Centennial Medal 2012

The Centennial Medal is the highest honor awarded by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, given annually on the day before Commencement to celebrate the achievements of a select group of Harvard University’s most accomplished alumni. The medal was first awarded in June 1989, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of GSAS.

Read more coverage in Harvard Magazine.

2012 Centennial Medalists

The Americanist
Daniel Aaron, PhD ’43, history of American civilization

To win the Centennial Medal in his 100th year seems only fitting for a man who “literally embodies the American Studies century,” says Professor Werner Sollors of his longtime friend and colleague, literary historian Daniel Aaron, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature, Emeritus, at Harvard.

Aaron, who still works daily in his Barker Center office, is “a chief founder of the discipline of American Studies in the United States and abroad,” says Helen Vendler, the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor in the Department of English. He “advocated the scholarly study of American authors at a time when universities still emphasized English and European literature. As the founding president of the Library of America, he recognized, with his friend Edmund Wilson and others, “the need to create a series that would encompass all of our nation’s best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes intended for a wide public, a kind of American Pléiade,” says Cheryl Hurley, the Library’s president. The Library of America has now published more than 200 authoritative editions of American classics, remaining committed — as Hurley says — “to Dan’s vision of bringing all the richness, the range, and the variety of American writing to readers everywhere.”

Aaron was the first person to earn a Harvard PhD in the history of American civilization. For decades — first at Smith College, and for the last 40 year at Harvard — he has been among the country’s foremost scholars of American culture, and his “freshness of spirit, zeal for learning, amazing self-discipline, and generosity of imagination set a daunting standard for all of us,” says Andrew Delbanco, AB ’73, PhD ’80, Columbia University’s Mendelson Family Chair of American Studies.

Aaron’s 40-plus books include Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (1961), The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973), American Notes: Selected Essays (1994), and his captivating 2007 intellectual memoir The Americanist.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1973 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2010 for his contributions to American literature and culture.

The Soldier-Statesman
Karl Eikenberry, AM ’81, regional studies–East Asia

Karl Eikenberry, who served as US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011, is the “very model of a modern soldier-statesman,” says Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), with a nod to Gilbert and Sullivan.

Eikenberry, a graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, is now the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. He had a 35-year career in the Army, retiring as lieutenant general in 2009 when President Obama tapped him to lead the diplomatic mission in Afghanistan.

His involvement with that country has been long and deep. Prior to becoming ambassador, he was deputy chairman of the NATO Military Committee in Brussels, where he was heavily involved in the mission in Afghanistan, and regularly traveled there. From 2005 to 2007, he guided military efforts on the ground as commander of US-led coalition forces, and earlier, he served as US security coordinator and chief of the Office of Military Cooperation in Kabul, where he aided efforts to establish and strengthen the Afghan army and police force. “Karl was given extremely difficult assignments in Afghanistan,” says his Harvard mentor Ezra Vogel, the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, Emeritus. “He has, under trying circumstances, provided assistance to the Afghan government and Afghan people and leadership to Americans in Afghanistan.”

Over the course of his career, Eikenberry served in key strategy, policy, and political-military positions, including as director of strategic planning and policy for the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii, as defense attaché at the United States Embassy in Beijing, and as the Defense Department’s senior country director for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mongolia.

“Integrity, service, honor, commitment, decency, intelligence. Karl Eikenberry embodies what it means to be an American patriot,” says Stephen Krasner PhD ’72, the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations at Stanford. His service and achievements have resulted in a long list of military and diplomatic honors, including the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, and the Bronze Star.

The Great Equalizer
Nancy Hopkins, AB ’64, PhD ’71, biochemistry and molecular biology

Nancy Hopkins, the Amgen, Inc. Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, can take great satisfaction in the two revolutions she has helped to lead over the course of her career. One is the revolution of molecular biology, which she knew early on would transform our understanding of the world. And the second is the revolution in the roles and aspirations of women in the academy.

Hopkins, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, started her career in unusually rarified circumstances — as a Radcliffe undergraduate in the lab of James D. Watson, who had won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. She worked initially with bacterial viruses, in a successful effort led by former Harvard professor Mark Ptashne (PhD ’68) to isolate the lambda phage repressor, a protein that controls gene expression. In a series of significant findings, she went on to demonstrate how the repressor binds to DNA.

She joined the faculty of MIT’s Center for Cancer Research in 1973 (now the Koch Institute, where she remains), building a successful program in mouse RNA tumor viruses. Later, she deftly navigated another professional switch, making fundamental discoveries in the genetics of vertebrate behavior, using the newly emerging model of the zebrafish.

But Hopkins is equally known for promoting equality of opportunity for women. She was the prime mover behind the influential “MIT Report on Women in Science,” which in the late 1990s prompted the Institute to acknowledge a pattern of bias and begin reforms. Other universities followed suit, and her advocacy led to a prolonged period of reflection around the country and at Harvard.

“She doesn’t look like a revolutionary,” says her friend and colleague Lotte Bailyn, PhD ’56, the T Wilson (1953) Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School. “Nor was she the first person to document the situation of women faculty in science. But she was extraordinarily careful in her research, relentless and fearless, and she was the first to get her report noticed, responded to, reported on the front page of the New York Times, and acknowledged at the White House — and so she was the originator of a revolution that continues to this day.”

“Her insistence of equal recognition and support of women in science has opened doors for thousands of women to contribute to society,” says her longtime colleague, Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Phillip Sharp, the Institute Professor at MIT. “Leaders pay a price for blazing a trail, but they live in the success of those who follow. Nancy is a special leader.”

The Global Thinker
Robert Keohane, PhD ’66, government

Robert Keohane, professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, is among the most influential and respected theorists of world politics and power.

Keohane, who before Princeton taught at Swarthmore, Duke, Stanford, Brandeis, and Harvard, has been president of the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association “and is consistently ranked as the most influential scholar of international relations by Foreign Policy magazine,” says his longtime friend and collaborator Joseph Nye, PhD ’64, University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard. “But even more important is his role as mentor and friend to so many people in the field.”

The beneficiaries of that mentoring — who include his former dissertation advisee— say it has been fundamental to their careers. Keohane was “probably the single most important influence on my professional development,” says David B. Yoffie, the Max & Doris Starr Professor of International Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. “His penetrating questions, careful scholarship, counterintuitive insights, unending energy, and keen eye towards great problems are the best combination of attributes for an advisor, a co-author, and a great friend.”

“Working with Bob was not easy,” says Fareed Zakaria, PhD ’93, foreign affairs specialist for CNN and Time. “He was friendly and warm, of course, but he was demanding. He set high standards and didn’t discount. He insisted on rigor and research. The result was that I learned to think — systematically and analytically.”

Keohane’s books include After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (1984), Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World (2002), and Anti-Americanisms in World Politics (2006). He has produced articles, book chapters, and edited volumes too numerous to list, and he has won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order (1989), and the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science (2005).

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His wife, Nannerl O. Keohane, who is also a political scientist — as well as the former president of Wellesley College and Duke University — is a member of the Harvard Corporation.