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耶鲁授予朱棣文和张艺谋荣誉学位的评语

(2010-10-30 16:29:12) 下一个

雅美途's Notes: There were a total of nine individuals who received the honorary degree from this year’s Yale commencement, two of them, Steven Chu (朱棣文) and Zhang Yimou (张艺谋), are well known in the Chinese community. I have to manually type the complete citations on their honorary degrees from a book in which everyone had a copy during the ceremony and I include them for your further reading:

“Since the commencement of 1702, certain distinguished persons, selected by the Yale Corporation, have received honorary degrees. The provost announces the name of each recipient, the senior marshal and corporation marshal place a hood over the shoulders of the recipient, and the President reads a citation and confers the degree.”

Yale honorary degree citations for 朱棣文 and 张艺谋 

Doctor of Science

STEVEN CHU is the U.S. Secretary of Energy. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for work with his colleagues at Bell Laboratories. He has also served on the faculty of Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Secretary Chu’s parents emigrated from China to study in the United States. His father was educated at MIT in chemical engineering, and his mother studied economics. He and his brothers grew up in academic settings, with aunts and uncles who had Ph.D’s in science and engineering, so it was assumed that he would pursue an academic career. Secretary Chu has called himself the “academic black sheep” of his family since he was slow in finding his scientific gift. In high school, he developed an interest in sports and taught himself to play tennis by reading a book. In his senior year, he encountered a teacher who inspired his interest in physics. He went on to the University of Rochester and received his bachelor’s degree in math and physics. Intending to pursue theoretical physics, he enrolled in the doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley. In the course of his studies, he returned to his early fascination with experimental physics and began to work with lasers and high-energy physics. After graduation from Berkeley in 1978, he went to work at Bell Laboratories with a group of young scientists who were encouraged and supported in carrying out cutting-edge research. While at Bell Labs, he worked with a colleague on the previously impossible task of obtaining accurate measurements of quantum electrodynamic corrections to an atomic system. In 1983 he was appointed head of the Quantum Electronics Research Department; his work focused on the use of laser cooling to trap atoms with light. Trapping atoms with this method allows scientists to study, with great accuracy, individual atoms that exist in the air and to determine their inner structure. He and his colleagues received the Nobel Prize for this work, which has led to insights into the interaction of matter and radiation and a variety of applications in such areas as spectroscopy, atomic clocks, atomic interferometers, optics, lithography, and gravitational measurements.

After nine years at Bell Labs, he returned to academia, this time as Professor of Physics at Stanford University, where he served as chair of the Physics Department from 1990 to 1993 and from 1999 to 2001. While at Stanford, Secretary Chu, together with three other professors, initiated the Bio-X program, which focuses on interdisciplinary research in biology and medicine. In 2004 he returned to Berkeley, this time as Professor of Physics and Molecular and Cellular Biology and Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. President Barack Obama tapped him as the twelfth Secretary of Energy in 2009.

Secretary Chu is an advocate for research into alternate energy and nuclear power and has become a powerful and respected voice in the debate on climate change. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American philosophical Society, and the Academia Sinica, and he is foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Science and the Korean Academy of Science and Engineering.

Doctor of Fine Arts

ZHANG YIMOU is a Chinese filmmaker and theatrical designer who captivated an international audience with the spectacular opening and closing ceremonies that he created for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. His first films gained global critical acclaim for their accomplished direction and gifted cinematography, and his recent films have been international success. 

Zhang was born in Xi’an, Shaanxi, in China just a year after Mao Zedong’s Communist force defeated the Kumintang Army, in which his father had served as an officer. Zhang attended high school in his home city until his studies were interrupted by the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, and he was forced to work first as a farm hand and then in a textile factory. There he was exposed to the highly propagandistic films and theatrical productions of that period. Nonetheless, he developed a love of film and, as a young adult, managed to buy a camera, raising the money by selling his blood for five months. 

At the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Beijing Film Academy reopened, and Zhang matriculated in its first post-Mao class, joining a group of filmmakers, the so-called Fifth Generation, who received international notice for their work. He was the cinematographer on Yellow Earth (1984), which launched the Fifth Generation’s fame. He added acting to cinematography with Old Well and won the Best Actor award at the 1987 Tokyo International Film Festival. The following year, he embarked on his own first feature, directing Red Sorghum, which portrayed the plight of a young girl sold as a bride to a leprous old man in traditional Chinese society in the 1920s. The film established him as a director who would challenge the status quo and tackle difficult themes of social repression, authority, and rebellion. Ju Dou (1990), which reflected his own experience as a textile worker under a repressive regime, was banned by the government, as were his next three films: Raise the Red Lantern (1991), The story of Qiu Ju (1993), and To live (1994). These films addressed difficult aspects of Chinese society: power struggles, bureaucracy and patriarchy, and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. 

Zhang’s next film, Shanghai Triad (1995), received a warmer reception in China and was selected to open the New York Film Festival, although Chinese officials did not permit that. Zhang’s subsequent films, though not as directly confrontational, have still addressed the contradictions and complexity of Chinese society in particular, and life in general. Not One Less (1998), a highly realist work about the need for educational reform in rural China, was particularly well received. Zhang is a prolific filmmaker, with twenty-three films to his credit as director or cinematographer. His biggest hit, Hero, can claim to be the first foreign film ever to have topped the U.S.weekly box office rankings, playing at more than 2,000 theaters here in late summer 2004. Zhang has also directed opera. His acclaimed version of Puccini’s Turandot played at the Forbidden City, Beijing, with Zubin Mehta as conductor; he also designed the production of Tan Dun’s opera The First Emperor, which had its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 2006. 

Zhang received the Golden Bear Award for Best Picture at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival and twice received the Golden Lion Award at the Venice International Film Festival (1992 and 1999). He has received six Academy Award nominations. After his accomplishments at the Beijing Olympics, he was runner-up for Time magazine’s 2008 Person of the Year.

Posted 星期日, 05/30/2010 - 18:42 at www.tongjiyiren.com

 
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