NOTE: This web page is archived for the Class of 2005. To see the Commencement site for this year's class, click here.

Four Honorary Degrees to be Awarded

The University of Massachusetts Amherst will award four honorary degrees during its graduate and undergraduate commencement ceremonies May 21-22.

At the Graduate School Commencement May 21, Dell Hathaway Hymes will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree. He is an emeritus Commonwealth professor of English and anthropology at the University of Virginia whose principal area of research and scholarship has been the language, culture and folklore of Native Americans. Robert L. Gluckstern will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. He is a former UMass provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, professor and head of the department of physics and astronomy, and president emeritus and former chancellor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

At the Undergraduate Commencement May 22, Douglas Berthiaume, alumnus and chairman and CEO of Waters Corporation of Milford, a high-technology firm serving the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. Heriberto Flores, alumnus, former trustee and executive director of the New England Farm Workers’ Council will receive an honorary Doctor of Public Service degree.

BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILES

Dell Hathaway Hymes has had a highly distinguished career in social anthropology, linguistics and folklore. His groundbreaking research in the languages, cultures and folklores of Native Americans has decisively influenced the study of forms and meanings in indigenous oral cultures the world over. He is the author, co-author or editor of more than 700 publications and is the founding editor of the journal Language in Society. He is a past president of the American Anthropological Association, the Linguistic Society of America and the American Folklore Society—the only person to have so served all three organizations.

A graduate of Reed College, Hymes earned his graduate degrees at Indiana University. In addition to the University of Virginia, he has taught at Harvard, the University of California Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton and Johns Hopkins. He has had fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has a life fellowship at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Hymes has served on the editorial boards of more than 40 scholarly publications and been a consultant for UNESCO, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.

Robert Gluckstern’s career has been marked by achievement in two realms, physics and academia. Even in retirement he serves as director of the University of Maryland’s Dynamic Systems and Accelerator Theory Laboratory, and he was earlier a consultant to such accelerator-research enterprises as the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Fermi National Laboratory and CERN, the international accelerator located in Switzerland. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been an adviser to the U.S. Department of Energy. In 1999 he received the U.S. Particle Accelerator Prize for his work on fundamental processes in high-intensity beams.

Gluckstern earned his doctorate in physics from MIT in 1948 and taught at the University of California Berkeley, Cornell and Yale before becoming professor of physics and department head at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1964. He held those posts for five years before serving as associate provost for one year and as provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs from 1970 to 1975. At UMass Amherst, Gluckstern built the modern physics department, expanding it in terms of faculty numbers, breadth of discipline and graduate education, enabling it to take a comprehensive, broad-front approach to research and win national prominence. As provost, he worked to expand the campus and its emphasis on research and was generous in his praise of and respect for outstanding achievement. He served as chancellor of the University of Maryland, College Park, from 1975 to 1982. There he upgraded academic quality and established widely admired and emulated scholarship programs.

Douglas Berthiaume ’71 has been chairman of Waters Corporation since 1996. Waters is a world leader in liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, two technologies that provide essential measuring tools for the pharmaceutical and biotechnical industries. Based in Milford, Mass., the company employs 3,000 people and has a distribution network extending to nearly 50 countries. Exports account for nearly two-thirds of its annual sales, which approach $1 billion.

In addition to helping Massachusetts strengthen its economy and its standing as a world leader in medical technology, Berthiaume has maintained strong ties to his alma mater. His commitment to the Isenberg School of Management and UMass Amherst is generous and longstanding. A perennial Chancellor’s Circle donor, he also made one of the largest individual gifts to the Isenberg School’s Alfond Management Center. In 2003 he began a four-year term on the board of the UMass Amherst Foundation. He further shows his dedication by serving as a visiting practitioner for undergraduate and M.B.A. students and hosting students at Waters headquarters.

Heriberto Flores ’73, ’91 M.Ed. is executive director of the New England Farm Workers’ Council, a private, nonprofit agency providing education, training and other assistance programs for low-income migrant farm workers and their families in a region extending from Hartford, Conn., to Manchester, N.H. Its mission and clients have both expanded since the council’s founding in 1971; it now provides home-energy assistance, day care, job training, educational assistance and emergency shelter to its clients, who are largely Latino but include all ethnic and racial groups. Its energy and day care programs serve more than 15,000 households.

Flores earned a bachelor’s degree in education in 1973 and an M.Ed. in 1991 from UMass Amherst. He is a former member of the University’s Board of Trustees. From 1981 to 1985 he served on the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education in Rhode Island. Flores is or has been a member of the MassJobs Council, the Western Massachusetts Judicial Nominating Committee, the Northeast Latino Economic Council, the Federal Reserve Consumer Advisory Council, and the boards of the Pioneer Valley United Way and the Pioneer Valley Private Industry Council. He is a trustee of Mercy Hospital and a member of the Regional Employment Board, both in Springfield, Mass.