IU campus to confer twelve honorary degrees

All eight of IU's campuses will hold commencement ceremonies at the beginning of May. Undergraduate and graduate students will be honored, and doctoral students will receive their hoods at each of the ceremonies. A total of 14,469 degrees will be conferred on students.\nTwelve honorary degrees will be also awarded at six campuses to outstanding IU graduates or community leaders. Among the honorary degree recipients is NBC sportscaster Dick Enberg, who will deliver the commencement address for two ceremonies on the Bloomington campus.\nOthers receiving honorary degrees from IU-Bloomington include Jost Delbruck, former president of Kiel University in Germany; Scott Jones, chairman and CEO of Escient Technologies; Jean Fox O'Barr, a women's studies expert; and Reinhard Selten, recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics.\nO'Barr, who received her bachelor's degree from IU in 1964, went on to found the women's studies department at Duke University. Her nomination for an honorary degree was welcomed by the gender studies department.\n"Judith Allen (department chair) and the gender studies faculty fully endorse her nomination," department administrator Gail Fairfield said. \nO'Barr has also written or edited more than 17 books on women's studies.\nSelten is remarkable not only as a Nobel laureate, but he survived as a half-Jewish youth growing up in a Nazi-controlled area of Poland.\n"It was not easy for me to live as a half-Jewish boy under the Hitler regime," Selten said in a excerpt from the Nobel Laureate E-Museum. "When I was 14 I had to leave high school, and the opportunity to learn a trade was denied to me. The only career open to me was that of an unskilled worker. Fortunately it turned out that this did not matter much since after about half a year my mother, my brothers, my sister and I left Breslau on one of the last trains before all outbound railway traffic stopped."\nDespite this struggle, Selten later went on to earn his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Berlin and became an expert on game theory.\nIU-Purdue University at Indianapolis will confer two honorary degrees at its commencement May 12. One will go to Father Boniface Hardin, president of Martin University in Indianapolis, and the other will go to Hugh B. Price, president and CEO of the National Urban League. \nIUPUI chancellor Gerald Bepko is pleased to have these men nominated.\n"Through perseverance (Hardin) has made Martin University a fine institution," Bepko said. "Father Hardin is known nationally for his work, but in this case, it is a special recognition for a tour de force in higher education." \nPrice was chosen to be honored, Bepko said, partly because of his achievements and partly because of timing. The president of the Indianapolis Urban League will retire this year, and their offices are on the edge of the IUPUI campus. \n"We thought this would be a wonderful time to have Hugh Price come to Indianapolis for an honorary degree," Bepko said.