|
The Third Annual Annenberg Symposium provides an opportunity to celebrate and reflect on the life and legacy of Ambassador Walter Annenberg (1908 - 2002).
Featured speakers include Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation, USC President Steven Sample; Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication, and Elizabeth Daley, executive director of the USC Annenberg Center for Communication.
Walter H. Annenberg was born in 1908 and enjoyed a distinguished career as a publisher, broadcaster, diplomat, and philanthropist.
He graduated from The Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey and attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He entered the family publishing business in Philadelphia where he became the President of Triangle Publications in 1940 and, subsequently, Chairman of the Board.
While serving as Editor and Publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr. Annenberg saw the need for a publication for teenage girls and, in 1944, established Seventeen Magazine. In 1953, as a result of his belief that television's growth would create a demand for more information on the part of viewers, he established TV Guide as a national publication.
Under Mr. Annenberg's initiative, Triangle Publications bought a radio station in the early 1940's in Philadelphia and built a VHF television station which was one of the first TV stations owned by a publishing house. The radio-TV division of Triangle grew to include six AM and six FM radio stations, and six TV stations. The Philadelphia station pioneered a number of broadcasting concepts among which was Mr. Annenberg's decision to use television to present a series of educational programs that ran for more than a decade. In 1951, Annenberg became an early awardee of the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont Award for pioneering education via television. He was also given the Marshall Field Award in 1958. In 1983, he received the Ralph Lowell Medal for "outstanding contribution to public television."
A man with a deep interest in education, Mr. Annenberg founded The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 and The Annenberg School for Communication at USC in 1971. In 1983, he established the Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies in response to growing awareness that difficult government and industry problems were emerging in the rapidly changing telecommunications field.
Annenberg served as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, Great Britain, from 1968 to 1974. By the late 1980's, having sold all of his publishing and broadcast enterprises, Ambassador Annenberg devoted his attention to philanthropy and public service.
Keynote speaker Vartan Gregorian is the twelfth president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, a grant-making institution founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1911. Prior to his current position, which he assumed in June 1997, Gregorian served for nine years as the sixteenth president of Brown University.
He was born in Tabriz, Iran, of Armenian parents, receiving his elementary education in Iran and his secondary education in Lebanon. In 1956 he entered Stanford University, where he majored in history and the humanities, graduating with honors in 1958. He was awarded a Ph.D. in history and humanities from Stanford in 1964.
Gregorian is the author of Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 1880-1946. A Phi Beta Kappa and a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Training Fellow, he is a recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and the American Philosophical Society. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 1969, he received the Danforth Foundation's E.H. Harbison Distinguished Teaching Award.
He currently serves on the boards of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Human Rights Watch, the Museum of Modern Art, and The McGraw-Hill Companies. He served on the boards of the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Aga Khan University, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He has been decorated by the French, Italian, Austrian and Portuguese governments. His numerous civic and academic honors include some fifty honorary degrees, including those from Brown, Dartmouth, Drew, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the City University of New York, Rutgers, Tufts, New York University, University of Aberdeen, and, most recently, The Juilliard School, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In 1986, Gregorian was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and in 1989 the American Academy of the Institute of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Service to the Arts. In 1998, President Clinton awarded him the National Humanities Medal. He has been honored by various cultural and professional associations, including the Urban League, the League of Women Voters, the Players Club, PEN-American Center, Literacy Volunteers of New York, the American Institute of Architects and the Charles A. Dana Foundation. He has been honored by the city and state of New York, the states of Massachusetts, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, and the cities of Fresno, Austin, Providence and San Francisco.
More Information:
|
