College announces honorary degree recipients

President Richard Levao has announced the Carla Harris, Joyce Carol Oates, and Rep. Bill Pascrell will receive honorary degrees at the 137^th commencement exercises on May 27, 2010.

Carla Harris

Carla Harris is a managing director at Morgan Stanley Investment Management where she heads the emerging manager platform and provides investment advice to corporations, public pension plans, foundations and endowments.

Ms Harris has been involved in investment banking since 1987 when she began in the mergers and acquisitions department at Morgan Stanley. She has risen through the ranks of the company and has been a senior member of the equity syndicate desk, executing IPOs for UPS, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Ariba, Redback, General Motors; and the largest biotechnology common stock transaction in U.S. history, the $3.2 billion transaction for Immunex Corporation. She formerly head the equity capital markets effort for the consumer and retail industries and is responsible for Equity Private Placements. She has extensive industry experience in the technology, media, retail, telecommunications, transportation, industrial and healthcare sectors.

A graduate of Harvard University with an AB in economics magna cum laude, Ms Harris earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and has received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Marymount Manhattan College.

Among her citations are Fortune Magazine’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Black Executive in Corporate America, U.S. Bankers Top 25 Most Powerful Women in Non-Bank Finance (2009), Black Enterprise’s Top 75 Most Powerful Women in Business (2010), Black Enterprise Magazine’s Top 50 African Americans on Wall Street, Essence Magazine’s The 50 Women Who are Shaping the World, Ebony’s 15 Corporate Women at the Top, Harvard Business Men’s Forum Woman of the Year 2004.

Ms Harris is actively involved in her community and heartily believes that “we are blessed so that we can be a blessing to someone else.”  As a result, Carla has funded the Carla Harris Scholarship at Harvard University and at Bishop Kenny High School in Jacksonville, Florida.

She is the chair of the Board of the Morgan Stanley Foundation and sits on the boards of the Food Bank for NYC, The Executive Leadership Council, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO), A Better Chance, Inc., The Apollo Theatre Foundation, Mt. Sinai Hospital, Xavier University, Maya Angelou Research for Minority Health and was a member of the Board of Overseers’ Committee on University Resources, Harvard University.  Ms. Harris is a member of the National Social Action Commission of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated.  She has received the Bert King Award from the Harvard Business School African American Alumni Association, the 2005 Women’s Professional Achievement Award from Harvard University, the Pierre Toussaint Medallion from the Office of Black Ministry of the Archdiocese of New York, the Women of Power Award given by the National Urban League, the Bill and Camille Cosby Award given by Associated Black Charities, the NASP New York’s Wall Street Hall of Fame Award, Blazing New Trails Award from the Robert A. Toigo Foundation and many other awards. 

In her other life, Ms Harris is a singer, and has released her second CD, a gospel album entitled, Joy Is Waiting, which has been featured on BET Nightly News.  Her first CD entitled, Carla’s First Christmas, was a bestseller on Amazon.com in New York and in record stores, and was featured on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather in his American Dream segment.  She is also the author of the newly released book, Expect to Win (Hudson Press). She is an active member of the St. Charles Gospelites of the St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Harlem, N.Y. and the Mark Howell Singers whom she invited to sing with her at Carnegie Hall.  Carla has performed in the New York area for over a decade in club appearances, off-off Broadway plays, and fundraisers. 

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates has often expressed an intense nostalgia for the time and place of her childhood, and her working-class upbringing is lovingly recalled in much of her fiction. Growing up in the countryside outside of Lockport, New York, she attended a one-room schoolhouse in the elementary grades. As a small child, she told stories instinctively by way of drawing and painting before learning how to write. After receiving the gift of a typewriter at age fourteen, she began consciously training herself, "writing novel after novel" throughout high school and college.

Success came early: while attending Syracuse University on scholarship, she won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. After graduating as valedictorian, she earned an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin, where she met and married Raymond J. Smith after a three-month courtship. In 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, a city whose erupting social tensions suggested to Oates a microcosm of the violent American reality. Her finest early novel, them, along with a steady stream of other novels and short stories, grew out of her Detroit experience. "Detroit, my 'great' subject," she has written, "made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am—for better or worse."

Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada. During this immensely productive decade, she published new books at the rate of two or three per year, all the while maintaining a full-time academic career. Oates quickly became one of the most respected and honored writers in the United States. Asked repeatedly how she managed to produce so much excellent work in a wide variety of genres, she gave variations of the same basic answer, telling the New York Times in 1975 that "I have always lived a very conventional life of moderation, absolutely regular hours, nothing exotic, no need, even, to organize my time. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word."

In 1978, Oates moved to Princeton, New Jersey. She now is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Creative Writing in the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Shortly after arriving in Princeton, Oates began writing Bellefleur, the first in a series of ambitious Gothic novels that simultaneously reworked established literary genres and re-imagined large swaths of American history. Published in the early 1980s, these novels marked a departure from the psychological realism of her earlier work. But Oates returned powerfully to the realistic mode with ambitious family chronicles You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, novels of female experience: Solstice, and Marya : A Life, and a series of pseudonymous suspense novels published under the name Rosamond Smith. As novelist John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."

The dramatic trajectory of Oates's career, especially her amazing rise from an economically straitened childhood to her current position as one of the world's most eminent authors, suggests a feminist, literary version of the mythic pursuit and achievement of the American dream. Yet for all her success and fame, Oates's daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast. Not surprisingly, a quotation from that other prolific American writer, Henry James, is affixed to the bulletin board over her desk, and perhaps best expresses her own ultimate view of her life and writing: "We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."