雅美途's Notes: There were a total of nine individuals who
received the honorary degree from this year’s Yale commencement, two of them,
Steven Chu (朱棣文) and Zhang Yimou (張藝謀), are well known in the Chinese community. I have to
manually type the complete citations on their honorary degrees from a book in
which everyone had a copy during the ceremony and I include them for your
further reading:
“Since
the commencement of 1702, certain distinguished persons, selected by the Yale
Corporation, have received honorary degrees. The provost announces the name of
each recipient, the senior marshal and corporation marshal place a hood over
the shoulders of the recipient, and the President reads a citation and confers
the degree.”
Yale honorary degree citations for 朱棣文 and 張藝謀
Doctor of Science
STEVEN CHU is the U.S. Secretary of Energy.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for work with his colleagues
at Bell Laboratories. He has also served on the faculty of Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Secretary Chu’s parents emigrated from
China
to study in the United States. His father was educated at MIT in chemical
engineering, and his mother studied economics. He and his brothers grew up in
academic settings, with aunts and uncles who had Ph.D’s in science and
engineering, so it was assumed that he would pursue an academic career.
Secretary Chu has called himself the “academic black sheep” of his family since
he was slow in finding his scientific gift. In high school, he developed an
interest in sports and taught himself to play tennis by reading a book. In his
senior year, he encountered a teacher who inspired his interest in physics. He
went on to the University
of Rochester and received his bachelor’s degree in math and physics.
Intending to pursue theoretical physics, he enrolled in the doctoral program at
the University
of California, Berkeley.
In the course of his studies, he returned to his early fascination with
experimental physics and began to work with lasers and high-energy physics.
After graduation from Berkeley in 1978, he
went to work at Bell Laboratories with a group of young scientists who were
encouraged and supported in carrying out cutting-edge research. While at Bell
Labs, he worked with a colleague on the previously impossible task of obtaining
accurate measurements of quantum electrodynamic corrections to an atomic
system. In 1983 he was appointed head of the Quantum Electronics Research
Department; his work focused on the use of laser cooling to trap atoms with
light. Trapping atoms with this method allows scientists to study, with great
accuracy, individual atoms that exist in the air and to determine their inner
structure. He and his colleagues received the Nobel Prize for this work, which
has led to insights into the interaction of matter and radiation and a variety
of applications in such areas as spectroscopy, atomic clocks, atomic
interferometers, optics, lithography, and gravitational measurements.
After nine years at Bell Labs, he returned to
academia, this time as Professor of Physics at Stanford University, where he served as chair of the Physics Department
from 1990 to 1993 and from 1999 to 2001. While at Stanford, Secretary Chu, together
with three other professors, initiated the Bio-X program, which focuses on
interdisciplinary research in biology and medicine. In 2004 he returned to
Berkeley, this time as Professor of Physics and Molecular and
Cellular Biology and Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
President Barack Obama tapped him as the twelfth Secretary of Energy in 2009.
Secretary Chu is an advocate for research
into alternate energy and nuclear power and has become a powerful and respected
voice in the debate on climate change. He is a member of the National Academy
of Sciences, the American
Academy
of Arts and Sciences, the American philosophical
Society, and the Academia Sinica, and he is foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Science and the Korean Academy of Science and Engineering.
Doctor of Fine Arts
ZHANG YIMOU is a Chinese filmmaker and theatrical designer who captivated an
international audience with the spectacular opening and closing ceremonies that
he created for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. His first films gained global
critical acclaim for their accomplished direction and gifted cinematography,
and his recent films have been international success.
Zhang was born in Xi’an, Shaanxi,
in China just a year after Mao Zedong’s
Communist force defeated the Kumintang Army, in which his father had served as
an officer. Zhang attended high school in his home city until his studies were
interrupted by the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, and he was forced to work
first as a farm hand and then in a textile factory. There he was exposed to the
highly propagandistic films and theatrical productions of that period.
Nonetheless, he developed a love of film and, as a young adult, managed to buy
a camera, raising the money by selling his blood for five months.
At the end of the Cultural Revolution, the
Beijing Film
Academy reopened, and Zhang matriculated in its
first post-Mao class, joining a group of filmmakers, the so-called Fifth
Generation, who received international notice for their work. He was the
cinematographer on Yellow Earth (1984), which launched the Fifth
Generation’s fame. He added acting to cinematography with Old Well and
won the Best Actor award at the 1987 Tokyo International Film Festival. The following
year, he embarked on his own first feature, directing Red Sorghum, which
portrayed the plight of a young girl sold as a bride to a leprous old man in
traditional Chinese society in the 1920s. The film established him as a
director who would challenge the status quo and tackle difficult themes of
social repression, authority, and rebellion. Ju Dou (1990), which
reflected his own experience as a textile worker under a repressive regime, was
banned by the government, as were his next three films: Raise the Red
Lantern (1991), The story of Qiu Ju (1993), and To live
(1994). These films addressed difficult aspects of Chinese society: power
struggles, bureaucracy and patriarchy, and the excesses of the Cultural
Revolution.
Zhang’s next film, Shanghai Triad
(1995), received a warmer reception in China and
was selected to open the New York Film Festival, although Chinese officials did
not permit that. Zhang’s subsequent films, though not as directly
confrontational, have still addressed the contradictions and complexity of
Chinese society in particular, and life in general. Not One Less
(1998), a highly realist work about the need for educational reform in rural
China, was particularly well received. Zhang is a prolific
filmmaker, with twenty-three films to his credit as director or
cinematographer. His biggest hit, Hero, can claim to be the first
foreign film ever to have topped the U.S.weekly
box office rankings, playing at more than 2,000 theaters here in late summer
2004. Zhang has also directed opera. His acclaimed version of Puccini’s Turandot
played at the Forbidden City, Beijing,
with Zubin Mehta as conductor; he also designed the production of Tan Dun’s
opera The First Emperor, which had its world premiere at the
Metropolitan Opera in 2006.
Zhang received the Golden Bear Award for Best
Picture at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival and twice received the
Golden Lion Award at the Venice International Film Festival (1992 and 1999). He
has received six Academy Award nominations. After his accomplishments at the
Beijing Olympics, he was runner-up for Time magazine’s 2008 Person of
the Year.
Posted 星期日, 05/30/2010 - 18:42 at
www.tongjiyiren.com
