Yale Gives Degrees To Bernard Bailyn And Gary Trudeau

NEW HAVEN--As thousands of relatives and well-wishers watched both the commencement pomp and the threatening grey sky, Yale awarded 1152 bachelors and 1737 post-graduate degrees yesterday before bestowing one of its 11 bicentennial honorary awards on Bernard Bailyn, Winthrop Professor of History.

Also receiving honorary degrees during the hour-long morning ceremony on Yale's Old Campus were: Garretson B. "Gary" Trudeau, creator of the comic strip "Doonesbury" and a recent Yale College graduate; Mstislav Rostropovich, the Russian cellist who received a similar award from Harvard two years ago; William T. Coleman Jr., U.S. Secretary of Transporation; and Mary D. Leakey, the archeologist.

In awarding Bailyn the honorary "Degree of Humane Letters," Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. praised the 53-year-old historian as an "interpreter of the colonial age" whose "clarity of mind and pen bring a rare pattern of coherence and wholeness to our understanding of the American past."

Brewster's citation for Trudeau--who received a standing ovation from half the audience and virtually all of the degree recipients present--stated that "Yale's image, as the hucksters would say, will never be the same after what you have done to your classmates and your president."

"Happily, too, your country will never look at itself quite so self-seriously, certainly not as self-righteously, thanks to your satiric insights into the foibles, and pretensions of both the notorious and the obscure," the citation added.

Others receiving the awards at the university's 375th commencement included Elizabeth Drew, journalist; William G. Milliken, governor of Michigan; Jesse W. Beams, professor of Physics emeritus at the University of Virginia; William R. Hewlett, president of the Hewlett-Packard Corporation; and Franklin S. Cooper, associate director of research at Haskins Laboratories.