Syracuse University to present five honorary degrees at its 152nd CommencementApril 17, 2006Sara Millersemortim@syr.edu
Syracuse University will award honorary degrees to five individuals of exceptional achievement in the areas of business, law, architecture, music and medicine. Honorary degrees will be presented at the 152nd Commencement exercises to Dave Bing, Peter David Eisenman, Billy Joel, the Honorable Carolyn Dineen King and Risa J. Lavizzo-Mourey. The Commencement ceremony will be held Sunday, May 14, in the Carrier Dome.
Dave BingDoctor of Laws
Dave Bing, chair of The Bing Group in Detroit, has lived a life of achievement as a star athlete, a successful businessman and a generous supporter of charitable causes and community organizations. He was a standout basketball player at SU, at a time when the men’s basketball program was not yet a program of national renown. In three varsity seasons at SU, Bing averaged 24.6 points, earning All-America honors as a senior. In 1966, the Detroit Pistons made him the second overall pick in the NBA Draft and Bing went on to play 12 seasons of professional basketball, winning widespread acclaim as one of the all-time great players. He was named Rookie of the Year in 1967; selected to the All-NBA First Team in 1968 and 1971 and to the All-NBA Second Team in 1974, and received the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award in 1977. In 1990, he was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. In 1996, he was named “One of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History.”
After Bing retired from the NBA in 1978, he went to work for a steel company in the Detroit area. Two years later, he started his own company, Bing Steel, catering to the auto industry. He managed to survive the slumps in the industry and grow his company into a diverse group of companies that have prospered in the highly cyclical automotive industry. Bing used his success and contacts in the auto industry to establish numerous programs linking business with community service. These include a program established with General Motors and minority suppliers to make car purchases more affordable for his employees; and the Detroit Manufacturing Training Center, a collaboration between auto manufacturers and minority suppliers to prepare people for employment in the automotive industry. Today, the Bing Group of Companies includes Bing Metal Group and Bing Metals Assembly; the company has more than 1,400 employees and gross annual sales of $372 million.
In addition to his business successes, Bing has been a strong supporter of many community and charitable organizations and programs, including a partnership with local churches and an equity partnership to build as many as 40 homes in inner-city neighborhoods, and a program sponsored by Freddie Mac and GMAC Mortgage to help his employees qualify for home ownership. In addition to his own programs, Bing has served and continues to serve on the boards of 17 not-for-profit organizations in the Detroit area and across the country.
The Syracuse University Orange Pack created the Dave Bing Basketball Fund in 1983 to honor this legendary player and man.
Peter David EisenmanDoctor of Fine Arts
Peter Eisenman is an international architect and educator. He has designed a wide range of housing and urban design projects, innovative facilities for educational institutions, and a series of inventive private houses.
Prior to establishing his practice, Eisenman Architects, in New York City in 1980, Eisenman was an educator and theorist. In 1967, he founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), an international think tank for architecture, and served as its director until 1982. He received a Stone Lion (first prize) for his Romeo and Juliet project at the Third International Architectural Biennale in Venice in 1985 and was one of just two architects selected to represent the United States at the Fifth International Venice exhibition in 1991. The firm’s City of Culture of Galicia project was
shown in the Ninth International Biennale in 2002. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Arnold W. Brunner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Eisenman is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2001, he received the Medal of Honor from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the Smithsonian Institution’s 2001 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture. In 2003, he was awarded the international Gabarron Prize for the Arts. In 2004, Eisenman received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Ninth Architectural Biennale in Venice.
Eisenman’s academic career includes teaching at Cambridge, Princeton, Yale and Ohio State universities. He is currently the Louis I. Kahn Professor of Architecture at Yale and a visiting professor at Princeton.
Eisenman has written several books, most recently “Code X: The City of Culture of Galicia” (Monacelli Press, 2005); “Eisenman: Inside Out, Selected Writings 1963-1988” (Yale University Press, 2004); “Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial, Eisenman Architects 1988-1998” (Monacelli Press, 2003) and “Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques”(Rizzoli, 1993). Other works include “Chora L Works” (Monacelli Press, 1997), co-authored with Jacques Derrida, and “Diagram Diaries” (Universe, 1999). Additionally, Eisenman was an editor of the journal Oppositions (IAUS, 1973-1984) and Oppositions Books, in addition to writing numerous essays on architecture in magazines and journals worldwide.
Eisenman holds a bachelor of architecture degree from Cornell University, a master of architecture degree from Columbia University, and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Cambridge. He holds two honorary doctorates of fine arts, one from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and one presented by the Pratt Institute in New York. The Universita La Sapienza in Rome recently awarded him an honorary doctorate in architecture.
Billy JoelDoctor of Music
Billy Joel is one of America’s most popular and prolific musicians, and he is also one of the country’s strongest supporters of music education. He has received numerous awards, including six Grammy Awards, and was inducted into both the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He has had 33 Top 40 hits, and an album of his classical piano work spent 18 weeks at No. 1 on the Top Classical Albums chart.
Joel is, however, unique among popular musicians and entertainers because he dedicates both his time and his resources to furthering music education, particularly at the college and university level. In addition to his personal commitments to educating the next generation of composers and musicians, Joel has shown, in his own popular work, a sincere tribute to and respect for the literature of classical music composition. In September 2005, Joel provided a $320,000 gift to SU’s College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) as part of his recently launched music education initiative that provides gifts of seed money, musical scholarships and endowments to East Coast colleges. With this gift, VPA will establish Billy Joel Fellowships in Composition in the Rose, Jules R. and Stanford S. Setnor School of Music. In addition to the VPA gift, Joel made grants to six other institutions: the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, New York University, The Julliard School, the SUNY College at Purchase, New England Conservatory and Tanglewood Music Center, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Academy for Advanced Musical Study. Joel has also held master classes on college campuses across the country and around the world for more than 20 years.
In addition to six Grammys, Joel has earned three Awards for Cable Excellence, numerous ASCAP and BMI awards, and the 1994 Billboard Century Award. In 2003, he received a Tony Award for his orchestrations for the Broadway hit musical “Movin’ Out,” a collaboration with choreographer Twyla Tharp. Among his other honors, Joel holds honorary degrees from Fairfield University, Berklee College of Music, Hofstra University and Southampton College.
The Honorable Carolyn Dineen KingDoctor of Laws
The career and accomplishments of Carolyn Dineen King, chief judge for the Federal Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, are outstanding reflections of the best of the legal profession.
A native of Syracuse, King entered the legal profession at a time when women faced significant obstacles. She was the first woman to be paid a salary equal to the men entering her law firm, and she resigned her position in the firm in protest when men were promoted to partner for two consecutive years when she was not. Her courageous act forced the firm to offer equal opportunities for women. She had a distinguished career in practice before being nominated to the Fifth Circuit by President Jimmy Carter in 1979; she was the first woman to serve on that court. She soon became chief judge of the Fifth Circuit, serving from January 1999?2006, and was the first woman to hold that position. Chief Justice William Rehnquist appointed King a member of the executive committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States from 2000?05, and to chair the committee from 2002?05 — a position of enormous importance in running the federal courts in the United States.
A strong advocate for women in the profession, she was awarded the Margaret Brent Award in August 2005, presented by the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession. She was also honored by the Federal Judicial Conference in September 2005 in a resolution delivered to her by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens. Her skills as a jurist and an effective representative of the federal judiciary are widely known, as is her tireless volunteerism in her community.
King graduated from Smith College summa cum laude and received a J.D. from Yale Law School. Since 2004, she has served as an honorary member of the Syracuse University College of Law Board of Advisors.
Risa Lavizzo-MoureyDoctor of Humane Letters
Risa Lavizzo-Mourey is the president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, serving as a visible leader and champion for the health and health care needs of all Americans, particularly the most vulnerable in our society. With a strong commitment to affect meaningful change in our country’s health care systems, Lavizzo-Mourey’s academic, professional and administrative accomplishments combine the values she learned as a physician ? altruism, commitment to others ? with the skills and knowledge from her business training ? measuring results and outcomes, accountability, and taking a disciplined approach to managing resources and motivating people.
A member of the Institute of Medicine of The National Academies and a leader in academic medicine, from 1995-2002, Lavizzo-Mourey held an endowed chair at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, also serving as chief of geriatric medicine and building the University’s highly regarded Institute of Aging. In addition to giving conceptual and administrative direction to the nation’s largest health and health care foundation, Lavizzo-Mourey is engaged in numerous health policy leadership roles, including the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
A practitioner and scholar, she continues to make path-breaking contributions to medical education and service delivery, while continuing to see patients at a community health center in New Brunswick, N.J. Through her scholarship and leadership, she has advanced the nation’s concern about health care disparities and providing access to quality health care services to low-income and other under-served populations. Under Lavizzo-Mourey’s leadership, the Robert Wood Foundation has restructured its strategic investments to target a set of high-impact priorities, among them: designing a more effective, performance-driven patient-centered health system; improving the quality and safety of patient care; strengthening state and local public health systems; halting the rise in childhood obesity by 2015; covering the uninsured; and easing the crisis in the nursing profession; and developing the next generation of health leaders and policy-makers.
Lavizzo-Mourey earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School, and a master of business administration degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. She completed a residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston; was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania; and trained in geriatrics at Penn.
