Photograph by Stu Rosner
Anthony Appiah
K. Anthony Appiah, Doctor of Laws. Kwame Anthony Appiah is Rockefeller University Professor of philosophy at Princeton, where he is acting director of the University Center for Human Values, which explores ethical issues in public and private life. Appiah served on the Harvard facultyâultimately as Carswell professor of Afro-American studies and of philosophyâfrom 1991 until his move to Princeton in 2002; he had previously taught at Duke, Cornell, and Yale. (Although Appiahâs departure from Harvard came during highly publicized tensions between then-president Lawrence H. Summers and Fletcher University Professor Cornel West, who decamped for Princeton, and other members of the Afro-American studies faculty, Appiah was careful to say that his decision was not motivated by those issues. He was then maintaining a home in New York with a long-time partner, and commuting regularly; read the Crimsonâs account.)
A moral philosopher whose scholarship has extended into African and African-American literary and cultural studies (he was born in London, where his Ghanaian father was a law student, but moved to and grew up in Ghana), Appiahâs work is described this way in his Princeton biography:
In 1992, Oxford University Press published In My Fatherâs House, which deals, in part, with the role of African and African American intellectuals in shaping contemporary African cultural life. His major current work has to do with the relationships between philosophical ethics and other disciplines. In 1996, he published Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race with Amy Gutmann; in 1997, the Dictionary of Global Culture, coedited with Henry Louis Gates Jr. Along with Gates, he has also edited the Encarta Africana CD-ROM encyclopedia, published by Microsoft, which developed into Oxford University Pressâs five-volume Africana encyclopedia in book form. In 2003, he coauthored Bu Me Bé: Proverbs of the Akan (of which his mother is the major author), an annotated edition of 7,500 proverbs in Twi, the language of Asante. He is also the author of three novels, of which the first, Avenging Angel, was largely set at Clare College, Cambridge, where he received his bachelorâs, masterâs, and doctoral degrees. His recent books include Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (2004), The Ethics of Identity (2005), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), Experiments in Ethics (2008), and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010).
Awarded the National Humanities Medal this past February, Appiah has chaired the American Philosophical Associationâs executive board and the board of the American Council of Learned Societies, and served as president of the PEN American Center. He was recently named chair of the Board of Scholars for Facing History and Ourselves (succeeding Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School), a nonprofit organization that encourages scholarly examination of racism, prejudice, and anti-Semitism. On May 20, he delivered the commencement address at Occidental Collegeâs 125th anniversary graduation ceremony.
Photograph by Stu Rosner
Photograph by Stu Rosner
Wendy Kopp
Wendy Kopp, Doctor of Laws. Wendy Kopp is founder and chief executive officer of Teach for America (TFA)âfamously conceived as the subject of her senior thesis at Princeton in 1989. The organization, which recruits talented college graduates for two-year placements in schools in low-income communities, Peace Corps-styleâas a hoped-for catalytic measure to enhance education, and to enlist future education leadersâhas proven wildly popular: TFA is a leading destination of recent Harvard College graduates (nearly one-fifth of whom applied for placements in some recent years, the Crimson reports), and has attracted significant philanthropic, corporate, and government funding for its model of improving classrooms even where children come from very underprivileged backgrounds. More than 9,000 corps members are currently deployed. The organization is one of the destinations for practice placements for Harvard Graduate School of Educationâs (HGSE) new doctor of education leadership (Ed.L.D.) candidates. Kopp talked about her organization and this new way of educating leaders when the Ed.L.D. program was launched in 2009:
âAs weâve engaged in this work over the past 20 years, weâve seen that it is absolutely possible for kids in low-income communities to excel academicallyââat the classroom level, school-wide, and even through entire school systems, demonstrating the âpossibility of school-system-wide change.â At each of those levels, she said, âUltimately, it turns out, itâs all about talent and leadership,â in classrooms, the principalâs office, and the superintendency. Throughout the education community, she continued, there is now widespread recognition of the ârole of leadership in actually moving the needle against educational inequity.â
…âWhatâs the constraint to progress?â Kopp asked. âItâs all about a talent constraint,â as everyone working on educational improvement, from diverse perspectives, seeks âsenior-level talent who have all the foundational skills.â The Ed.L.D. program, she said, âpromises to provide one more stream of talent who do have deep groundingâ not only in education but in ârelationship-building skillsâ that have to be applied in the very complex setting of education reform.
Kopp is the author of two books: A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesnât in Providing an Excellent Education for All and One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach for American and What I Learned Along the Way.
She recently spoke about Teach for America on campus (see the HGSE video recording) and addressed some criticisms of TFAâs model. Historian Diane Ravitch, among others, has argued that schools alone cannot overcome the effects of poverty; more broadly, some professional teachers and teachersâ organizations have objected that TFA corps members do not come properly prepared for their assignments, and that larger issues of resources and equity are obscured by the organizationâs modelâall issues involved in the larger, complex, and high-stakes effort to make American K-12 education work better for all. Whatever oneâs perspective on those issues, Teach for America has become one of the leading players in focusing attention on education reform, and one of the largest sources of new personnel and resources engaging in the sector.
Photograph by Stu Rosner
John Lewis
John Lewis, Doctor of Laws. Congressman John Lewis, the son of sharecroppers, became active in the civil-rights movement as a student (he attended American Baptist Theological Seminary and Fisk University), participating in sit-ins and the first Freedom Rides, and helped found and was subsequently elected leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1963. He helped plan and spoke during the March on Washington that year (where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous âI Have a Dreamâ speech), declaring:
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