The Conferring of Honorary Degrees
Stanley N. Katz

Citation Presented by Neil B. Weissman
Provost and Dean of the College

Stanley N. Katz, we honor you today as a champion of engaged, socially responsible scholarship and education.

You graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and continued your graduate work there as well, receiving masters and doctoral degrees in American History. You proceeded to teach at a series of distinguished institutions, including the University of Wisconsin, the University of Chicago—where you also served as associate dean of the Law School, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and Princeton University as the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty. Simultaneously, you launched a program of scholarship, initially on the early history of American law and politics, that to date has yielded nearly one hundred publications. Most academicians would proudly call these achievements a career; for you they were only a beginning.

The image of scholarly life in American popular culture, an image unfortunately shared by many academicians themselves, is that of solitary, owlish actors, operating independently in archives, libraries and classrooms. In fact, the scholarly community is just that—a community, whose well-being demands resources, organization, and, yes, vision and conscience. It is here that you have made your most lasting contribution. You served in a series of increasingly significant positions, such as President of the Organization of American Historians. Your rise through the associational world culminated in your selection as President of the American Council of Learned Societies, our nation’s leading organization in humanistic scholarship and education. During your eleven years in that post, you made a venerable organization into a vigorous one. You were, as one co-worker puts it, “positively indefatigable” in pressing forward such initiatives as publication of the American National Biography and collaborations between educators in K-12 schools and those in colleges and universities. Especially resonant at Dickinson, you distinguished yourself by your commitment to global nature of the academy. In particular, under the principle that “scholarship be insulated from politics,” you have led in establishing contacts with China, Vietnam, and—most recently—Cuba.

Your insistence that learning be free of political interference is not a call to narrowness or indifference. On the contrary, you have been a powerful voice for scholarship infused with and guided by vision and social responsibility. Borrowing a phrase to capture your vitalizing effect on the work of others, one colleague remarked, “when Stanley comes into the room, everyone becomes brave.” This courage to call educators to a higher standard characterized your tenure at ACLS and guides your present endeavors as Co-Director of the Center for Arts and Public Policy Research. It informs your current writing on conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, and South Africa. And it has prompted you to pen provocative articles on higher education including “Choosing Justice Over Excellence” and “The Cheated Undergraduate.” This latter piece calls upon faculty to de-emphasize disciplinary specialization in favor of an issue-orientation that prepares students for the demands of democratic citizenship. As you put it, “One-dimensional training does not equip students for a three-dimensional world.” We take this call seriously at Dickinson, and we intend to continue the dialogue on this topic you began with us at yesterday’s Commencement weekend colloquium into the future.

Mr. President, it is a privilege to present Stanley N. Katz for the honorary degree of Doctor of Liberal Arts.

Conferring of the degree by William G. Durden
President

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