He was elected senior executive vice president of The Bank of New York Company in June 1990.
Griffith is a trustee and member of the executive committee of the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) Association and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. A government and law major at Lafayette, he holds an MBA from Baruch College of the City University of New York.
Franklin D. Raines, chairman and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae, will receive the Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Award from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the nation’s oldest, broadest civil rights coalition for “selfless and devoted service in the cause of equality” on May 9 in Washington, D.C. The Humphrey Award, the civil rights community’s highest honor, goes to recipients based on their distinguished contributions to the advancement of civil and human rights.
A New York Stock Exchange company and the largest non-bank financial services company in the world, Fannie Mae is the nation’s largest source of financing for home mortgages. Raines became chairman and chief executive officer on January 1, 1999.
Raines stepped down as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and a member of the President’s Cabinet on May 20, 1998, after two years of service. Raines was the President Clinton’s key negotiator in the talks that led to passage of the bipartisan Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Raines was the first OMB director in a generation to balance the federal budget. Raines also helped the president manage the federal government by coordinating procurement, financial management, information technology, and regulatory policies for all federal agencies.
From 1991 to 1996, Raines was vice chairman of Fannie Mae, in charge of the company’s legal, credit policy, finance, and other corporate functions.
Prior to joining Fannie Mae, Raines was with Lazard Freres & Company for 11 years where he was a general partner. Before joining Lazard Freres, he served from 1977 to 1979 as associate director for economics and government in the OMB and assistant director of the White House Domestic Policy Staff.
Raines is a director of Fannie Mae, Pfizer, America Online, PepsiCo, the Enterprise Foundation, and the National Urban League. He is chairman of the Visiting Committee of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and past president of the Harvard’s Board of Overseers.
Raines was a member of the congressionally-mandated Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces. He also has served on a number of federal and state public policy advisory groups regarding tax equity, education, poverty, and welfare reform.
Raines was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of The Business Council, the Trilateral Commission, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Raines holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from Harvard College. He also attended Magdalen College, Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar.
Charles Coulston Gillispie, who was editor of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography from 1964-80, is the author of many books, contributions to collective volumes, articles, and reviews. He is the recipient of prestigious national and international awards in the history of science and technology, including the 1997 Balzan Prize in the History and Philosophy of Science. The International Balzan Foundation, based in Switzerland, cited Gillispie for “the extraordinary contribution he has made to the history and philosophy of science by his intellectually vigorous and exacting works.” The Balzan Prize includes a cash award of more than $300,000 U.S. dollars.
He received the Dibner Award for Distinction in the History of Science and Techology from the Dibner Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994, la Medaille Alexandre Koyre from the Academie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences in 1985, the Sarton Medal from the History of Science Society in 1984, and the Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society in 1981 for his book Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime.
Gillispie joined Princeton as instructor of history in 1947. He was named Shelby Cullom Davis Professor in 1967 and Dayton-Stockton Professor in 1973. He was director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science from 1960-66 and 1976-80. He chaired the history department from 1971-73 and was acting chair in 1968-69.
Gillispie holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, an M.A. in history from Wesleyan University, and an A.B. in chemistry from Wesleyan.