An internationally renowned pianist based at Bates, a leading scholar on the intersection of medicine and race, and a distinguished MIT researcher and inventor will speak and receive honorary degrees during Bates College’s 145th commencement ceremony at 10 a.m. Sunday, May 29, on the college’s historic Quad, at Campus Avenue and College Street.

The event concludes the undergraduate careers of the approximately 440 members of the Bates class of 2011, representing 35 states and 42 countries.

The 2011 Bates honorands are (in alphabetical order):

Frank Glazer, Bates Artist in Residence and Lecturer in Music

Internationally known for his artistry and dedication, beloved for his generosity and celebrated for his artistic longevity, Frank Glazer made his concert debut on a vaudeville stage in Milwaukee in 1927, when he was 12 years old. The event began a performing career that’s still in progress.

A protégé of legendary pianist Artur Schnabel and composer Arnold Schoenberg, Glazer made his New York debut in 1936 at Town Hall, and his orchestral debut as soloist three years later with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Koussevitzky. Glazer’s career hit its stride following World War II military service and, more to the point, a two-year effort to reinvent his piano technique. This study produced a relaxed, economical style central to both Glazer’s artistry and his astonishing musical longevity in a field where hand problems are endemic.

Glazer began teaching at the Eastman School of Music in 1965, and in 1977 came to Bates, where he became an artist-in-residence in 1980. He has played countless solo, chamber ensemble and orchestral concerts; made more than 60 recordings, including two released by Bates in 2010; hosted his own television program in the 1950s; and, in Maine, co-founded the New England Piano Quartette and two chamber music series. Glazer’s recent performances at Bates include a season-long survey of all 32 Beethoven sonatas in 2009–10 and, early this year, three “Sundays with Schubert.”

In a 2006 interview, Glazer said: “I don’t know what retirement means. I’ve worked all my life to get to this point, where I like the sounds I hear.”

Evelynn M. Hammonds, Dean of Harvard College

Considered one of the leading scholars in the field of the intersection of medicine and race, Hammonds began her tenure as dean of Harvard College in 2008. Prior to her appointment she served as Harvard University’s first Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity. She is also the Barbara Gutman Rosenkrantz Professor of History of Science and of African and African American Studies.

Hammonds joined the Harvard faculty in 2002 after teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was also the founding director of the Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology and Medicine. Her scholarly interests include the history of scientific, medical, and sociopolitical concepts of race and sexuality, the history of disease and public health, gender in science and medicine, and African-American history. She is the author of “Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930,” many scholarly articles and the co-editor of “The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics” (MIT Press, 2008) with Rebecca M. Herzig of Bates.

Hammonds was named a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (2003–2005) by Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. She has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and a Fellow in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Hammonds earned a doctorate at Harvard in the Department of History of Science, a master’s in physics from MIT, a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a bachelor’s degree in physics from Spelman College.

Robert S. Langer, David H. Koch Institute Professor,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Langer is one of 14 Institute Professors at MIT — the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member. He has written more than 1,100 articles, and has approximately 760 patents issued or pending worldwide. His patents are licensed or sublicensed to more than 220 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies.

He served as a member of the United States Food and Drug Administration’s Science Board, the FDA’s highest advisory board, from 1995 to 2002, and as its chairman from 1999 to 2002.

In 1989 Langer was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1992 he was elected to both the National Academy of Engineering and to the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of very few people ever elected to all three United States National Academies and the youngest in history (at age 43) to ever receive this distinction.

Langer has received more than 180 major awards including the 2006 United States National Medal of Science and the 2008 Millennium Prize, the world’s largest technology prize. The citation for his 1996 Gairdner Foundation International Award noted that “there is general agreement that Dr. Langer pioneered the field of controlled drug release delivery systems (slow release oral systems, transdermal patches, injectable microspheres and slow release implants).”

He received his bachelor’s degree in 1970 from Cornell University and his doctorate in 1974 from MIT, both in chemical engineering.

“If you want to solve all the problems that we’re facing in this world, it’s unlikely that the people and ideas that got us to where we are will be the ones that are going to get us to a different place,” Segway inventor Dean Kamen told 464 graduates at Bates College’ 141st Commencement ceremony.

“It’s going to require new people with new ideas. And that would be you,” Kamen said in one of the ceremony’s biggest applause lines. (See the honorands’ addresses and citations, slide shows and videos).

Inventor-entrepreneur Kamen was one of four honorary degree recipients at the ceremony, which took place under gathering clouds on the college’s historic Quad. The other honorands were children’s book illustrator-author Eric Carle, actress-writer Anna Deavere Smith, and Corey Harris, a respected roots musician who graduated from Bates in 1991.

In her fifth Bates Commencement, President Elaine Tuttle Hansen led the ceremony. “This ceremony celebrates you, Bates graduates — your habits of mind and soul, and our enduring pride in you,” she said. Hansen concluded by asking the assembly to applaud the people — parents, grandparents, “special others” and faculty — who had done so much to support the students in their journey to this day.

The first of the day’s honorands, Carle may be best-known for his 1969 book The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which has eaten its way into the hearts of millions of children worldwide. Since Caterpillar, Carle has illustrated more than 70 books, many of them best-sellers and most of which he also wrote. More than 75 million copies of his books have been sold around the world.

Carle, who dropped out of school at 16, told the graduates of his “unerring confidence that, when I grew up, I would draw pictures.” He said, “I must warn you that following your dream comes with a price.” In his case, that price lay in not learning much about other subjects, such as math and Latin, that would have served him well later in life. “I regret that,” he said.

Carle also explained how he came to write Caterpillar, getting the idea as he punched holes in a stack of paper. “The holes made me think of a bookworm, and with the help of my good editor, the bookworm became a caterpillar” and the subject of his breakthrough book.

“You see, a good editor, a hole-puncher in good working order and a little bit of luck will take you a long way,” Carle said.

“I was asked to write a speech, but instead I’m just going to talk to you,” Harris began. Sixteen years after his own Bates graduation, the 38-year-old musician returned with a resume that includes well-regarded CDs exploring the spectrum of African-influenced New World music and a central role in a episode of Martin Scorsese’s 2003 PBS series The Blues.

Harris recounted his very first visit to Bates, when this college in a small Maine city seemed like “an outpost. I felt like I was somewhere in the North Pole.” Coming from what he regarded as an insular community in Colorado, “it’s funny that I chose Bates to see the world,” he told the graduates. “But, when I look at you all, I can see that you are the world.”

Harris credited Bates with increasing the diversity of its campus community, while reminding the graduates that in his view, if one considers the world as a whole, “there’s no such thing as a minority.”

He said, “It was at Bates that I got to interact with people I never thought I’d interact with . . . This was my jumping-off point to discover the world.”

Kamen’s Segway personal transporter is the best-known of a string of sophisticated innovations that more typically aim to improve the lives of medical patients and people lacking access to basic necessities of life. College graduates are often exhorted to go fix the world, but Kamen was unusually blunt about what needs fixing and how the worst problems stack up against the worries that graduates may have, such as how to repay college loans.

Kamen reminded his listeners that “a billion people live on less than a dollar a day. And four billion — that’s two-thirds of humanity — on less than two dollars a day.”

He pointed out that the people with the education and privilege to be effective leaders are an “incredibly small minority of this planet. They have a huge advantage in the leverage they have and the control they have.”

In the traditional verbiage that colleges use in presenting honorary degrees, honorands are accorded all the “rights, privileges and responsibilities ” that pertain to the honor. Kamen had opened his address by saying he wanted to know about those privileges. But Smith, known for writing and performing plays that comment on American race relations and other social issues, jokingly responded, “I still want to know what the rights are.”

Taking community as a theme, Smith asked the students to think of community as the people not just close by, but the ones they can possible reach. “What’s so important is, how long is your reach?”

“Many of us have been educated to celebrate our own identities and to celebrate that which we understand because that’s what we came from,” she said. But she challenged her listeners to “come out of your safe houses of identity . . . to a state that I call the crossroads of ambiguity, where there is no house, where it is not safe.”

She recounted how, as someone who has stayed in plenty of hotels, she saw no point in opening the curtains when she entered her room on at the start of her visit here. Later she changed her mind and opened the curtains, realizing that daylight would help her get up in the morning.

“When I woke up this morning I saw that extraordinary waterfall,” the Androscoggin River’s Great Falls between Auburn and Lewiston. “Even at the moment when we think we know something, if we stop to open the curtains, to open our eyes, to open our hearts in another way, there just might be that waterfall. And that waterfall might lead to a new thought or a new spirit.”

The 464 members of Bates’ class of 2007 consisted of 249 women and 215 men. Fifty-five were Maine residents, out of 249 New England residents. One hundred eighty five came from other states, and 30 from other countries.

The most popular subjects in which members of the class of 2007 majored were psychology, with 51 graduates; political science, with 50; and economics, with 41. Fifty-two students took double majors.

At Bates College on Monday, famed cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich let his instrument do the talking.

Instead of addressing the audience of about 1,000, Rostropovich, the retired music director of the National Symphony in Washington, performed the Sarabande in C Major from Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello after accepting an honorary doctor of humane letters degree during Bates’ annual Founders Day Convocation. His listeners responded with a standing ovation.

“I have been very touched and excited by my reception here,” Rostropovich said before sitting down to play. “My English is not enough; I’ll use my cello now.”

Rostropovich came to the United States from the former Soviet Union in 1977. He had been ostracized in his native country because of his support for such dissidents as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but he has visited Russia several times in recent years to raise funds for earthquake relief, war orphans and historic landmarks.

He was music director of the National Symphony from 1977 to 1994.

Bates President Donald W. Harward cited Rostropovich for “giving voice to dissent” and for his music’s “majesty and evoking what is noble in us all.”

The convocation marked the 141st anniversary of Bates’ founding in April 1855.