Convocation 2006
Bicentennial Award Citations
Established in 1993 on the occasion of Williams College's 200th anniversary, Bicentennial Medals honor members of the Williams community for distinguished achievement in any field of endeavor. The college awarded 23 Bicentennial Medals in 1993 and has added five to seven in each year since.
This year’s recipients were chosen because of their service to the world, in honor of the Bicentennial of the Haystack Prayer Meeting of 1806, at which five Williams students committed themselves to lives of service “into all the world.”
College President Morton Owen Schapiro read the citations below in presenting these Bicentennial Medals during Convocation on Sept. 9 in Chapin Hall.
STANLEY O. FOSTER
Class of 1955
Bangladesh ... 1975. Hidden under a burlap bag by parental shame, three-year-old Rahima Banu lay severely ill. Yet there you were, able to diagnose her—the last person in the world known to suffer from naturally occurring major smallpox. The road to that moment had been long. It began when, inspired by the spirit of the Haystack Prayer Movement, you decided on a career in public health. That led eventually to becoming a principal organizer of the fifteen-year effort against smallpox, which became a triumph of science, management, and international political cooperation. To isolate the virus among people reluctant to admit to the illness, you trained and mobilized armies of local health workers who offered citizens rewards for identifying possible outbreaks, so that, for instance, ten thousand Bengali health workers could search twelve million households in ten days. Having slain the smallpox dragon, you went on to work with colleagues in more than forty countries to strengthen their capacity to assess health needs and to plan, implement, and evaluate programs to improve community health and wellbeing. Likewise you have worked to strengthen child-survival programs in more than a dozen African countries. At an age when you would be forgiven for retiring, you continue your work, as the Haystack participants would say, “into all the world”—work that recently took you back to Bangladesh and to a reunion with Rahima Banu, whose children—you couldn’t help yourself—you taught habits of good health.
In recognition of your distinguished achievement in international public health, Williams College is proud to honor you with its Bicentennial Medal.
C. ERIC REEVES
Class of 1972
By day a mild-mannered professor of English; by night, weekend, and sabbatical a dauntless campaigner against atrocities in Sudan. Beginning eight years ago as a lone voice crying out in a desert of disinterest, you have used a relentless barrage of articles, lectures, op-eds, letters to the editor, and Internet postings to draw the world’s averted eyes to “suffering a long way off.” For a while response was slow. You were the first person to provide realistic death counts in southern Sudan and Darfur and the first to identify government actions there as genocide. Your tone was hard but your cause just. As one State Department official says, “I read Eric Reeves religiously, even if he gives me heartburn.” Eventually your work snowballed into greater, harsher press attention, the engagement of activists into a citizens army, the withdrawal of western oil companies, and pressure from national governments. The head of the U.S. Committee for Refugees says, “I’ve never seen a single person in humanitarian advocacy make as much of an impact.” With progress being made, you pressed on—devoting more time, taking unpaid leaves, borrowing against your family’s home, battling while for the last three years struggling with leukemia. You began this effort by saying, “We’ll see what one very loud, very committed, very passionate voice can accomplish if it’s really, really focused, and it just doesn’t give up.” The answer is a peace accord in the south, growing intervention in Darfur, and a saving of the world’s conscience, albeit by a shred.
In recognition of your distinguished achievement in in stemming genocide in Sudan, Williams College is proud to honor you with its Bicentennial Medal.
ANNA L. WARING
Class of 1978
Despite your Ph.D. in education administration and policy at Stanford, where you helped create the Haas Center for public service, your work nationally with A Better Chance, and your teaching in DePaul’s master’s program in public services, your greatest legacy has been your extraordinary leadership of a school that defies the odds. Josephinum Academy is a Catholic middle and high school for girls in Chicago’s Wicker Park. Almost all its students are of color, eighty-five percent qualify for federal free or reduced-price lunch, and many of them enter performing below grade level. However, one hundred percent graduate and ninety-five percent earn college admission. To encourage their growth into young women of “faith, character, and intelligence,” you have created an environment in which, as you have said, they can try on the role of “smart girl” too often denied them in the outside world. You encourage them to excel in math and science and the use of technology. You provide tutors and counseling and programs that focus on study skills. You take them outside the school and outside themselves on field trips to the city’s cultural offerings and to engage in community service in Chicago, South Carolina, and New Mexico. And, as you have said, “We don’t ask whether you’re going to college but where.” Thanks to your efforts, this transforming education is available to students regardless of their families’ ability to pay. It is hard to imagine a more powerful educational model.
In recognition of your distinguished achievement in education, Williams College is proud to honor you with its Bicentennial Medal.
GREGORY M. AVIS
Class of 1980
A founding partner of one of the nation’s leading private equity firms and member of the Board of more than thirty companies, you have devoted considerable time, talent, and finances to serving many overlapping communities. You have served as President of the Board of the San Jose Repertory Theater. As head of the Board of the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley you have led its merger with the Peninsula Community Foundation to create the third-largest community foundation in the country. As a Board member of Family Service Mid-Peninsula you facilitated its merger with a complementary agency. You have brought similar vision to your service on the Board of the James Irvine Foundation, which improves the lives of California residents through programs for the arts, at-risk youth, and citizen involvement. With barely a glance at the clock, you serve also on the Board of the National Outdoor Leadership School and of your alma mater and are involved with land conservation in Montana. Most extraordinarily, you also teach sophomore math at Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto, almost all of whose students will be the first in their families to attend college. A tough but respected teacher, you have been involved with the development of each of your students and of the school as a whole, helping it constantly grow in effectiveness and, in particular, leading the effort to introduce performing arts into its curriculum and to design and build its first performing arts center. The tiredness we feel just contemplating all this activity is surpassed only by our pride.
In recognition of your distinguished achievement in community involvement, Williams College is proud to honor you with its Bicentennial Medal.
ELIZABETH A. ANDERSEN
Class of 1987
Law is the foundation of society’s economic, social, and even physical health—a fact never taken for granted in the countries you work. As Executive Director of the American Bar Association’s Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative, you have been midwife to new legal systems in scores of countries emerging from the broken social structures left by despots and outside domination. Through Initiative efforts, more than five thousand American and European judges, attorneys, and legal specialists have contributed more than two-hundred-million dollars in pro bono assistance to new democracies. Where new tyrannies of lawlessness and corruption threatened to spread, the Initiative has helped build civil societies by advising on new constitutions; on training lawyers, judges, and government officials; on reforming law school curriculums; and on educating citizens about their newfound rights. Armenia is one country that as a result has passed constitutional reform that increases legal protections, improves the balance of power between the legislature and the executive, and establishes a more independent judiciary. The Initiative also helped set up the Women’s Legal Assistance Center in Tajikistan and filed more than eleven-hundred citizenship applications for Roma living in Macedonia. Your career in promoting the rule of law includes earlier work as head of the Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch and soon as leader of The American Society of International Law. The benefit of these efforts extends well beyond the citizens of those increasingly stable societies to all of us in this increasingly interconnected world.
In recognition of your distinguished achievement in promoting the rule of law worldwide, Williams College is proud to honor you with its Bicentennial Medal.
CATHERINE M. SALSER
Class of 1988
The idea arose while you were walking with a friend in Hopkins Forest and gave new meaning to the term “road trip.” You packed your car and drove across country offering art workshops at domestic violence centers along the way, while producing portraits on the side to pay for gas and supplies. Your hunch proved true—creating art could indeed help survivors of domestic violence to reclaim their lives and move toward a healthy future. From that experience you founded A Window Between Worlds, a non-profit that has provided creative expression as a healing tool for more than twenty-thousand battered women and their children in shelters and outreach centers across the country. Women “explore themes in healing from abuse, such as processing anger, building self-confidence, and reconnecting with hopes for the future.” In separate workshops, their children work through similar struggles. Some ninety-four percent of women say their sessions were “useful to their progress in getting free from domestic violence.” As one participant says, “Each time I cut, pasted, and expressed myself I felt like there were very heavy pages that I’d been carrying on my back, and I felt that as I peeled them off one by one I was being liberated from something very painful.” At the same time, ninety-five percent of shelter workers report that the workshops have “helped the children make significant progress with their growth and healing.” And the art itself is powerful, having been exhibited, along with your stunning portraits of women survivors, in more than a hundred locations across the country, including the U.S. Senate’s Russell Office Building.
In recognition of your distinguished achievement in socially responsible art, Williams College is proud to honor you with its Bicentennial Medal.
Bicentennial Award recipient photos by Roman Iwasiwka.
Previous Bicentennial Medal recipients