The Honorable Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Under President George W. Bush, Will Be Keynote Speaker at Rutgers’ 248th Commencement May 18

Board of Governors Chair Gerald C. Harvey, paleoanthropologist-environmentalist Richard E.F. Leakey, entrepreneur-journalist Donald Katz will join Rice as honorary degree recipients

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Former Secretary of State, the Honorable Condoleezza Rice will be the keynote speaker at Rutgers’ 248th anniversary commencement Sunday, May 18, it was announced at today’s Board of Governors meeting in Newark.

Rice, who served from January 2005 to 2009 under President George W. Bush as the nation’s 66th secretary of state – the second woman and first African-American woman to hold the position – will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

Rutgers also will award an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree to Gerald C. Harvey, outgoing chair of the university’s Board of Governors, and an honorary Doctor of Science degree to Richard E.F. Leakey, the renowned

Rice previously had been assistant to the president for national security affairs (national security adviser) under President Bush from January 2001 to 2005. She was the first woman in that post. She also served on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council staff from 1989 through March 1991. She was director, then senior director of Soviet and East European affairs, and special assistant to the president for national security affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Rice served as special assistant to the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

At Stanford University, Rice is a professor of political economy in The Graduate School of Business; the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution; and a professor of political science. She is also a founding partner of RiceHadleyGates LLC, an international strategic consulting firm based in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.

Rice served as Stanford’s provost from 1993 to 1999, during which she was the university’s chief budget and academic officer. She was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students. In 1997, she also served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training in the Military.

A member of the Stanford faculty since 1981, Rice has won two of the institution’s highest teaching honors – the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Rice has authored and co-authored numerous books, including two bestsellers, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (Crown, 2011) and Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (Crown, 2010). Her other works include Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Harvard University Press, 1995) with Philip Zelikow; The Gorbachev Era (Stanford Alumni Association, 1986) with Alexander Dallin and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (Princeton University Press, 1984).

In 1991, Rice co-founded the Center for a New Generation (CNG), an innovative, after-school academic enrichment program for students in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, Calif. In 1996, CNG merged with the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula (an affiliate club of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America). CNG has since expanded to local BGCA chapters in Birmingham, Ala.; Atlanta and Dallas. She remains an active proponent of an extended learning day through after school programs.

Rice currently serves on the board of C3, an energy software company, and Makena Capital, a private endowment firm. In addition, she is a member of the boards of the Commonwealth Club, the Aspen Institute, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Previously, Rice served on boards of the Chevron Corp., the Charles Schwab Corp., the Transamerica Corp., the University of Notre Dame and the San Francisco Symphony.

Born in Birmingham, Rice earned her bachelor’s degree in political science cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Denver; her master’s from the University of Notre Dame and her doctorate from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

Harvey, who completes a one-year term as Board of Governors chair in June, is one of Rutgers’ most loyal alumni and is being recognized for 16 years of continuous membership on university boards, beginning in 1998. A former Board of Trustees chair, he was inducted as a Trustee Governor in July 2008 for a six-year term and was elected vice chair in 2010. He became chair in 2012.

During his tenure as chair, Harvey led the university through a period of historic transformation – the implementation of the New Jersey Medical and Health Sciences Education Restructuring Act, which integrated most of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey into Rutgers. The expansion of health sciences at Rutgers has provided additional academic opportunities, broadened Rutgers’ presence throughout the state and significantly elevated Rutgers’ standing among top research universities in the United States.

Harvey also oversaw the university’s entrance into the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the Big Ten Conference, in addition to major facility development projects on all campuses.

A Bay Head, N.J., resident, Harvey is a retired executive vice president, general counsel and secretary of Breeze-Eastern Corp., a Whippany-based manufacturer of aircraft hoisting equipment. He is a member of the Panel of Commercial Arbitrators of the American Arbitration Association and is the former chair of the Board of Trustees of Philip’s Academy Charter School in Newark.

A 1972 Rutgers College graduate, Harvey earned a law degree from Columbia University in 1975.

Harvey previously served as president of the Rutgers University Alumni Federation and was awarded the federation’s Meritorious Service Award. He is a member of the Rutgers Alumni Association’s Loyal Sons and Daughters. He and his wife, Keiko, a former member of the Rutgers Board of Trustees and Board of Governors and a 1972 graduate of Rutgers School of Engineering, have funded the Keiko and Gerald Harvey Scholarship for Women in Engineering at the School of Engineering.

Leakey is a professor of anthropology at New York’s Stony Brook University, where he also serves as the founder and chair of the Turkana Basin Institute, a Kenya-based research facility that studies the history of life, climate change and the origins of humans.

The second son of Louis and Mary Leakey, he participated from an early age in his parents’ field expeditions in Africa. His involvement with paleoanthropology included not only extensive field research and attendant discoveries, but also his years of service as director of the National Museums of Kenya (NMK).

Between 1968 and 1969, he coordinated NMK field expeditions to the eastern and western shores of Lake Turkana. Among his team’s important finds were early Stone Age tools dating to around 1.9 million years old and evidence of early members of the genus Homo, including the extraordinary discovery of the nearly complete 1.6 million-year-old skeleton of the “Nariokotome Boy” (or “Turkana Boy”), a Homo erectus youth.

Leakey gave up his field work when he was appointed head of the Kenya Wildlife Service in 1989, where he successfully combated elephant and rhino poaching and oversaw a reorganization of Kenya’s troubled national park system. In 1993, he lost both legs below the knee when the plane he was flying crashed. The following year, political opposition caused him to leave the KWS and he became more involved in Kenyan politics, serving as Secretary General of Kenyan opposition party Serafina. In 1997 he was elected to an opposition seat in the Kenyan parliament.

Leakey’s political career culminated in 1999 when the Kenyan president appointed him head of the country’s Civil Service and of a so-called “Dream Team” of technocrats assembled from various fields and backgrounds to tackle management, corruption and reorganization issues within the country’s government. He relinquished this position in 2001 and announced his retirement from politics, but continues to fight for political justice in Kenya. He often lectures on environmental themes and is involved in grass-roots wildlife conservation projects.    

Katz founded Audible Inc. in 1995, and the company now is the world’s largest seller and producer of downloadable audiobooks. Audible provides hundreds of jobs – 600 at company headquarters in Newark, N.J., – and serves millions of listeners by offering more than 150,000 downloadable audiobooks, audio editions of periodicals and other programs.

Under Katz’s leadership, Audible commercialized the first portable digital audio player in 1997, four years before the introduction of the iPod. Audible is the exclusive supplier of audiobooks to Apple’s iTunes music store worldwide and operates 11 global outlets. Formerly publicly traded on NASDAQ, the company was acquired by Amazon.com in 2008 and is now an Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary.

For the 20 years before launching Audible, Katz was a journalist and the author of five books. He was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, among other publications, and earned a National Magazine Award and selection as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Under Katz’s leadership, Audible is an engaged and active member of the Newark community. Audible has supported the city’s North Star Academy, a nationally recognized charter school, since 2007. Audible scholarships provide outstanding North Star graduates with internships and other financial support throughout college.

The company also is committed to the Newark Public Library and Katz has made active participation in what he calls “the Newark Renaissance” a centerpiece of Audible’s company culture.

Katz earned his Bachelor of Arts in English and political science from New York University and a Master of Science in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

He lives in Montclair, N.J., where he served as a member of the public library board for several years. He serves on the board of Newark’s Brick City Development Corp.

Established in 1766, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is America’s eighth-oldest institution of higher learning and one of the nation’s premier public research universities. Serving more than 65,000 students on campuses, centers, institutes and other locations throughout the state, Rutgers in the only public university in New Jersey that is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities.