14 to Receive Honorary Degrees

Novelist Susan Sontag, Duke University President-designate Nannerl O. Keohane and culinary giant Julia M. Child are among 14 scholars, artists and educators who will receive honorary degrees at Commencement today.

Other honorary degrees will go to:

* Commencement speaker Gen. Colin L. Powell, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff (See profile, column six).

* Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin '34.

* Chair of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and former Johnson & Johnson CEO James E. Burke.

* Total quality management pioneer W. Edwards Deming.

* Hebrew University of Jersualem professor Shmuel N. Eisenstadt.

* Albert Eschenmoser, professor of organic chemistry at the Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland.

* Loeb University Professor Emeritus Oscar Handlin.

* New York City high school principal Deborah W. Meier.

* Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, director of the genetics division of the Max-Planck-Institut fur Entwicklungsbiologie in Tubingen, Germany.

* Sitar music performer and composer Ravi Shankar.

* Nobel prize-winning Nigerian writer Oluwole A. Soyinka.

For the third consecutive year, the number of honoraries degrees given by the University has grown. Last year, 11 degrees were given. In 1991, Harvard awarded nine lumi- ,A-3naries with special diplomas.

Most of the honorands arrived in Cambridge this week. They stayed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston and dined last night in Memorial Hall on grilled tuna with a savory carrot puree and fresh asparagus.

Daniel J. Boorstin '34

A celebrated historian and author, Boorstin is recognized for his 12 years of service as Librarian of Congress and for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Americans: The Democratic Experience.

An editor of The Crimson during his years at Harvard, Boorstin lectured on legal history at the Law School during the early 1940s. He later served for 25 years on the faculty of the University of Chicago as a professor of American history.

In addition to a distinguished teaching career, Boorstin was a prolific writer. His works include more than 20 books on American history and politics. In 1959, he received the Bancroft Award for his writing on the American colonial experience, and in 1966, he wrote a book on America's national experience that won him acclaim as recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize.

James E. Burke

Burke, who graduated from the Harvard Business School in 1949, is renowned as a manufacturing company executive. He has spent the majority of his career with Johnson & Johnson, serving as chief executive officer.

Burke has also served on the board of directors of IBM and the Prudential Insurance Company and Harvard's Board of Overseers. He has also been involved with the Medical School and the Dental School.

He is currently chair of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and co-founder of the Business Enterprise Trust, a national organization designed to promote corporate responsibility.

Julia M. Child

Child lives on Irving Street in Cambridge. She is a television personality and author who specializes in French cooking.

She wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and has hosted the television show "The French Chef" since 1962. She recently donated her papers to Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library.

W. Edwards Deming

Deming is a statistician and educator, an expert on developing quality control techniques. He advised Allied production during WWII, and currently advises research in Greece, India, Japan and Germany.

Deming was inducted into the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame in 1986, and has served as distinguished professor of management at Columbia University since 1986.

Deming is author of numerous articles including "Statistical Adjustment of Data." He received the National Medal of Technology from the U.S. president in 1987 and is an honorary life member of the International Statistics Institute.

His work recently enjoyed a surge of popularity in American management circles, and Deming earns high fees consulting to major manufacturers like General Motors.

Shmuel N. Eisenstadt

Eisenstadt was born in Warsaw, Poland, on September 10, 1923. He was a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for half a century and chaired its Department of Sociology from 1951 to 1969. His research has concentrated on the study of historical sociology and the comparative study of civilizations.

His landmark 1963 work, The Political System of Empires, is an exploration of the progress and decline of 27 different empires. He has written numerous other books and essays including some in Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

"I try to understand what was the historical experience of the great civilizations...to try to understand the major dynamics of these civilizations and how they became modern societies, how they modernize and how they develop different cultural programs of modernity," Eisenstadt said last night.

Albert Eschenmoser

An organic chemist educated in Switzerland, Eschenmoser has conducted research there for almost 40 years. He was appointed professor of organic chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1965, and elected to the Foreign Association of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., in 1973.

Eschenmoser has been honored by his receipt of over 13 awards from both Swiss and American institutions.

Eschenmoser is noted for his scientific creativity and his dedication to the field. Outstanding among his topics of research is the chemistry of molecules involved in the first stages of life on earth.

Oscar Handlin

Handlin was Harvard's Carl H. Pforzheimer University professor of history, specializing in American history and immigration.

"[Handlin] is one of the preeminent figures in the American historical profession," said Donald H. Fleming, Trumbull professor of American history.

Handlin won a 1952 Pulitzer Prize for history with Uprooted, one of 31 books he wrote or edited. "[H]e has charged his pages with poetry and feeling," said a New York Times book review.

While at Harvard, Handlin also served as director of the Harvard University Library and the Charles Warren Center for studies in American history. He is now Carl M. Loeb University professor emeritus.

Deborah W. Meier

Meier serves as principal of Central Park East Secondary School, a public high school in New York City. She is famous for founding a group of public alternative elementary schools in East Harlem, New York.

Meier, like Sontag, has won a five-year fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

Nusslein-Volhard, the director of genetics at the Max Planck Institute, has done groundbreaking research on the embryos of fruit flies.

Her work has offered new insight into different elements of modern developmental biology. In an October 1991 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Nusslein-Volhard wrote that she and other researchers at the institute discovered many of the genes in the fruit fly embryos that affect the ultimate form of the fly.

Nannerl O. Keohane

Keohane was born in Arkansas on September 18, 1940. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1961. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she then studied at Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar for two years and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1967. She has taught at Swarthmore College and Stanford University.

Keohane is currently the president of Wellesley College, where she also teaches political science. She will become the eighth president of Duke University on July 1. She is the author of Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightment (1980) and co-editor of Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology.

Pandit Ravi Shankar

Shankar, 73, has had an illustrious career as a sitar player and composer.

His international reputation and association with Western musicians like Yehudi Menuhin and former Beatle George Harrison (with whom Shankar appeared at the Woodstock festival in 1969) have contributed to increasing the popularity of Indian music in the West.

Reached last night in his hotel room, Shankar said that "considering the prestige of Harvard as an institution, [the degree] is definitely a great honor."

"I wonder if this makes me a better musician, though," he added.

Susan Sontag

Sontag studied at the University of Chicago and received master's degrees from Harvard in English literature and philosophy. She has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. She also won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978.

Sontag has written fiction, two plays, four films and a variety of essays. Her essays include "Illness as Metaphor," published in 1978, and "AIDS and its Metaphors," published in 1989, both of which try to create a deeper view of the concept of illness.

Oluwole Akinwande Soyinka

Soyinka is a Nigerian dramatist, novelist and poet who became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

Soyinka, who writes in both English and Yoruba, has been described by the New York Times Book Review as "unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer and arguably her finest."

He has achieved international acclaim with two novels, two volumes of poetry, several plays and a series of notes from his prison experiences titled The Man Died. In 1979 he directed Death and the King's Horseman in Chicago, which enhanced his reputation in the West

Most of the honorands arrived in Cambridge this week. They stayed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston and dined last night in Memorial Hall on grilled tuna with a savory carrot puree and fresh asparagus.

Daniel J. Boorstin '34

A celebrated historian and author, Boorstin is recognized for his 12 years of service as Librarian of Congress and for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Americans: The Democratic Experience.

An editor of The Crimson during his years at Harvard, Boorstin lectured on legal history at the Law School during the early 1940s. He later served for 25 years on the faculty of the University of Chicago as a professor of American history.

In addition to a distinguished teaching career, Boorstin was a prolific writer. His works include more than 20 books on American history and politics. In 1959, he received the Bancroft Award for his writing on the American colonial experience, and in 1966, he wrote a book on America's national experience that won him acclaim as recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize.

James E. Burke

Burke, who graduated from the Harvard Business School in 1949, is renowned as a manufacturing company executive. He has spent the majority of his career with Johnson & Johnson, serving as chief executive officer.

Burke has also served on the board of directors of IBM and the Prudential Insurance Company and Harvard's Board of Overseers. He has also been involved with the Medical School and the Dental School.

He is currently chair of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and co-founder of the Business Enterprise Trust, a national organization designed to promote corporate responsibility.

Julia M. Child

Child lives on Irving Street in Cambridge. She is a television personality and author who specializes in French cooking.

She wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and has hosted the television show "The French Chef" since 1962. She recently donated her papers to Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library.

W. Edwards Deming

Deming is a statistician and educator, an expert on developing quality control techniques. He advised Allied production during WWII, and currently advises research in Greece, India, Japan and Germany.

Deming was inducted into the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame in 1986, and has served as distinguished professor of management at Columbia University since 1986.

Deming is author of numerous articles including "Statistical Adjustment of Data." He received the National Medal of Technology from the U.S. president in 1987 and is an honorary life member of the International Statistics Institute.

His work recently enjoyed a surge of popularity in American management circles, and Deming earns high fees consulting to major manufacturers like General Motors.

Shmuel N. Eisenstadt

Eisenstadt was born in Warsaw, Poland, on September 10, 1923. He was a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for half a century and chaired its Department of Sociology from 1951 to 1969. His research has concentrated on the study of historical sociology and the comparative study of civilizations.

His landmark 1963 work, The Political System of Empires, is an exploration of the progress and decline of 27 different empires. He has written numerous other books and essays including some in Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

"I try to understand what was the historical experience of the great civilizations...to try to understand the major dynamics of these civilizations and how they became modern societies, how they modernize and how they develop different cultural programs of modernity," Eisenstadt said last night.

Albert Eschenmoser

An organic chemist educated in Switzerland, Eschenmoser has conducted research there for almost 40 years. He was appointed professor of organic chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1965, and elected to the Foreign Association of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., in 1973.

Eschenmoser has been honored by his receipt of over 13 awards from both Swiss and American institutions.

Eschenmoser is noted for his scientific creativity and his dedication to the field. Outstanding among his topics of research is the chemistry of molecules involved in the first stages of life on earth.

Oscar Handlin

Handlin was Harvard's Carl H. Pforzheimer University professor of history, specializing in American history and immigration.

"[Handlin] is one of the preeminent figures in the American historical profession," said Donald H. Fleming, Trumbull professor of American history.

Handlin won a 1952 Pulitzer Prize for history with Uprooted, one of 31 books he wrote or edited. "[H]e has charged his pages with poetry and feeling," said a New York Times book review.

While at Harvard, Handlin also served as director of the Harvard University Library and the Charles Warren Center for studies in American history. He is now Carl M. Loeb University professor emeritus.

Deborah W. Meier

Meier serves as principal of Central Park East Secondary School, a public high school in New York City. She is famous for founding a group of public alternative elementary schools in East Harlem, New York.

Meier, like Sontag, has won a five-year fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

Nusslein-Volhard, the director of genetics at the Max Planck Institute, has done groundbreaking research on the embryos of fruit flies.

Her work has offered new insight into different elements of modern developmental biology. In an October 1991 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Nusslein-Volhard wrote that she and other researchers at the institute discovered many of the genes in the fruit fly embryos that affect the ultimate form of the fly.

Nannerl O. Keohane

Keohane was born in Arkansas on September 18, 1940. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1961. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she then studied at Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar for two years and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1967. She has taught at Swarthmore College and Stanford University.

Keohane is currently the president of Wellesley College, where she also teaches political science. She will become the eighth president of Duke University on July 1. She is the author of Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightment (1980) and co-editor of Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology.

Pandit Ravi Shankar

Shankar, 73, has had an illustrious career as a sitar player and composer.

His international reputation and association with Western musicians like Yehudi Menuhin and former Beatle George Harrison (with whom Shankar appeared at the Woodstock festival in 1969) have contributed to increasing the popularity of Indian music in the West.

Reached last night in his hotel room, Shankar said that "considering the prestige of Harvard as an institution, [the degree] is definitely a great honor."

"I wonder if this makes me a better musician, though," he added.

Susan Sontag

Sontag studied at the University of Chicago and received master's degrees from Harvard in English literature and philosophy. She has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. She also won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978.

Sontag has written fiction, two plays, four films and a variety of essays. Her essays include "Illness as Metaphor," published in 1978, and "AIDS and its Metaphors," published in 1989, both of which try to create a deeper view of the concept of illness.

Oluwole Akinwande Soyinka

Soyinka is a Nigerian dramatist, novelist and poet who became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

Soyinka, who writes in both English and Yoruba, has been described by the New York Times Book Review as "unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer and arguably her finest."

He has achieved international acclaim with two novels, two volumes of poetry, several plays and a series of notes from his prison experiences titled The Man Died. In 1979 he directed Death and the King's Horseman in Chicago, which enhanced his reputation in the West