Katharine Graham and Meyer Schapiro Lead 1983's Roster of 6 Honorary Degree Recipients

President Bok will confer honorary degrees this morning on one woman and five men, including Katharine Graham, the chairman of the board of the Washington Post company, and Meyer Schapiro, one of the world's foremost art critics and historians.

Victor F. Weisskopf, a theoretical physicist who worked on the team that built the first atomic bomb during World War II, and E. Bright Wilson, Richards Professor of Chemistry Emeritus, will also receive honorary degrees, at the culmination of this morning's portion of Harvard's 332nd Commencement exercises.

Rounding off this year's list--which is about half the size of previous years' rosters--are Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican author and statesman who will give this afternoon's principal Commencement address, and Robert Winthrop '26, a New York financier and benefactor.

Harvard traditionally keeps the names of the winners of the university's most prestigious award until the moment they claim their degree on the Tercentary theater state. The Crimson reported the honorands' identities in its Tuesday edition.

*

Carlos Fuentes began his diplomatic career when he was only 22 years old. A graduate of the School of Law, National University of Mexico, he served as a member of the Mexican delegation to the United Nations, Director of International Cultural Relations for Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and, from 1974 until 1978, as Ambassador to France.

The 54-year-old Fuentes, also a prolific playwright, critic, and novelist, has taught and lectured at over a dozen U.S. universities, delivering last year's Spencer Lecture at Harvard. Currently a resident of Princeton, N.J., he is adjunct professor of English and Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania.

Fuentes, who told. The Crimson in 1981 "I must write," has penned ten novels, three plays, and a host of critical essays, including commentary on Melville, Faulkner, Bunuel, and Genet. His first novel, "Where the Air is Clear," appeared in 1958.

His two most critically acclaimed works have been "The Death of Artemio Cruz" in 1962, and "Terra Nostra" in 1975. Fuentes' most recent works are a 1980 novel, "Distant Relations," and a 1982 play. "Orchids in the Moonlight," which premiered at Harvard's Loeb Drama Center.

Much of his writing has been concerned with political issues, especially with the legacy of the Mexican Revolution of 1917.

A graduate of primary school in Washington, D.C., Fuentes is well-known as a friend of the United States, but he has recently been an outspoken critic of the U.S.'s policies in Latin America, especially in the Reagan administration's support for dictatorships in El Salvador and Guatemala.

*

Katharine M. Graham, the only woman receiving an honorary degree today, has had a distinguished career in journalism, working for her high school newspaper, publications around the country, and eventually the Washington Post, which her father owned. Today, at 65, she is chairman of the board of the Post Company and one of the most influential figures in American journalism.

During her college years, which she spent at Vassar and the University of Chicago, Graham worked as an intern for the Post. After graduation, Graham worked for a short time for the Chicago Times and then briefly for the San Francisco News before returning to the Post as a member of the editorial staff.

In 1940, she married Philip L. Graham, then a Washington lawyer. After World War II, he was made publisher of the Post when his wife's father stepped down. Under the conditions of the transfer, the Grahams could only sell the newspaper with the approval of a special committee, which included former Harvard President James B. Conant.

Graham and her husband built up the Washington Post empire by buying Newsweek Magazine, an international news service, and several radio and television stations.

After her husband's death in 1963, Graham became president of the Washington Post Company until 1973 when she became chairman of its Board of Directors.

A former member of the Overseers Visiting Committee to the Kennedy School of Government, Graham is also a trustee of George Washington University.

Meyer Schapiro has for most of his career been known as one of the century's leading art historians. In addition, his criticism has brought new dimensions to the study of art by integrating political, psychological and biogical theory with traditional methods of art analysis.

Schapiro has published eight books, including seminal works on Cezanne and Van Gogh, but his more common forum has been the essay. He has written more that 180 essays of art criticism, which have appeared in a wide variety of journals.

Long an active force in New York intellectual circles, Schapiro has found many influences outside the realm of traditional art criticism. His writing is steeped in the work of important social scientists, must notably Marx and Freud.

A member of the faculty of Columbia University from 1928 to 1973, Schapiro has also served as visiting professor at several universities, including. Oxford and the University of London. In 1966 and 1967, he gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, discussing the French Romanesque style.

Born in Shavly, Lithuania in 1904, the scholar emigrated to the United States in 1907. He earned his PhD from Columbia in 1931, and became a full professor there in 1952. Upon his retirement in 1973, he was awarded the Art Dealers Association of America Award for excellence from art history. He has also served as a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Much of Schapiro's work has focused on modern art, but is celebrated for its incorporation of the study of art of other periods--notably early Christian and Medieval. Among his most famous works are a series of essays on Cezanne's apples, to which the art historian affixes various social and psychological meanings. In one essay, Schapiro calls the fruit examples of "displaced erotic interest."

Most recently, Schapiro has been working on compiling, collections of his critical essays for publication in several volumes. As a critic, he has always stressed the importance of applying external factors to the study of art. "Everything that interests me is part of the picture," he one said.

A 1979 Newsweek article on Schapiro hailed his as the 20th century's leading art critic, and an important influence on every student of art in his time. "To call Meyer Schapiro an art historian is a little like calling Marx an Economist," the Article stated. "It's true, but you wouldn't want to leave it at that."

*

Victor F. Weisskopf once said "Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; knowledge without compassion is inhuman." Throughout his career as a prominent theoretical nuclear physicist, Weisskopf has sought to balance the exploding field of scientific knowledge with a basic sense of humanity.

Born in Vienna in 1908, Weisskopf received his PhD at The University of Gottingen, Germany, in 1931 and conducted postgraduate research in Denmark and Switzerland. In 1937 he emigrated to the United States, a refugee of Nazi oppression.

Weisskopf taught physics at The University of Rochester before joining the secret Manhattan Project during World War II, which developed the first atomic bomb. He served as the leader of the project's theory division.

The accuracy of his experimental opinions and predictions eventually led to a sign in his corridor pointing the way to the "Los Alamos Oracle."

In 1943 Weisskopf joined MIT's faculty as a professor of physics. He subsequently took a leave of absence when he was appointed the fourth director-general of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, an international collaboration of scientists dedicated to the peaceful use of atomic knowledge.

Following his directorship at CERN from 1961-65. Weisskopf returned to MIT to teach before retiring in 1975.

Throughout his career in quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, and the physics of elementary particles. Weisskopf wrote a large number of scientific papers and books, including his Theoretical Nuclear Physics with John M. Blatt (1952), Knowledge and Wonder (1962), and Physics in the Twentieth Century(1972).

E. Bright Wilson, Richards Professor of Chemistry Emeritus, has done groundbreaking work in the field of molecular spectroscopy and determining the structure of molecules, using first infrared and later microwave radiation.

Born in Tennessee on December 18, 1908, Wilson received as B.S. and Masters Degree from Princeton, and went on to earn his Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology in 1933.

In 1934, the chemist came to Harvard as a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows, a three-year funded post awarded to young scholars of extraordinary promise. He has remained at Harvard ever since, becoming a full professor in 1946 and teaching actively until age 70.

Among Wilson's long lost of honors are the Pauling Award, the 1975 National Medal of Science and honorary degrees from Princeton, Columbia, Dickinson, the Universities of Bologna and Brussels.

At Harvard, Wilson has been "a paragon of what you can hope for in a professor," according to Dudley R. Herschbach, Baird Professor of Chemistry, a former student of Wilson's. At 74, Wilson continues to do theoretical work on spectroscopy and molecular structure although his graduate students perform the actual experiments. Herschbach says.

Wilson's son, Cornell physicist Kenneth G. Wilson '56, in February delivered the first of an annual lecture series at Harvard he established in honor of his father. The younger Wilson received a 1982 Nobel Prize and was awarded a Harvard honorary degree of his own in 1981.

E. Bright Wilson has been among the pioneers in his field since the 1930s, when he co-authored a textbook on quantum mechanics with the chemist I must Pauling. He went on to write "Introduction to Scientific Research" (1952) and co-author an influential study on molecular vibrations in 1955.

His work to illuminate the structure and reactive properties of molecules has aided other research not only in chemistry, but also in biology, and physics Wilson's research, for instance, was among the information that led to the discovers of DNA structure. More recently, he has helped clarify the structure of such molecules as hemoglobin. Herschbach says.

Wilson has served on a number of committees, both nationally and within the University. During World War II, he worked on defense related research for conventional weapons at Woods Hole under the late Harvard chemist George Kistiakowsky, and during the 1950s he sat on a government weapons evaluation committee. More recently, Wilson chaired a National Academy of Science committee examining the management of radioactive waste.

*

Robert Winthrop '26, currently honorary chairman of the New York brokerage and investment banking firm of Wood, Struthers and Winthrop, is the only honorary degree recipient this year who graduated from the College.

A native of Boston. Winthrop his combined a successful business career with a strong interest in charitable causes, ranging from schools to wildlife preservation. A board member of several hospitals and schools near his Old Westbury, Long Island, home. Winthrop is a member of the Harvard Medical School's Overseers visiting committee and has served as President of the North American Wildlife Foundation.

After postgraduate study at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at the Business School. Winthrop joined his guard father's Wall Street firm of Robert Winthrop and Company, private bankers and members of the New York Stock Exchange--only weeks before the crash of 1929.

Winthrop recalled that period in his 25th reunion report: "The next three years were years of liquidation and grim years on Wall Street." The ensuing New Deal legislation, Winthrop wrote, "cut private bankers down to size."

The sluggish pace of business for the family firm during those years gave Winthrop the time to pursue outside activities, he wrote. Assessing the triumphs and the disappointments of his career in the report, he concluded: "I have no regrets that things turned out as they did for I have had a most satisfying life so far."

Winthrop went on to become senior partner of the firm and remained in that office until 1969, when he became honorary chairman.

The 79-year old financier has served as a trustee of Jericho Public School, the Greenvale School, and the Foxcrott School. His efforts with hospitals include serving as president of the boards of Nassau Hospital in Mineola, N.Y., and of the Presbyterian Hospital.

Winthrop's services to Harvard follow a family tradition of association with the University. Winthrop's father and two brothers attended Harvard as did several grandchildren.

Special Papers, prepared by Tammy Huang, Mary s. Humes, Holly A. Idelsott, Rebecca J. Joseph, Chuck Lane, Thomas J. Mayor, and Michael W. Miller.

President Bok this morning will confer honorary degrees on:

Carlos Fuentes, author and statesman;

Katharine Graham, chairman of the board, Washington Post Company;

Meyer Schapiro, art historian and critic, University Professor Emeritus at Columbia;

Victor F. Weisskopf, physicist, Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT;

E. Bright Wilson, Richards Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Harvard;

Robert Winthrop '26, financier.