BAM 100

By The Editors / November / December 2000
October 24th, 2007

Although in the end the BAM 100 was chosen by the magazine’s editors—and therefore does not represent any kind of official University list—the selection process was broad and deep. About a year ago we began soliciting nominations from you in the pages of the magazine, on our Web site, and at Commencement and reunion weekend. We asked our board of editors for their guidance and suggestions.Over the summer and fall we badgered the faculty and staff in every academic department for the names of worthy graduates. We consulted Brown archivist Martha Mitchell and her classic Encyclopedia Brunoniana.

More than 300 individual alumni received nominations. We reviewed each one, seeking advice from more knowledgeable experts when necessary. Because we were looking for impact on the twentieth century—not the nineteenth or the twenty-first—we considered alumni from classes of the late 1800s and excluded most from classes of the 1990s. We opened the nominations to recipients of any Brown degree and to a few individuals who never earned one but are nevertheless considered alumni.

We quickly realized, of course, how arbitrary and foolish was our task. With more than 75,000 alumni out there, choosing 100 meant leaving out hundreds who deserved to be on such a list. And how could we compare the impact of a corporate CEO with that of a historian or a theoretical mathematician?

The solution was to organize our choices in twenty-nine categories that emerged from the nominations and to consider our choices within each as more representative than definitive. We broke our own rules twice. In five instances impact was better illustrated by a pair of nominees considered jointly rather than by a single nominee. And we allowed ourselves three special mentions.

Naming names is always dangerous. So why did we do it? We think that looking at a period of history through the narratives of a selected group of individuals can reveal much about the character of the period as well as the nature of the group. In the BAM 100 we believe you will be able to discern the contours of a century—its wars, its prosperity, its technological ambition, and its passion for combating injustice.

We hope you will see how you were shaped by these things and how you responded.

The BAM 100 is our list—your own might be very different. We think that’s a good thing. In fact, we hope this exercise triggers an honest discussion about the ever-changing relationship between the world within the Van Wickle Gates and the world beyond them. What will that relationship be like a century from now? No doubt the BAM 200 will have more racial, ethnic, gender, and international diversity than we found in the twentieth century. History is pulling us in that direction, pulled itself by men and women discharging the offices of life with usefulness and reputation. Their young minds are carrying on the work today in the year 2000.

BIOCHEMISTRY
Richard A. Roth ’72, ’76 Ph.D.

BROADCASTING
Linda Mason ’64
Ira Glass ’82
Betsy West ’73
Chris Berman ’77

BUSINESS & FINANCE
Steven Rattner ’74
Stephen Robert ’62
Russ Pillar ’87
Ted Turner ’60
Marvin Bower ’25
Walter Hoving ’20
Thomas J. Watson Jr. ’37
George M.C. Fisher ’66 Ph.D.
John Sculley ’61
Willard C. Butcher ’48
John D. Rockefeller Jr. 1897
Barry Sternlicht ’82

CHEMISTRY
Edwin Hart ’34 Ph.D.
Herman B. Goldstein ’40
Robert G. Parr ’42

COMPUTER SCIENCE
Norman K. Meyrowitz ’81
John W. Tukey ’37, ’37 Sc.M.
John Seely Brown ’62
John Crawford ’75
Ingrid B. Carlbom ’80 Ph.D.
John Guttag ’71, ’73 Sc.M.
Ed Lazowska ’72

ECONOMICS
Rowland Hughes ’17
Janet Yellen ’67

EDUCATION
Alexander Meiklejohn 1893
Samuel Nabrit ’32 Ph.D.
John Hope 1894
Mary Emma Woolley 1894, 1895 A.M.
Ira Magaziner ’69
Elliot Maxwell ’68

ENVIRONMENT
Kathryn Scott Fuller ’68
Irving (Strasmich) Stowe ’36

FEMINIST THEORY
Marianne Hirsch ’70, ’75 Ph.D.

GOVERNMENT & POLITICS
Bobby Jindal ’92
Charles W. Colson ’53
E. Howard Hunt ’40
Charles Evans Hughes 1881
Theodore Francis Green 1887
Richard Holbrooke ’62
George Lincoln Rockwell ’42
William Beck Widnall ’26
Thomas Corcoran ’22

GRAPHIC DESIGN
Tom Geismar ’53

HISTORY
Winthrop Jordan ’60 Ph.D.
J. Saunders Redding ’28, ’32 A.M.
Spencer Crew ’71
Adam B. Ulam ’43

INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING
Lillian Moller Gilbreth ‘15 Ph.D.

JOURNALISM
Wallace Terry ’59
Mara Liasson ’77
Lyn Crost ’38
Ralph Begleiter ’71
Irving R. Levine ’44

LITERATURE
Quentin Reynolds ’24
S.J. Perelman ’25
Gayl Jones ‘75 a.d.
Nathanael West ’24
Alfred Uhry ’58

MATERIALS SCIENCE
Baltasar Mena ’73 Ph.D.
Gordon Kidd Teal ’31 Ph.D.

MATHEMATICS
Kenneth Ribet ’69, ’69 A.M.
Derrick Lehmer ’30 Ph.D.
Frederick Almgren ‘62 Ph.D.

MEDICINE
Sidney A. Fox ’19
Donald Abrams ‘72
Robert I. Parker ‘73, ‘76 M.D.
Seth Berkley ’78, ’81 M.D.
Alan Zametkin ’77 M.D.
Augustus White III ’57

MICROBIOLOGY
Stanley Falkow ’61 Ph.D.

PHILOSOPHY
Keith Lehrer ’60 Ph.D.
Roderick M. Chisholm ’38

PSYCHOLOGY
Aaron Beck ’42
Richard Solomon ’40, ’47 Ph.D.

PUBLIC SERVICE
Martha Dickie Sharp Cogan ’26
Jane Kates Pincus ’59
Arn Chorn-Pond ‘88

PUBLISHING
Wendy J. Strothman ’72

RELIGION
Laura Geller ’71

SPACE SCIENCE
Geoffrey Alan Landis ’88 Ph.D.
Thomas O. Paine ’42
Byron Lichtenberg ’69

SPECIAL MENTION
Alumni of the Corporation
Alumni War Veterans
Artemis A.W. Joukowsky ’55
Martha Sharp Joukowsky ’58

SPORT
Fritz Pollard ’19
William Almon ’75
Mark Donohue ’59
Albina Osipowich van Aiken ’33
Joe Paterno ’50
Steve Jordan ’82
John Heisman 1891

THEATER & FILM
JoBeth Williams ’70
John Lee Beatty ’70, ’73 M.F.A
Richard Foreman ’59

ZOOLOGY
Robert Cushman Murphy ’11

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November / December 2000