Noting Holbrooke's central role in the Balkan crisis, President Harward said, "As an educational institution, Bates has a responsibility to provide a forum for discussion of the political, social and moral issues surrounding the crises of our times."

Joining Holbrooke as honorary-degree recipients were career educator Robert E. Dunn, Bates class of 1950; biochemist Leroy E. Hood, M.D.; and urban sociologist William Julius Wilson.

Donald W. Harward, president of Bates College, conferred bachelor's degrees on approximately 435 seniors in an outdoor ceremony at 10 a.m. in front of Coram Library.

Holbrooke, who received an honorary doctor of laws degree, has played a major role in the U.S. efforts to employ diplomacy and military force to put an end to bitter regional conflicts. As U.S. special envoy in 1995, Holbrooke presided over the Dayton peace accord, which achieved peace in Bosnia. For his efforts, Holbrooke received The World Jewish Congress Nahum Goldmann Award, the Gold Medal for Distinguished Service to Humanity from the National Institute of Social Sciences and the Frizis Award from the Hellenic Leadership Conference, among more than 25 international awards for public service and diplomacy.

Holbrooke, who is President Clinton's nominee as ambassador to the United Nations, began his diplomatic career in 1962, joining the Foreign Service after graduating from Brown University, where he received his bachelor's degree. He held a variety of posts, including representing the Agency for International Development and serving as staff assistant to U.S. Ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge. Holbrooke was later assigned to the White House, working on the staff to President Johnson and the American delegation to the Paris Peace Talks on Vietnam. He also has been a fellow at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and director of the Peace Corps in Morocco.

During his tenure as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Carter administration, the United States established full diplomatic relations with China. Holbrooke, now vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston Corporation, based in New York, remains active in humanitarian service as chairman of Refugees International, a founding member of the National Advisory Forum of the Holocaust Memorial Museum and a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy. He is the author of "To End a War," published in 1998 and selected as one of the nine best books of the year by The New York Times, and co-author of "Counsel to the President," the 1991 best-selling memoirs of Washington power broker Clark Clifford, as well as numerous articles on foreign policy.

Dunn, who received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree, has been a teacher of history, guidance counselor, assistant principal and principal at William H. Hall High School in West Hartford, Conn. Former deputy headmaster at Seoul International School in Seoul, South Korea, Dunn has served on a nine-member National Commission on Education, chaired by then-U.S. Secretary of Education Terrell H. Bell. Named Connecticut Principal of the Year in 1989-90, Dunn was a state representative on the National Association of Secondary School Principals' Study Mission to the former Soviet Union and East-Bloc countries.

Dunn, who taught introductory sociology courses to first-year Bates students as a departmental assistant, received his M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Connecticut. A recipient of a Rotary Foundation Fellowship after graduation, Dunn visited representative secondary schools in Great Britain, Europe and South Africa and did research at the University of Birmingham, England, Institute of Education. He also received the Alfred North Whitehead Fellowship from Harvard University and the John Hay Fellowship in the Humanities from the University of Oregon. Active in Bates affairs and a tireless admissions recruiter for the college, Dunn received the college's Distinguished Service Award and served on the Board of Overseers from 1970 to 1975. In 1990, he and his wife, Gladys Bovino Dunn, Bates class of 1951, established the Gladys B. Dunn '51 and Robert E. Dunn '50 Scholarship Fund in memory of their parents for graduates of William H. Hall High School.

Hood, who received an honorary doctor of science degree, is the William Gates III Professor of Biomedical Sciences and chairman of the Department of Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He has received the Louis Pasteur Award for Medical Innovation and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for his studies of immune diversity. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association of Arts and Sciences, Hood received the Commonwealth Award of Distinguished Service for work in developing instruments used to study modern biology, the American College of Physicians Award for distinguished contributions in science as related to medicine and the University Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for "changing how diagnoses are made and opening the doors for miracles in treatments and cures."

The Leroy Hood Laboratory at the University of Washington has played a leading role in developing automated microchemical instrumentation for the sequence analysis of proteins and DNA as well as the synthesis of peptides and gene fragments. Hood has applied his laboratory's expertise in large-scale DNA mapping and sequencing to the analysis of the human and mouse T-cell receptor loci, an important effort of the Human Genome Project. His research interests also include the study of autoimmune diseases and new approaches to cancer biology. Hood received his M.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology.

Wilson, who received an honorary doctor of laws degree, is one of the nation's leading social scientists on poverty. In his widely debated 1978 book "The Declining Significance of Race" (winner of the American Sociological Association's Sydney Spivack Award), Wilson outlined a thesis he supports today: that class, as well as race, determines the status of African Americans. Called one of the 25 most influential Americans by Time magazine in 1996 and awarded the 1998 National Medal of Science, Wilson is the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University.

The author of numerous publications, his other well-known works include "The Truly Disadvantaged," winner of The Washington Monthly Annual Book Award and the Society for the Study of Social Problems' C. Wright Mills Award. His latest book, "When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor," was selected as one of the notable books of 1996 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review and received the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award. Past president of the American Sociological Association, Wilson was a MacArthur Prize fellow from 1987 to 1992. The only noneconomist ever to receive the Seidman Award in Political Economy, he also received the American Sociological Association's Dubois, Johnson, Frazier Award for significant scholarship in inter-group relations and the Burton Gordon Feldman Award from Brandeis University for outstanding contributions in the field of public policy. After receiving his Ph.D from Washington State University, Wilson taught sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1972. In 1990, he was appointed the Lucy Flower University Professor and director of the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Urban Inequality. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1996. Wilson is a member of numerous national boards and commissions, including the President's Commission on White House Fellowships

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