The Michigan Review

U-M Commencement Honorees: Who Are They?

by Lee Bockhorn

Students at university commencements are accustomed to seeing big-name speakers. In the past, the University of Michigan has enjoyed its share of notable commencement speakers, including the likes of President George Bush, First Lady Hillary Clinton, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison.

In contrast, last week's announcement of Dr. Mamphela Ramphele as this year's choice for commencement speaker raised eyebrows on campus. Upon hearing the names of Ramphele and the three other honorary degree recipients - Edward Said, Richard Ford, and Mary Lowe good - many students asked, "Who are these people?" Although widely known and respected in their specific fields, this year's speaker and honorees are not exactly household names, so let's take a closer look at these four individuals.

Mamphela Ramphele

Dr. Ramphela, vice chancellor of the University of Capetown in South Africa, was chosen from this year's group of honorary degree recipients to give the Spring Commencement address at Michigan Stadium. Born under apartheid to rural schoolteachers, the fifty-year-old Ramphele overcame lond odds to become a physician, social activist, and now the head of one of South Africa's largest univeristies. Along with Steve Biko (whose life story was chronicled in the film Cry Freedom), she was one of the founders of the radical anti-apartheid Black Consciousness Movement in 1969. She was exiled for six years to an impoverished resettlement area for blacks in northern South Africa; during this time, while pregnant with Biko's son, she learned that he had died in police custody. She became the first black woman to be named vice chancellor of a South African university in 1996, and recently chronicled her life story in her autobiography, Across Boundaries.

Ramphele has not reached this point without enduring her fair share of controversy. Much of this has centered around her relationship with Biko. She criticized what she termed the "Gandhi-like" portrayal of his life in Cry Freedom, and she herself has been criticized by more radical political adversaries for abusing Biko's legacy "as a way of climbing up the ladder of white privilege."

Another source of controversy for Ramphele has been her effort to make the faculty and administration at UCT more racially representative. Although black students now comprise almost half of the University's enrollment, the faculty is still largely white and male. Her public statements on this have been mixed; for example, while she states that " we cannot go into the 21st century on the basis of a profile of deans who are all white males," she has also declared that "no one at UCT will be targeted merely because they are white and male ... competent white men who are doing their jobs will have nothing to fear at UCT and the vast majority fall into this category." Similarly, she rejects the notion of affirmative action, saying she never uses the term because she "rejects its notion of tokenism," and states that it is a strategy "mindlessly imported from America, where [it hasn't] even worked, because it was all about just giving black people a leg-up rather than profoundly transforming society."

Finally, Ramphele has taken aggressive steps to transform the management structure at UCT, where she has consolidated deanships and instituted a "performance appraisal system" to increase financial responsibility and efficient management.

Richard Ford

Perhaps the best known of the Commencement honorees, Richard Ford will speak at the Rackham Commencement ceremony at Hill Auditorium on May 1st. In 1996, Ford's novel Independence Day (not the basis for the movie) won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award - the first book ever to do so. His first novel, A Piece of My Heart, was published in 1976, and nominated for the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel. His other works include the novels The Ultimate Good Luck (1981); The Sportswriter (1983) - of which Independence Day was the sequel; Wildlife (1990); a collection of short stories, Rock Springs (1987); and Women with Men (1997), a collection of three novellas.

Born in 1944 in Jackson, Mississippi, he attended Michigan State University and studied literature. In between a brief stint in law school and earning his M.F.A. at the University of California at Irvine in 1970, Ford worked a variety of odd jobs, including teaching junior high school, and becoming assistant science editor at American Druggist magazine. In 1981, he became a sportswriter, covering baseball and college football for Inside Sports in New York. His connection to the U-M goes back almost three decades: he was a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows in 1971-74, a faculty member in 1975-76, and the Avery Hopwood Memorial Lecturer in 1992. He has also taught at williams College, Princeton University, and is now a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University.

Edward Said

Said might very well be the most controversial of the honorary degree recipients. Born in Jerusalem, in 1948 Said and his family were dispossessed from Palestine and settled in Cairo, Egypt. He attended the Victorian College in Egypt, and earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, where he won the Bowdoin Prize. He joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1963, and has taught in the fields of history, music, and literature. Said is well-known in the world of academia, having lectured at more than 150 universities and colleges in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Professor Said is also active politically, and is considered one of the most prominent intellectuals and cultural critics in the United States today. He is a contributing writer and classical music critic for the liberal magazine The Nation, and was a member of the Palestine National Council, an arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), for fourteen years. He has been an outspoken advocate for Palestinian self-determination, and has recently been extremely critical of the Middle East peace process, believing that the Palestinian leadership has made too many concessions to Isreal and the United States. In many of his books, most notably Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said has fiercely criticized the West. In Orientalism, his thesis was that the study of the Middle East by Western scholars was essentially an imperialist act, for it furthered the aims of imperialist powers and contributed to Western perceptions of Arabs as inferior and of Islamic culture as second-rate. Similarly, in Culture and Imperialism he argued that the West forced its culture, especially its literary culture, upon African and Asian peoples, while at the same time denigrating their indigenous cultures.

Mary Lowe Good

Good spent 25 years in academia, most recently as the Boyd Professor of Materials Science at Louisiana State University. Beginning in 1993 and until recently, she was the undersecretary for technology in the Commerce Department of the Clinton Administration. She has been a science advisor to four U.S. presidents, and also served as a member of the National Science Board for 11 years. She was most recently awarded the 1997 Priestley Medal, the highest honor of the american Chemical Society. MR

This article was published in the 22 April 1998 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 16, Number 10).
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