Lafayette Will Grant Four Honorary Degrees at 171st Commencement

Lafayette will award honorary doctorates to four distinguished leaders at the College’s 171st Commencement exercises Saturday, May 20.

Gregory Farrington, president of Lehigh University, will receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University, will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. Mulgrew Miller, the internationally acclaimed jazz pianist and resident of Easton, will be granted an honorary Doctor of Performing Arts.

Lafayette announced earlier that Deborah Bial, founder and president of the Posse Foundation, will be the commencement speaker. She will receive an honorary Doctor of Public Service.

Commencement will be held at 2:30 p.m. on the Quad. The academic procession will begin at 2:15 p.m. A Baccalaureate service will be held at 10:30 a.m. the same day, also on the Quad, featuring a talk by Robert I. Weiner, the College’s Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Professor of History and Jewish chaplain. In case of rain, the ceremonies will be held in Allan P. Kirby Sports Center.If there is a change in the location of the ceremonies based on weather, the information will be available by calling (610) 330-5809.

Farrington, who was selected as 12th president of Lehigh in May 1998, announced in October that he will step down in June following eight years in the presidency and remain at the university as a professor.

Throughout his academic career, Farrington has been an innovative leader with a strong focus on the needs of students and vision for meeting the challenges of higher education in the new millennium. At Lehigh, he has championed breaking down disciplinary walls and developing creative uses of information technology to improve student learning. In addition, under his leadership, a $75-million academic venture fund was developed to encourage faculty collaboration in creating innovative academic programs that go beyond traditional boundaries while still meeting the central challenge of educating well-rounded citizens.

He has been an effective partner with the city of Bethlehem, state and federal governments, industry, and other partners to make the city and region a better place to live, work, and learn, while strengthening the university and spurring regional economic development. Farrington was named by Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell to the state’s transition team for the Department of Community and Economic Development in January 2003.

His commitment to the local community is also evident through his active participation on the board of trustees of St. Luke’s Hospital & Health Network and the National Museum of Industrial History. In addition, he serves on the boards of the Lehigh Valley Partnership and the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation.

Prior to his Lehigh appointment, he had been dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds or shares more than two dozen patents and has written or edited several books and book chapters in his field, as well as more than 100 technical publications. He serves on a number of national boards and committees dealing with education and technology.

Born in Bronxville, N.Y., he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in chemistry, specializing in electrochemistry, in 1972. He earned his A.M. degree in chemistry from Harvard in 1970, after receiving his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Clarkson University in 1968.

Farrington began his career as a chemist in 1972, when he joined the General Electric Company as a staff scientist in its Corporate Research and Development Center in Schenectady, N.Y. He joined Penn’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering in 1979.

Franklin, a leading figure in the field of African-American history, American race relations, and Southern regional history, has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal in History among dozens of other honors and awards. In 1997, he was appointed chairman of the advisory board for President Clinton’s “One America: The President’s Initiative on Race.”

A native of Oklahoma, Franklin graduated from Fisk University in 1935, then earned master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Harvard University in 1936 and 1941, respectively. He taught at Fisk, St. Augustine’s College, North Carolina Central University, and Howard University before moving to Brooklyn College as chairman of the history department in 1956.

In 1964 he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he served as chairman of the history department from 1967-70 and as John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor from 1969-82. In 1982, he was named James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke and, in 1985, was elected professor emeritus. From 1985 to 1992, he was professor of legal history at Duke Law School.

Franklin is a prolific author. Perhaps his best-known book, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans, coauthored with Alfred A. Moss, Jr., was published in 1947 and is now in its eighth edition. His autobiography, Mirror to America, published in November, chronicles his life and America’s racial transformation in the 20th century. With his son, John Whittington Franklin, Franklin edited My Life and an Era, the autobiography of his father, Buck Colbert Franklin. It was published in 1998. In 1990, a collection of essays covering a teaching and writing career of 50 years was published under the title, Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988. In 1993, he published The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-first Century. Among his many other publications are The Emancipation Proclamation; The Militant South, 1800-1861; The Free Negro in North Carolina, Reconstruction After the Civil War, and A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Ante-bellum North.

Franklin was involved in key events of the Civil Rights movement. As an expert on Southern history, he was recruited by NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall in 1953 to help prepare the brief in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. In 1965, he accompanied the Rev. Martin Luther King on the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.

In 1976 Franklin was selected to deliver the annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. The lectureship is the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. His talk, entitled “Racial Equality in America,” was published in 1985 and received that year’s Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize.

Franklin has served on many national commissions and delegations, including the National Council on the Humanities, U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, President’s Advisory Commission on Ambassadorial Appointments, and 21st General Conference of UNESCO. He has been president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, American Studies Association, Southern Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, and American Historical Association.

In 2001, Duke opened the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, which is dedicated to bringing together humanists and social scientists to study important societal issues from a variety of perspectives.

Miller, who served as Lafayette’s Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence during the 2003-04 academic year, was born in Greenwood, Miss., in 1955. He was picking out melodies on the piano at age six, taking lessons at eight, and performing with his older brother by 10. He soaked up every kind of music available in his small Southern hometown, blues, country and western, gospel, rhythm and blues, and classical European, but did not find a focus for his musical passion until, as a teenager, he heard his first jazz record by Oscar Peterson.

Miller’s professional career started at age 20 with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, led by the late Mercer Ellington. During his formative years as a sideman, Miller also worked with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Woody Shaw’s Quintet, and Betty Carter’s group. He was also one of the founding members of the Tony Williams Quintet.

Miller rapidly became established as one of the most in-demand pianists in the New York scene. In 1985, he made his first recording as a leader for producer Orrin Keepnews’ former label, Landmark. During the 1990s, Miller developed his career as a leader of his own trios and quintets, recording an impressive series of albums for RCA/Novus.

In 1995, Miller toured Europe and the United States, sharing the stage with fellow pianist Kenny Barron. That year, in a New York Times poll, he was voted “most in-demand” piano player by his peers. He also has played in various all-star groups, such as The New York Jazz Giants, One Hundred Golden Fingers, and the yearly editions of Jam Session-Jazz at the Philharmonic Today, and has recorded with almost every known jazz artist in the scene, from Joe Lovano to Nicholas Payton.

Miller’s 2002 release The Sequel, on MaxJazz, features Miller surrounded by long-time associates such as Steve Nelson and Steve Wilson in a blend of original compositions and standard tunes. His first live recording, Live at Yoshi’s, Volume 1, with bassist Derrick Hodge and drummer Karriem Riggins, was released in 2004, and Live at Yoshi’s, Volume 2 was released last year. Miller remains one of the most recorded pianists in the scene today with more than 400 recording sessions to his credit.