Benjamin Rush Award

The Benjamin Rush Award recognizes outstanding achievement by a member of the business or government community. The recipient presents a public lecture addressing the relationship of a liberal-arts education to the business or government world. While visiting campus, the Rush Award recipient typically meets with students, faculty and other members of the college community to discuss relevant issues.

The recipient of the award is presented with an honorarium and with a bronze medal that bears the likeness of Benjamin Rush, the prominent Colonial-era Philadelphia physician who was a key founder of the college and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

The first Benjamin Rush Award was presented in 1985 to the board chairman and chief executive officer of CBS. Recipients have included three other corporate executives; the minister of trade, industry and energy of the Republic of Korea; the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget; the deputy secretary general of the United Nations; and the chairman of the Board of Mutual Life Insurance of America.

• Donald Graham, chairman of The Graham Group and founder of Graham Engineering (2010)
• William F. Greenlee, president and CEO of The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences and chairman and CEO of the Health Research & Education Foundation (2009)
• Derek Hathaway (2008)
• Stephen Adler (2007)
  Editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek Magazine.
• Roger W. Sant (2006)
  Co-founder and former chairman of AES Corporation.
• Lawrence Bossidy (2005)
  Former CEO of Allied Signal Corporation
• Edward Gramlich (2004)
  Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
• Arthur Levitt (2003)
  Former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission
• William Flynn (2002)
  Board chairman of Mutual of America
• Louise Fréchette (2001)
  United Nations Deputy Secretary-General
• Curt Weldon (2000)
  U.S. Congressman