Honorary Degree Recipients Selected for Commencement 2010

An activist journalist, a human rights hero, a noted scholar of Descartes, and a beloved alumnus will receive honorary degrees from Haverford this year.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, Chilean judge Juan Guzman Tapia, French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, and former Director of Athletics and Dean of the College Greg Kannerstein '63, who died in November, will be recognized at Commencement 2010, which will be held Sunday, May 16. Herbert, Guzman Tapia, and Marion will also participate in an informal panel discussion with graduates and their guests on Saturday, May 15.

Bob Herbert

Since 1993, New York Times Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert has been raising awareness of the issues that matter to many—poverty, education, health care, race relations, international affairs—with his twice-weekly essays on politics, urban affairs and social trends.  In the past year alone he has alerted readers to children's suffering as a result of the world economic crisis; expressed hope for the United States' potential to develop clean energy sources; lamented the injustice of sending the same soldiers on repeated combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq; and warned of a“middle-class tax time bomb” in the Senate's health care bill.

Herbert received a bachelor of science in journalism from the State University of New York (Empire State College), and began his journalism career in 1970 with the Newark Star Ledger, where he was promoted to night city editor in 1973. He went on to join the staff of the New York Daily News, first as a reporter and editor from 1976-85, then as a columnist and member of the editorial board.

In 1990 Herbert became a founding panelist for“Sunday Edition,” a weekly discussion program on WCBS-TV in New York, and the host of“Hotline,” a weekly issues program broadcast on New York public television stations. He continued to work in television as a national correspondent for NBC from 1991-1993, reporting for“The Today Show” and“NBC Nightly News.”

Herbert has won numerous awards, including the Meyer Berger Award for coverage of New York City, the American Society of News Editors award for distinguished newspaper writing, the David Nyhan Prize from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University for excellence in political reporting, and the Ridenhour Courage Prize for the“fearless articulation of unpopular truths.”

He has taught journalism at Brooklyn College and the Columbia University School of Journalism, and is the author of Promises Betrayed: Waking Up from the American Dream (Times Books, 2005).

Juan Guzman Tapia

As the first judge to prosecute former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet on human rights charges, Juan Guzman Tapia is hailed as a champion of social justice.

The son of Juan Guzman Cruchaga, a Chilean poet and diplomat, Guzman Tapia studied law at the Catholic University of Santiago. He began his judicial career in Panguipulli, a city south of Santiago.  After serving as a judge for 35 years in many Chilean cities, he retired from the judiciary system as Justice of the Court of Appeals of Santiago in 2005. In January of 1998, he led the investigation of a lawsuit filed by human rights lawyers against Pinochet, who was arrested while visiting London under a Spanish warrant for crimes against humanity. Although the dictator was eventually deemed unfit for trial by England's Home Secretary and sent home to Chile, Guzman Tapia scored a victory in 1999 by securing the arrests of five retired military officers for their role in a squad that became known as the Caravan of Death; the members were accused of killing more than 70 opponents of the military government in 1973.

In the summer of 2000 the Supreme Court of Chile stripped Pinochet's immunity from prosecution and declared him fit to stand trial. In December of that year, Guzman Tapia formally charged Pinochet with kidnapping during his 1973-1990 reign. The charges were suspended and later dismissed due to health concerns in 2001, but Guzman Tapia pressed on, persuading the Supreme Court to strip Pinochet of his immunity in 2004 and 2005 for charges concerning Operations Condor and Colombo, both campaigns of political repression.

The judge's attempts to prosecute Pinochet were chronicled in a 2008 documentary film, The Judge and the General. He has been honored with the Oscar Romero Award for Leadership in Service to Human Rights and the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, named for two activists killed by agents of Pinochet.

Guzman Tapia is a professor in Procedural Law at the School of Law of the Universidad Católica of Santiago and has served as Dean at the School of Law of the Universidad Central, where he currently directs the Center of Studies of Human Rights.

Jean-Luc Marion

One of the best-known living philosophers in France, Jean-Luc Marion was a student of Jean Beaufret, Jacques Derrida and Ferdinand Alquié. He started his work as a leading scholar in the history of early modern philosophy (Descartes mostly), and evolved as a phenomenologist and a philosopher of religion. He reaches out to aesthetics, patristics and Christian theology.

Born in 1946, Marion studied at the Ecole Normale supérieure (1967-71), the Université of Paris-Nanterre and the Sorbonne, where he began teaching as the assistant of Alquié. After receiving his doctorates (in 1974 and 1980), he was hired by the University of Poitiers as a professor in 1981. In 1995 he joined the University of Paris-Sorbonne, where he occupies the chair previously held by Emmanuel Levinas. Marion started teaching at the University of Chicago in 1994. He became John Nuveen professor in 2003, and then the Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley professor in 2010 at the Divinity School. He also serves in the Department of Philosophy and the Committee on Social Thought.

He is known for his work on Descartes in several books, including On Descartes' Metaphysical Prism (transl., 1999). He debates the question of God and being in God Without Being (transl., 1995), He explores issues in phenomenology,  including the concept of gift and givenness, in Reduction and Givenness (transl., 1997;) and in Being Given (transl., 2002). He looks at the saturated phenomenon in In Excess (De surcroît, transl. 2002, 2004), and at a logic of love in The Erotic Phenomenon (transl. 2006).  In two recent books, not yet translated,  he has done a study of St. Augustine and also written on the concept of negative certitude in philosophy  (Au lieu de soi. L'approche de saint Augustin, Paris, 2008, 2009, soon to be translated into English); and an essay to introduce the concept of negative certitude in philosophy in Certitudes Negatives, Paris, 2010.

Marion has been awarded the Grand Prix de philosophie de l'Académie française and the Karl-Jaspers Preis (Heidelberg) (1992). He was elected a member of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome and, recently, of the Académie Française (2008).

Greg Kannerstein ‘63

This posthumous award will recognize Kannerstein's contributions as a student, teacher, dean, coach, administrator and above all, friend.  He dedicated his life and career to his alma mater, holding a variety of positions during his 41 years at the College and consequently coming to be known as“Mr. Haverford.”

An English major, Kannerstein played for Haverford's baseball and basketball teams and was sports editor of the College News, leading to his first post-college job as a sportswriter and“rewriteman” for the Philadelphia Bulletin. He went on to write for the Southern Courier in Montgomery, Alabama, and became one of the few journalists covering the Civil Rights Movement in the South. He taught English at several colleges before returning to Haverford in 1968 as Assistant Dean of Students.

In 1971 he was named assistant to President Jack Coleman, with whom he helped shape the College's commitment to diversity. Throughout the 1970s Kannerstein served as Acting Dean of Student Affairs, Acting Dean of the College, Associate Dean of the College, and a lecturer in humanities. He also coached the baseball team from 1978-1992.

He became Director of Athletics in 1983, a position he retained until 2006. He also served as Interim Dean of Admission from 2004-2005, and was appointed Dean of the College in 2006. At the time of his death, he had just stepped down from this role and was beginning a new chapter as Special Advisor to Institutional Advancement and lecturer in Independent College Programs.

Kannerstein was the editor of The Spirit and the Intellect: Haverford College 1833-1983, an institutional, cultural and personal history of Haverford.

-Brenna McBride