Martin Meyerson

Martin Meyerson, "ICAS Distinguished Fellow and Liberty Award recipient, the President of the University of Pennsylvania from the summer of 1970 to early 1981, is now President Emeritus and University Professor Emeritus. He is a member of boards or councils of Penn's Institute for Research on Higher Education (chair), Friends of the Library (chair), the University Press (chair for a dozen years), Mahoney Institute of Neurosciences, and the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies. He headed the program and the policy review group of the University's Fels Center of Government for over a decade, until 1996. With the former Penn Trustees' chairman, he was co-chair of the University's 250th Anniversary, which was celebrated throughout 1990 and included a national public television series on the changing globe after the cold war. His earlier professorial and research appointments at Penn were in the years 1952 to 1957.

"...Between 1981 and 1985, Martin Meyerson served as chairman of the board of the Institute of International Education, which administers Fulbright and many international exchanges through its 20 worldwide offices; he is a board member there of over 25 years' standing. Having acted in the early eighties as president of the board of the International Association of Universities, he has been an Honorary President since 1985.

"He began an academic career in 1948 to 1952 as an assistant professor of the social sciences at the University or Chicago, in its undergraduate College and its graduate division. In 1957, at the age of 34, he became the first tenured Frank Backus Williams professor of city planning and urban research at Harvard University, and in 1963 was acting dean of that university's Graduate School of Design. From 1958 to 1963, he was the first director of the M.I.T -Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, a research group drawn from various disciplines working on theoretical and applied problems in the United States and elsewhere, including Venezuela. He was appointed professor and dean of the College of Environmental Design of the University of California at Berkeley in 1963, and in 1965 was the interim chancellor of the Berkeley campus at a time of major student unrest.

"Martin Meyerson became president of the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1966 and professor of public policy. Before leaving there to return to Pennsylvania, Time magazine featured him in a review of campuses as one of four university presidents who "have done uncommonly well". Referring to Berkeley, Time commented "he picked up the smoldering pieces with uncommon skill, winning the admiration of faculty and students"; and at Buffalo, it referred to his "major reforms". The New York Times, in its "Man in the News" coverage when he became president of Penn, called him an "educational innovator".

"From 1969 to 1974, he chaired the Assembly on University Goals and Governance, a foundation-supported national effort to aid and improve higher education. He has been a member of advisory bodies at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, the University of London, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hampshire College, Brandeis University, UCLA, the University of Oklahoma and Washington University, and was on the boards of the Niagara University, the Hebrew University, the American College, the Curtis Institute of Music and the United World College (New Mexico). He serves on the boards of the American Schools of Oriental Research (honorary), Tel Aviv University, and starting in 1993, a member of the board of overseers of Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey. An original member of the Business-Higher Education Forum, he was a director of the American Council on Aid to Education, the Educational Facilities Laboratory, the College Board and the Open University Foundation (U.S./U.K.). He held appointments with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (Director's Visitor) and as an Overseas Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University.

"... Since 1995, he has been a board member of the International Literacy Institute. At ACTION, the American Council To Improve Our Neighborhoods (a national movement of business, professional and civic leaders to enhance urban communities), he was executive director and earlier, research director. He has served on task forces for Presidents of the United States of both parties, on expert groups for Congress, and on councils of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, the Census Bureau, thc Electric Power Research Institute and other agencies. He collaborated on a national study of corporate education and training, and was a member of the Senior Executives Council of the Conference Board.

"...Martin Meyerson has been a long-standing board member of the Aspen Institute and the United States Committee on the Constitutional System and until recently, the Salzburg Seminar (U.S./Austria), where he is now a Senior Fellow. Since 1993, he has chaired the board of the Monell Chemical Senses Center -- the main institution for studies of taste and smell -- succeeding Lewis Thomas.

"He was president of the Klein Foundation and an advisor to the Ford and other foundations. He serves on the board of the Panasonic Foundation established by the Matsushita Corporation (Japan/U.S.), and in 1996 succeeded Marconi's daughter as chair of the Guglielmo Marconi International Fellowship Foundation (communication and information sciences); it is located at Columbia University. Professor Meyerson is an American advisor for the Japan Foundation/Center for Global Partnership. He chaired the annual Lita Annenberg Hazen Trust Biomedical Workshops for a decade through 1991 (the three most recent of them were on the mind and the brain).

"He has also been a director of the Afro-American Film Foundation, the Niagara Institute in Canada and the Annenberg Theater. He served on international juries to select architects and artists for projects in Skopje, San Francisco, Boston and elsewhere. He chaired the Western New York Nuclear Research Center and the Council of Presidents for the Universities Research Association, which operated the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, was a member of the Air Conservation Commission (initiated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of which he is a Fellow), and was on the boards of the Academy of Religion and Mental Health and of the Design Science Institute with Buckminster Fuller.

"Martin Meyerson was a director of the Saint Gobain Corporation, with its U.S. companies CertainTeed and Norton; and the Fidelity and First Fidelity Bancorporations (now it is First Union). He was on the board of the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company, and until 1998, Universal Health Services. He is a director of Avatar Holdings, Inc. (land development and utilities) and a past director of the Scott Paper Company (1971 to 1993), the Marine Midland Bank, the Real Estate Research Corporation and UNI-COLL Corporation (computing). He was senior advisor for ten years to Arthur D. Little, Inc., a technical and management research firm.

"...He was editor of Conscience of the City, a book sponsored by the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Daedalus, on whose board of editors he served from the mid-1970s until 1990. He has been on the board of editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (from 1980 through 1998) and of scholarly and professiona1journals. He edited a book series on community development for McGraw-Hill, and various of his articles, books and reports have been translated and published in other countries. He organized and moderated a U.S. Bicentennial series on cultural and policy issues for Westinghouse Broadcasting.

"...He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society (and its executive committee), the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Academy of Education and an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa. He is an Academician of the Acadámie Europáene des Sciences des Arts et des Lettres. Martin Meyerson was the special award recipient, for his theoretical and practical contributions, at a commemorative meeting of the American Institute of City Planners, of which he is a past governor, The Philippine Women's University established the Martin and Margy Meyerson Chair for International Relations, citing the achievements of "that remarkable couple"." 


 * Life Trustee, Institute of International Education
 * Trustee, Foreign Policy Research Institute