Gates, Wallach named Bates trustees

Author and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and New York City businessman James G. Wallach have been appointed to the Bates College Board of Trustees, according to Bates President Donald W. Harward.

Gates, who received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Bates in 1994, is the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Humanities and professor of English at Harvard University. He also chairs the department of Afro-American studies at Harvard and is director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute.

The author of 11 books, Gates has been awarded the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolfe Book Award, the Lillian Smith Book Award, the George Polk Award for social commentary, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award, the Zora Neale Hurston Prize and the faculty prize of the Yale Afro- American Cultural Center. He has been named a Woodrow Wilson National Fellow, a MacArthur Prize Fellow and a Mellon Fellow. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Lincoln Center Theatre board of directors, the African Literature Association, the Modern Language Association, the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, the College Language Association, the Caribbean Studies Association, the Council on Foreign Relations and Phi Beta Kappa.

Gates graduated summa cum laude from Yale University and received master’s and doctoral degrees from Cambridge University.

Wallach is chairman and CEO of Central National- Gottesman Inc., a pulp and paper sales and securities company with offices in the U.S. and around the world. Central National-Gottesman Inc. also distributes printing papers through warehouse facilities from Philadelphia, Pa., to Portland, Maine. Wallach graduated from Bates with a degree in economics in 1964. He attended Deerfield (Mass.) Academy and received an M.B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966 before serving in the Marine Corps Reserves.