Princeton President Emeritus Harold T. Shapiro has received the 2008 Clark Kerr Medal for Distinguished Leadership in Higher Education. He was awarded the medal at a private event in Berkeley, Calif., Jan. 27.
The award recognizes an individual who has made an extraordinary and distinguished contribution to the advancement of higher education. It was established in 1968 by members of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate as a tribute to the leadership and legacy of Kerr, a former Berkeley chancellor and University of California president.
Past recipients of the award include former California Gov. and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, renowned American historian and race-relations scholar John Hope Franklin, Berkeley Nobel laureate Yuan T. Lee, and past Berkeley chancellors Ira Michael Heyman and Chang-Lin Tien.
Shapiro served as president of Princeton from 1988 to 2001 and as president of the University of Michigan from 1980 to 1987. He currently is a professor in Princeton's Department of Economics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
In 2003, he was selected as the first Kerr Lecturer on the Role of Higher Education in Society, a program established under the aegis of Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education. He assembled the lectures into a book, "A Larger Sense of Purpose: Higher Education and Society," published by Princeton University Press in 2005.
Shapiro served as chair of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission under President Bill Clinton and as a member and vice chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology during the George H.W. Bush administration. He has chaired the boards of the Association of American Universities, the Consortium on Financing Higher Education and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and has served on the boards of the American Council on Education, the Educational Testing Service, the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. He also has been a member of numerous other commissions, councils, boards and panels.
