The ICAS Bulletin
Institute for Corean-American Studies, Inc.
MARTIN MEYERSON
ICAS Distinguished Fellow
Dear Friend:
We are pleased to share with you that Martin Meyerson has become an
ICAS Distinguished Fellow.
Martin Meyerson, the President of the University of Pennsylvania from the
summer of 1970 to early 1981, is now President Emeritus and University
Professor Emeritus. He is a member of boards or councils of Penn's Institute
for Research on Higher Education (chair), Friends of the Library
(chair), the University Press (chair for a dozen years), Mahoney
Institute of Neurosciences, and the Lauder Institute of Management and
International Studies. He headed the program and the policy review
group of the University's Fels Center of Government for over a decade,
until 1996. With the former Penn Trustees' chairman, he was co-chair of
the University's 250th Anniversary, which was celebrated throughout 1990
and included a national public television series on the changing globe
after the cold war. His earlier professorial and research appointments
at Penn were in the years 1952 to 1957.
When the building for the University's Graduate School of Fine Arts was
named Meyerson Hall by the Trustees, their resolution, recognizing his
aim of "one university", read in part: "The extraordinary intellectual
and physical integration of the University in which we take such pride
is in a large measure a tribute to the leadership of Martin Meyerson".
The chairman of the Trustees commented: "No one in the history of our
institution has done so much to internationalize the University." During
his presidency, his achievements included the union of separate units
into a faculty of arts and sciences, initiating a living-learning system
of college houses, undergraduate emphases including the freshman seminar
program, developing a responsibility center budgetary and planning
pattern with the academic deans and the University hospitals, remaking
the University's physical center and conducting one of the largest
academic fund drives in the country up to that time. The University has
established the Meyerson Professorship of Urbanism in honor of the
President Emeritus and his wife, Margy Ellin Meyerson.
Starting in 1986 and until 1999, he was the part-time president of
FISCITT , the Foundation for the International Exchange of Scientific
and Cultural Information by Telecommunications, which was chartered in
Switzerland and then in the United States as well. It was a consortium
of research universities and its various international teleconferences
joined scientists, scholars and public figures by video and computer.
Between 1981 and 1985, Martin Meyerson served as chairman of the board
of the Institute of International Education, which administers Fulbright
and many international exchanges through its 20 worldwide offices; he is
a board member there of over 25 years' standing. Having acted in the
early eighties as president of the board of the International
Association of Universities, he has been an Honorary President since
1985.
He began an academic career in 1948 to 1952 as an assistant professor of
the social
sciences at the University or Chicago, in its undergraduate College and
its graduate division. In 1957, at the age of 34, he became the first
tenured Frank Backus Williams professor of city planning and urban
research at Harvard University, and in 1963 was acting dean of that
university's Graduate School of Design. From 1958 to 1963, he was the
first director of the M.I.T -Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, a
research group drawn from various disciplines working on theoretical and
applied problems in the United States and elsewhere, including
Venezuela. He was appointed professor and dean of the College of
Environmental Design of the University of California at Berkeley in
1963, and in 1965 was the interim chancellor of the Berkeley campus at
a time of major student unrest.
Martin Meyerson became president of the State University of New York at
Buffalo in 1966 and professor of public policy. Before leaving there to
return to Pennsylvania, Time magazine featured him in a review of
campuses as one of four university presidents who "have done uncommonly
well". Referring to Berkeley, Time commented "he picked up the
smoldering pieces with uncommon skill, winning the admiration of faculty
and students"; and at Buffalo, it referred to his "major reforms". The
New York Times, in its "Man in the News" coverage when he became
president of Penn, called him an "educational innovator".
From 1969 to 1974, he chaired the Assembly on University Goals and
Governance, a
foundation-supported national effort to aid and improve higher
education. He has been a member of advisory bodies at Johns Hopkins
University, Harvard University, the University of London, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hampshire College, Brandeis
University, UCLA, the University of Oklahoma and Washington University,
and was on the boards of the Niagara University, the Hebrew University,
the American College, the Curtis Institute of Music and the United World
College (New Mexico). He serves on the boards of the American Schools
of Oriental Research (honorary), Tel Aviv University, and starting in
1993, a member of the board of overseers of Koc University in Istanbul,
Turkey. An original member of the Business-Higher Education Forum, he
was a director of the American Council on Aid to Education, the
Educational Facilities Laboratory, the College Board and the Open
University Foundation (U.S./U.K.). He held appointments with the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (Director's Visitor) and as
an Overseas Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University.
Martin Meyerson has worked on problems of regional, national and
cultural development for governments and institutions in various
countries. He was a member for its duration of five years of the
six-person United Nations Mission on Urbanization and Industrialization
in Japan, and chaired until 1993 the advisory council for the
international U.N. Centre for Regional Development based in Nagoya. He
also served the United Nations as an advisor in Indonesia, helping to
establish a program to aid in development there and in other South Asian
countries, and in Yugoslavia (the U.S. member of the mission to rebuild
urban Macedonia after its devastation by an earthquake). He was a
consultant in West African countries, to the government of Spain and to
the Governor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area and an advisor on
programming for France's Institut National de la Communication
Audiovisuelle. He was a founder and served for a score of years as the
International Governor of the research Centre for Environmental Studies
based in London, and is a board member of the Foreign Policy Research
Institute and a Franklin Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Having
been a founder in 1988 of the International Centre for the Study of East
Asian Development, located in Kitakyushu, Japan, he has continued as its
overseas board member. Since 1995, he has been a board member of the
International Literacy Institute.
At ACTION, the American Council To Improve Our Neighborhoods (a national
movement of business, professional and civic leaders to enhance urban
communities), he was executive director and earlier, research director.
He has served on task forces for Presidents of the United States of both
parties, on expert groups for Congress, and on councils of the National
Aeronautics and Space Agency, the Census Bureau, thc Electric Power
Research Institute and other agencies. He collaborated on a national
study of corporate education and training, and was a member of the
Senior Executives Council of the Conference Board.
Previously, he was head of planning and development for the Chicago
Housing Authority, and served on the staffs of Chicago's Michael Reese
Hospital (some of his work on that city's South Side was exhibited at
New York' s Museum of Modern Art) and the Philadelphia City Planning
Commission. In California, he was a Commissioner of the Bay Conservation
and Development Commission.
In Philadelphia, among other assignments he has been on the boards of
the University City Science Center, the Greater Philadelphia Urban
Affairs Coalition and the Bicentennial Corporation. He is a board
member of the Museum of Art and the International House Center, and
since its founding in 1988 has chaired the International Selection
Commission for the annual Philadelphia Liberty Medal.
A few of the recipients of the cash award and Medal, on each July 4,
were Justice Thurgood Marshal, Presidents de Klerk, Nelson Mandela and
Dae Jung Kim and in 1998, Senator George Mitchell, for his chairmanship
of the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland.
Martin Meyerson has been a long-standing board member of the Aspen
Institute and the United States Committee on the Constitutional System
and until recently, the Salzburg Seminar (U.S./Austria), where he is now
a Senior Fellow. Since 1993, he has chaired the board of the Monell
Chemical Senses Center -- the main institution for studies of taste and
smell -- succeeding Lewis Thomas.
He was president of the Klein Foundation and an advisor to the Ford and
other foundations. He serves on the board of the Panasonic Foundation
established by the Matsushita Corporation (Japan/U.S.), and in 1996
succeeded Marconi's daughter as chair of the Guglielmo Marconi
International Fellowship Foundation (communication and information
sciences); it is located at Columbia University. Professor Meyerson is
an American advisor for the Japan Foundation/Center for Global
Partnership. He chaired the annual Lita Annenberg Hazen Trust Biomedical
Workshops for a decade through 1991 (the three most recent of them were
on the mind and the brain).
He has also been a director of the Afro-American Film Foundation, the
Niagara Institute in Canada and the Annenberg Theater. He served on
international juries to select architects and artists for projects in
Skopje, San Francisco, Boston and elsewhere. He chaired the Western New
York Nuclear Research Center and the Council of Presidents for the
Universities Research Association, which operated the Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, was a member of the Air Conservation Commission
(initiated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
of which he is a Fellow), and was on the boards of the Academy of
Religion and Mental Health and of the Design Science Institute with
Buckminster Fuller.
Martin Meyerson was a director of the Saint Gobain Corporation, with its
U.S. companies CertainTeed and Norton; and the Fidelity and First
Fidelity Bancorporations (now it is First Union). He was on the board of
the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company, and until 1998, Universal Health
Services. He is a director of Avatar Holdings, Inc. (land development
and utilities) and a past director of the Scott Paper Company (1971 to
1993), the Marine Midland Bank, the Real Estate Research Corporation
and UNI-COLL Corporation (computing). He was senior advisor for ten
years to Arthur D. Little, Inc., a technical and management research
firm.
Martin Meyerson is principal author of the following books: Politics,
Planning and the Public Interest (Free Press/Macmillan); Housing, People
and Cities (McGraw Hill); Faces of the Metropolis (Random House);
Boston: The Job Ahead (Harvard University Press); and Gladly Learn and
Gladly Teach (University of Pennsylvania Press).
He was editor of Conscience of the City, a book sponsored by the journal
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Daedalus, on whose board
of editors he served from the mid-1970s until 1990. He has been on the
board of editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (from 1980 through
1998) and of scholarly and professiona1journals. He edited a book series
on community development for McGraw-Hill, and various of his articles,
books and reports have been translated and published in other countries.
He organized and moderated a U.S. Bicentennial series on cultural and
policy issues for Westinghouse Broadcasting.
Martin Meyerson received his B.A. from Columbia University's College,
and his M.C.P. from Harvard (the Wheelwright Fellow). He holds 23
honorary ScD, PhD (h.c.), LLD, DFA, DHL, DHUM and D Litt degrees from
universities and colleges in the United States, including Penn, and
abroad from Shiraz University in Iran, Queen's University in Canada, the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Edinburgh in the
U.K. He is an Honorary Professor at the National University of
Asunción, and in China in 1996 became an Honorary Professor of
Beijing's Peking
University. For an honorary doctorate from Ohio State University in
1991, the citation read, "Scholar, author, educator, administrator.
Diplomat, and public servant, he has brought to each discipline an
exceptional intellect and an enlightened leadership." A 1994 honorary
degree citation emphasized his "lifelong commitment to teaching", and
"to his students". The Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning
presented him the annual award of Distinguished Educator at its meeting
in Toronto.
He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of
the American Philosophical Society (and its executive committee), the
Council on Foreign Relations, the National Academy of Education and an
honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa. He is an Academician of the Acadámie
Europáene des Sciences des Arts et des Lettres. Martin Meyerson was the
special award recipient, for his theoretical and practical
contributions, at a commemorative meeting of the American Institute of
City Planners, of which he is a past governor, The Philippine Women's
University established the Martin and Margy Meyerson Chair for
International Relations, citing the achievements of "that remarkable
couple".
He received the Einstein Award of the American Technion Society and the
John Jay Award from Columbia University. He was honored by the
University of California, Berkeley, "For Distinguished Achievement". He
has been decorated a Knight-Commander of the Republic of Italy, in 1988
a "Chevalier de l'Ordre National de Merite" of France, and in 1989, the
Emperor of Japan honored him with the decoration, the "Order of the
Rising Sun". ("For over 30 years", the award indicated, "he has
contributed to the regional reconstruction of Japan and the education
of Japanese academic researchers.") Another recent citation read:
"Herman Melville suggested that Benjamin Franklin, founder of the
University of Pennsylvania, was a Jack-of-all-trades and mastered all of
them; one can match Franklin, Martin Meyerson as a successor to him at
Penn certainly has come close."
Thank you.
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Sincerely,
Sang Joo Kim / signed
Sr. Fellow & Executive Vice President |
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