Joining President Bush as honorary-degree recipients at commencement were these nine other distinguished individuals:
— John Bahcall, astrophysicist and Richard Black Professor of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has done seminal work on detecting solar neutrinos, developing a comprehensive model of the Milky Way Galaxy, and advocacy, planning and use of the Hubble Space Telescope.
— Rev. Cyprian Davis, OSB, Benedictine monk and professor of church history at Saint Meinrad School of Theology in Saint Meinrad, Indiana. His 1990 book The History of Black Catholics in the United States is considered the definitive work in its field.
— Marilou Eldred, president of Saint Mary’s College since 1997, the first laywoman to lead the college.
— Louis V. Gerstner Jr., chairman and chief executive officer of IBM since 1993. He is credited with reviving the fortunes of IBM, the world’s largest computer company, by making Internet technology and services top priorities. He is the co-author of Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America’s Public Schools.
— John W. Jordan II ‘69, member of the University’s Board of Trustees since 1993, founder of The Jordan Company, a private investment firm, and the Chicago-based holding company Jordan Industries Inc. Among his many philanthropic activities are generous contributions to Notre Dame, including the Jordan Auditorium in the Mendoza College of Business building.
— William Kennedy, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Ironweed and five other critically acclaimed novels set in his hometown of Albany, New York. He coscripted the 1986 film The Cotton Club with Francis Ford Coppola and the film version of Ironweed. He is a professor of English at the University of Albany and director of the New York State Writers Institute.
— Archbishop Giuseppe Pittau, S.J., secretary of the Congregation for Catholic Education, which oversees Catholic schools, including universities and seminaries, around the world. He was president of Sophia University in Tokyo, provincial of the Society of Jesus in Japan and rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
— Sara Martinez Tucker, president and chief executive officer of the National Hispanic Scholarship Fund, which has awarded more than $31 million to some 32,000 students since its establishment in 1975. She served for 16 years in a variety of management positions with AT&T, ultimately becoming the company’s first Hispanic woman executive. She was selected “Hispanic of the Year” for 2001 by Hispanic magazine.
— Andrew J. Viterbi, a leading contributor to communications theory and its industrial applications, president of Viterbi Group, LLC, a San Diego-based firm that advises and invests in startup companies, predominantly in the wireless communications and network infrastructure fields. He was the co-founder of Qualcomm Inc., developer and manufacturer of mobile satellite communications and digital wireless telephony.