Andover Alumni Award of Distinction 2014

2014

ANDOVER ALUMNI

AWARD OF DISTINCTION

Dinner to Honor Award Recipients TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2014 6 p.m.

Paresky Commons

Andover Alumni Award of Distinction Presentation WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2014 10:50 a.m. • All-School Meeting Cochran Chapel

2014

ANDOVER ALUMNI

AWARD OF DISTINCTION

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elcome to the third annual celebration of the esteemed recipients of the Andover Alumni Award of Distinction. This prestigious award recognizes and honors alumni of Phillips Academy and Abbot Academy who have served with distinction in their fields of endeavor. It also strives to connect current students with these inspirational role models through a schoolwide presentation and classroom discussions.

Clemency Chase Coggins ’51, John T. Darnton ’60, and Susan Goodwillie Stedman ’59 are the recipients of the 2014 Andover Alumni Award of Distinction. Their accomplishments and contributions embody the values of the Andover-Abbot community and have had—and are continuing to have—a positive impact on diverse peoples and places, society, and, ultimately, our world.

The Andover Alumni Award of Distinction is given annually to one or more living alumni who have served with distinction and exhibited leadership in the arts, sciences, letters, humanities, or other significant field of endeavor following their time at Phillips or Abbot academies. Once a candidate is nominated, his or her nomination remains on file in the Office of Alumni Engagement for annual review.

Award recipients are chosen by the Andover Alumni Award of Distinction Committee (see back cover) of the Alumni Council upon nomination by alumni. Please visit www.andover.edu/alumni/awardofdistinction for a nomination form.

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hroughout her career, art historian and Maya scholar Clemency Chase Coggins ’51 has worked to raise awareness of the relationship between the antiquities market and long-term archaeological goals, and to push art historians to examine their larger professional responsibilities. Her groundbreaking article, “Illicit Traffic of Pre-Columbian Antiquities,” published in Art Journal in 1969, came at a time when most art historians and many archaeologists turned a blind eye to the illicit trade in antiquities.

Through numerous publications and public lectures, Coggins has sustained interest in the subject of safeguarding cultural property, which has become an ongoing dialogue among archaeologists, art historians, art dealers, legal scholars, lawmakers, and the general public.

Coggins has worked with the Archaeological Institute of America on antiquities matters, chairing the Committee on Preservation of Archaeological Resources and the Professional Responsibilities Committee. She worked closely with congressional committees to develop and pass the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act, and she was among the first to be appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Cultural Property Advisory Committee.

Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, best-selling author, and two-time recipient of the George Polk Award in recognition for his outstanding work in the field of journalism, John T. Darnton ’60 boasts a career that spans nearly five decades, all of them with the New York Times.

Darnton began his career as a copy boy in 1966 and then worked as a reporter in New York. After producing award-winning coverage of New York City’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s, he received his first overseas assignment, which took him to West Africa.

Initially, Darnton was based in Lagos, Nigeria. After 13 months there, he was jailed and then deported for writing articles that displeased the military government. His next assignment was in Nairobi, where he covered the civil war in Rhodesia, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and the fall of Idi Amin in Uganda, for which, in 1979, he won his first George Polk Award for foreign reporting.

Clemency Chase Coggins ’51

In addition, her considerable time in the field has honed her ability to place a specific observation or finding within a broader framework, a talent that served her well as editor of Artifacts from the Cenote of Sacrifice: Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México. In the early 1900s, archaeologist Edward H. Thompson dredged this limestone cenote, or sinkhole, and discovered hundreds of pre-Hispanic artifacts, including the preserved remains of textiles, gold, copper, wooden objects, incense offerings, and mammalian remains, which were shipped to Harvard’s Peabody Museum. In 1926, the Mexican government charged Thompson with illegally removing the artifacts, but in 1944 the Mexican Supreme Court ruled in Thompson’s favor.

After graduating from Abbot Academy, Coggins earned a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College and, a decade later, a master’s degree in Library Science from San Jose State University. After her three children were in school, she completed MA and PhD degrees in fine arts at Harvard. Her thesis, “Painting and Drawing Styles at Tikal: An Historical and Iconographic Reconstruction,” is a study of Maya royal tombs at an important Classicperiod site in Guatemala; her dissertation involved groundbreaking research that brought together diverse archaeological information about burial contexts that included jade, ceramics, and inscriptions—to provide an iconographic and historical reconstruction of the site’s history and genealogy. She has published extensively on Maya history and iconography, including archaeological reports on Chichén Itzá and Dzibichaltún, Yucatán, Mexico.

Art Historian Maya Scholar Educator Researcher

His next assignment brought him to Eastern Europe, where he served as Warsaw bureau chief and covered the rise of the Solidarity movement and the imposition of martial law. For his coverage of these events, which included dispatches smuggled out of the country during a communications blackout, Darnton received his second George Polk Award—and the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

After serving as Madrid bureau chief and filing reports across Europe and the Middle East, Darnton returned to New York as deputy foreign editor. He then served as metropolitan editor and news editor/weekends before accepting the position of London bureau chief in 1992. Four years later, he returned to New York to become culture editor, a post he held for six years. He retired from the New York Times in 2005 but continues to consult with the newspaper as editorial director for Special Projects.

While at Andover, Darnton was editor of The Mirror, a cheerleader and deacon, a member of the Philomathean Society, and a varsity soccer player. He was voted class rebel, an assessment seemingly vindicated when he was expelled senior year for disciplinary infractions.

Darnton studied at the Searing School in New York, Alliance Française in Paris, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English and psychology. He is the author of several books, including the best-sellers Neanderthal and The Experiment; Mind Catcher; The Darwin Conspiracy; and Black & White and Dead All Over. His most recent book, Almost a Family, is a memoir about his father, Byron Darnton, a New York Times war correspondent who was killed in New Guinea during World War II.

Coggins’ numerous published works include “Heritage and Property—A Latin American Perspective: Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Guatemala,” “Archaeology and the Art Market,” “The United States Cultural Property Legislation: Observations of a Combatant,” and “Latin America, Native America, and the Politics of Culture.”

Coggins taught in a variety of roles at Harvard, where she has been a research associate of the Peabody Museum for decades. She is now Professor Emerita of Archaeology and of Art History at Boston University, having taught there for 25 years. Currently she is working to finish publications on Dzibilchaltún, Yucatán, Mexico, and on Tikal Guatemala.

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John T. Darnton ’60

John Darnton, seated center, was editor of The Mirror.

Award-Winning Journalist Foreign Correspondent Author New York Times Consultant

In September 2009, Long Island University named Darnton curator of the George Polk Awards in Journalism.

LIU established the Polk Awards in 1949 to memorialize George Polk, a CBS reporter who was killed the previous year while covering the civil war in Greece. Some of the most respected names in journalism have won George Polk Awards, including Christiane Amanpour, Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Walter Cronkite, and Edward R. Murrow. Darnton and his wife, journalist Nina Darnton, live in New York City.

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Andover Alumni Award of Distinction

aised in northern Westchester County, New York, Susan Goodwillie Stedman ’59 was drawn to the Civil Rights movement during her senior year at Stanford University. Inspired by Martin Luther King’s March on Washington and President Kennedy’s creation of the National Women’s Committee for Civil Rights, Stedman joined the committee’s staff and shortly thereafter became executive assistant to Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women.

Past Recipients 2013

Hafsat O. Abiola ’92 Human Rights Advocate, Civil Rights and Democracy Activist

In 1964, at the beginning of what is now known as Freedom Summer, a handful of courageous Mississippi women—both black and white—asked Height and other national women leaders to send interracial, interfaith teams of women from the North to Mississippi to be “a ministry of presence among us, to stir us up like a long-handled spoon and bring us together in ways we cannot do ourselves.”

The project was called “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” and its goal was to bring together black and white northern and southern women to help ease racial tensions in the midst of that tumultuous summer. It was a dangerous time, but Stedman volunteered to serve as the project’s white staff member on the ground in Mississippi.

George M. Church ’72 Geneticist, Molecular Engineer, Chemist, Research Pioneer Frank P. Stella ’54 Painter, Printmaker, Sculptor, Author, Innovator 2012 George H.W. Bush ’42 U.S. President, Ambassador, Aviator, Athlete

Susan Goodwillie Stedman ’59

On July 2, 1964—just days after three Civil Rights workers had been murdered in Neshoba County—the first team of black and white women from New York arrived in Jackson. Stedman and Doris Wilson, her black counterpart, met the group at the airport, but couldn’t be seen together. The black women went with Wilson and the white women with Stedman; all met in secrecy. For her own and others’ safety, Stedman worked undercover throughout her stay as a “white-gloved churchgoer” who was there writing a cookbook.

The vision and determination of “Wednesday’s Women” in Jackson and across Mississippi over the next 10 years resulted in the establishment of a range of new economic, health, and educational programs. Twenty years later, Dorothy Height asked Stedman to collaborate in writing her memoir, Open Wide the Freedom Gates.

Inspired by her experience in Mississippi, Stedman went on to earn an MA degree in international law and economics. She later worked on international economic and social justice issues at the U.N. and with the Ford Foundation in West Africa and New York.

From 1979 to 1992, Stedman led the Goodwillie Group, an international consulting firm based in Boston, providing advisory services to USAID, the U.N., and various NGOs. From 1984 to 1988, as the first executive director of Refugees International, she brought national attention to the plight of Southeast Asian refugees; in 1988, she received the first Refugees International award for service on behalf of refugees.

Stedman, also an author, wrote Now Hear This: The Life of Hugh S. Knowles, Acoustical Engineer and Entrepreneur and edited Voices from the Future: Our Children Tell Us about Violence in America. Since retiring to Maine in 1994, she has served on several local boards, was the founding board president of the Heartwood Regional Theatre Company, and enjoyed teaching courses on global issues at Midcoast Senior College with her late husband, Bruce, former assistant secretary-general of the U.N. Stedman is the current board president of the Abbot Academy Association.

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Civil Rights Activist Educator Author Community Volunteer

Wendy T. Ewald ’69 Photographer, Educator, Cultural Explorer, Researcher William S. Knowles ’35 Nobel Prize–Winning Chemist, Mathematician, Medical Innovator Stacy A. Schiff ’78 Pulitzer Prize–Winning Biographer, Guggenheim Fellow Peter M. Sellars ’75 Visionary Opera and Theatre Director, MacArthur Fellow

2014

ANDOVER ALUMNI

AWARD OF DISTINCTION

Andover Alumni Award of Distinction Committee Rome Arnold ’73, P’14 Emily Bernstein ’86 Al Blum ’62, GP’15, chair Les Callahan ’68 Susan Donahue ’73, P’05, ’08 Mari Wellin King ’75, P’05, ’07, ’10 Johnson Lightfoote ’69 Bonnie Oliva ’00 Karen Humphries Sallick ’83, P’14, ’17 Michael Schmertzler ’70, P’05, ’07 Ron Takvorian ’66, P’02, ’03, ’06

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