WAA honors 2006 Distinguished Alumni Award recipients
Reception, program planned for May 5
Two milestones will be set at this year’s Wisconsin Alumni Association’s Distinguished Alumni Award program.
The first second-generation recipient will be honored, and two Distinguished Young Alumni Awards will be presented.
Jeffrey Bartell, Quarles and Brady-Madison attorney; Russell Peterson, retired governor of Delaware; Pat Richter, former UW–Madison athletic director; and Judith Hicks Stiehm, a professor at Florida International University will be awarded.
The unprecedented two Distinguished Young Alumni Awards, which honor exemplary UW–Madison graduates under the age of 40, will be given to Benjamin Karlin, executive producer of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” and Jean Geran, a member of the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State.
Bartell was Wisconsin’s assistant attorney general from 1968-71. When he was appointed Wisconsin commissioner of securities at age 29 in 1972, he became the youngest securities commissioner in the country. For 15 years, he has been named one of The Best Lawyers in America.
Not only has his law career been one of service to the state, Bartell has also dedicated significant time and energy to UW–Madison and the state’s arts community. He chaired the $1 million capital campaign for the Memorial Union Director’s Fund, and since 1992, he has been chair of the Wisconsin Foundation for the Arts. Bartell was instrumental in making Madison’s Monona Terrace and Overture Center for the Performing Arts a reality.
As a chemist at DuPont in the 1940s and 1950s, Peterson was a leader in the development of Dacron. He served as governor of Delaware from 1969-73. A cutting-edge environmentalist, Peterson successfully blocked an attempt to convert the state’s unspoiled coastal zone into a network of refineries and petrochemical complexes. In 1971, Peterson was named the World Wildlife Fund’s Conservationist of the Year.
As the founding chair of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, Peterson was the first to call for a worldwide ban on the use of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons. In 1978, he was named president of the National Audubon Society, where he served for six years.
Richter holds the record for the longest tenured UW–Madison director of athletics, having held the position from 1989-2004. He brought the department out of a $2.1 million budget deficit and led a 12-year effort to get the department in Title IX compliance. Wisconsin student athletes earned more Academic All-Big Ten honors during the 1990s than any other school in the conference. A three-sport letterman himself (baseball, basketball and football), Richter led the UW to three national championships, 49 Big Ten championships and eight football bowl games.
In her days on campus, Stiehm was a student senator, co-founder of a literary magazine and chair of the Union Art Gallery. An ardent advocate for women’s rights, Stiehm became vice provost at the University of Southern California in 1984, when few women were being appointed to such posts. She is the author or co-author of nine books. In the national public service arena, Stiehm has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was appointed to the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in Service. She recently mobilized support to build a girls’ school in rural Afghanistan.
When Geran came to UW–Madison to earn her Ph.D., she brought with her field experience in Africa and Asia for international nonprofits, and previous positions at the United Nations and the World Bank. With this background and her Thai language skills, she was the ideal candidate to research the effects of Thailand’s 1997 economic crisis on the poor in remote, rural areas.
After graduation, Geran was employed by the U.S. Department of State. Sent to Iraq in 2003, Geran helped create the first Abuse Prevention Unit, charged with preventing and investigating human rights abuses in humanitarian assistance programs. She helped document mass graves, a leftover of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Karlin came to Madison in 1989 not knowing what he was going to study. After one semester, he joined the staff of the Daily Cardinal as a sportswriter and columnist. He used that experience to get a free-lance job at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona for United Press International.
In 1995, Karlin became the editor of The Onion, Madison’s popular satirical newspaper. A year later, Karlin moved to Hollywood to work on a variety of television projects, leading to his 1999 appointment as head writer for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” He has received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing and a Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting. Today, he is the show’s executive producer.
The awards program will begin at 5:45 p.m. on Friday, May 5, at the Wisconsin Union Theater. A preshow reception will begin at 5 p.m. in the lobby of the theater. To register for the event, visit http://www.uwalumni.com/daa and click on “Alumni Weekend 2006,” or call the Wisconsin Alumni Association at 262-2551.