Word: nickerson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Three members of the Corporation along with Putnam comprise this committee. Last year the sub-committee decided to abstain from voting Harvard's Mobil Oil stock on a resolution to have the company's foreign affiliates (including Mobil South Africa) institute affirmative action programs for minority employment. Albert L. Nickerson '33 one of the Fellows on the sub-committee, disqualified himself because he is a former chairman of Mobil's board of directors. If Corporation members removed themselves from every issue in which they were chummy with some of the principals the proposed action is directed against, the subcommittee probably...
...secrecy is a tradition and also helps make Commencement a drawing card for curious alumni who, Nickerson says, "always wonder who Harvard will honor." And of course there is always a great deal of speculation before Commencement on who the degree recipients will be. The best way to find out beforehand--though not totally reliable--is to check the registers of Boston and Cambridge hotels in early June for famous names, and to watch the newspapers for announcements of mysterious trips to Boston by American and foreign political leaders...
However, the committee does step down from the clouds sometimes to give special consideration to some Harvard people. Nickerson says the committee is "especially mindful of the great figures that have been associated with this university--presidents and deans and professors with enormous prestige are looked over carefully, though we try to resist giving degrees to people who are presently active...
Also, the committee loves to give a degree to someone whose "excellence" is not yet fully realized by the world at large. "We like to get people early on if they've shown sufficient promise," Nickerson says. "It's sad if every person we give a degree to is somebody who's gotten recognition before. Last year some of our most popular degree recipients had been recognized already--Georgia O'Keeffe and Margaret Mead, for example--but our faculty felt they hadn't received due recognition from the universities...
...many people turn down the honor. Nickerson says there is about a 95 per cent acceptance rate and that nobody in his memory has ever turned down a Harvard honorary degree for anything other than reasons of health or prior committment. And nobody but the Corporation, the Fellows, the Overseers, Bok, the committee and the degree recipients knows who will get the degrees until the morning of Commencement...