Academic Senate honors Princeton's Shapiro

The Clark Kerr Medal will be bestowed on thinker, writer, and higher-ed leader Harold Shapiro.

21 January 2009

BERKELEY — The awards committee of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate has selected Harold Shapiro, a former president of both Princeton and the University of Michigan, to receive the 2008 Clark Kerr Medal for Distinguished Leadership in Higher Education. The Clark Kerr Award is the highest honor bestowed by the Berkeley Division.

Shapiro, a professor emeritus in Princeton's Department of Economics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, was selected in 2003 as the first Kerr Lecturer on the Role of Higher Education in Society, a program established under the aegis of the campus's Center for Studies in Higher Education by then-UC President Richard Atkinson. Among his publications on this theme are A Larger Sense of Purpose: Higher Education and Society (Princeton, 2005) and, as co-editor with William Bowen, Universities and Their Leadership (Princeton, 1998).

The recipient of honorary degrees from at least 14 universities, Shapiro has been elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, among many other learned societies. He served as chair of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission under President Bill Clinton (1996-2001), and as a member and vice chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology during the George H.W. Bush administration. He has also served as chair of (among other entities) the Association of American Universities, the Council of Presidents of State Colleges and Universities, and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the U.S. Particle Physics Program, in addition to his membership on numerous commissions, councils, boards, and panels.

The Kerr Medal will be presented to Shapiro at a private dinner event on Jan. 27.