1991 Beberman Award Winner: John C. Bailar

Dr. Bailar is a retired commissioned officer of the U.S. Public Health Service. He worked at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda for 22 years, and he has held academic appointments at Harvard, McGill University, and at the University of Chicago. For 11 years, he was the statistical consultant for The New England Journal of Medicine and also was a member of the Editorial Board of that journal. He was a MacArthur Fellow from 1990 to 1995 and was elected to both the Institute of Medicine and the International Statistical Institute. He has published about 250 scientific papers of various kinds as well as several books. Dr. Bailar earned an M.D. degree from Yale (1955) and a Ph.D. in statistics from American University (1973.)


1992 Beberman Award Winner: Jane Hays Henneman

Jane Hays Henneman, J.D., is the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of The Downey Group, Inc. She provides life insurance and wealth transfer planning independently and together with Dave Downey and other Downey Group professionals. She also oversees all of The Downey Group operations, including client service of enforced policies purchased in connection with wealth transfer planning. She joined The Downey Group in early 1994 after almost 15 years of practicing law. She has been an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois College of Law since 1985. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the State Universities Retirement System of Illinois, and of the Champaign Public and Information Center, the Executive Club of Champaign County, the Finance Committee of the Carle Foundation, and Chair of the Carle Foundation Gift Planning Committee. Ms. Henneman is an appointed member of the Illinois State Bar Association Trusts and Estates Section Council and is a past President of the Eastern Illinois Estate Planning Council. She is the mother of three children.


1993 Beberman Award Winner: Victor Rabinowitch

Until his retirement in 2002, Dr. Rabinowitch was Senior Vice President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He was trained as an ecologist and earned both a master's degree and a doctorate degree from the University of Wisconsin. His doctorate is an unlikely combination of zoology and international relations. For more than 25 years, he was associated with the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (NAS/NRC) and its programs relating to science, technology, and international development. In 1979, he was a member of the U.S. Delegation to the United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development. From 1970 to 1981, he held the position of Director of the Academy's Board On Science and Technology for Development, and in 1981 was appointed as Executive Director of the Office of International Affairs of the National Research Council. He served as the Director of the NAS Committee on International Security and Arms Control from 1985 to 1987. Dr. Rabinowitch was honored as the NAS Staff Member of the Year for 1982. From 1990 to 1997, Dr. Rabinowitch was a member of the Council of the United Nations University. In October 1990, he was named Vice President for Programs of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In this capacity, he has been responsible for the management of all aspects of the Foundation except investments but including program development, staff, budget, and Board relations. In the past few years, Dr. Rabinowitch has been actively involved in the restructuring of the MacArthur Foundation's grant program and in the implementation of a new structure.


1994 Beberman Award Winner: Patricia Veach Wilder


1995 Beberman Award Winner: Frederick Marx

Frederick Marx is an internationally acclaimed, Oscar and Emmy-nominated producer/director with 25 years of experience in the film business. He was named a Chicago Tribune Artist of the Year for 1994, a 1995 Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of a Robert F. Kennedy Special Achievement Award. His film Hoop Dreams played in hundreds of theatres nationwide after winning the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was the first documentary ever chosen to close the New York Film Festival. It was on over 100 "Ten Best" lists nationwide and was named Best Film of the Year by Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Gene Shalit, and Ken Turran, and was chosen Best Film of the Year by the Chicago Film Critics Association. It is the highest-grossing non-musical documentary in United States history. It has won numerous prestigious awards, including an Academy Award Nomination (Best Editing), Producer's Guild, Editor's Guild (ACE), Peabody Awards, and The National Society of Film Critics Award. The New York, Boston, LA, and San Francisco Film Critics all chose it as Best Documentary, 1994. In addition to co-producing, co-directing, and co-writing Higher Goals, which was nominated for an Emmy, Marx also co-produced and edited Out of the Silence, an hour-long documentary about the international fight for human rights. Two other of his films, Hiding Out for Heaven, and Dreams from China, premiered at the New York Film Festival, and Dreams from China was broadcast nationally on the Learning Channel's Distant Lives series after receiving awards at major film festivals including Bombay, Vancouver, Hawaii, and Chicago. Marx has also won awards for his freelance work as a producer, director, and/or editor on a wide variety of educational and industrial. His subjects include caregiving for the elderly, stopping sexually transmitted diseases, and the perniciousness of the alcohol industry's advertising. Additionally, he has more than five years of experience working in film distribution and exhibition. While living and working in China for two years in the early '80s, Marx lectured on American Independent Film and screened his films throughout the country. Marx received a Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies and Political Science from the University of Illinois in 1978, and a Master of Fine Arts in Film Production from Southern Illinois University in 1983.


1996 Beberman Award Winner: Philip M. Faucett

Faucett taught economics at Northwestern University and was an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago and was the senior economist for Wolfe Engineering Co. in Chicago. He went on to serve in the U.S. State Department as a financial economist and was deputy mission director in Bolivia, assistant director of industry in Vietnam, and deputy director of missions in Ecuador. In addition, he was the director of Argentine and Paraguay affairs at Washington, D.C. After leaving the State Department, Faucett embraced a whole second career in the arts. He and his wife Betty, the former Elizabeth P. Lohmann, also a Uni graduate and a member UniÕs first subfreshman class which graduated in 1937, were instrumental in helping to found the Young Concert Artists management association, an organization devoted to promoting and scheduling emerging talent. When the Faucetts returned to Champaign-Urbana, he assisted the National Academy of Arts as executive vice president from 1973 to 1975 and later served as treasurer. He was the founding president and director of the Conservatory of Central Illinois and also was involved with the Sinfonia da Camera. And, he served as president of the World Heritage Museum at the University of Illinois. Faucett was the founder and president of Faucett Travel, Inc., which was based in Champaign, from 1979 to 1984, when the company merged with Franklin Travel. In 1980, he founded and served as president of Faucett Communications, Inc., which published C-U Magazine from 1980 to 1984 and again from 1991 to 1992.


1997 Beberman Award Winner: Max Harnish & his Parents

The late Rear Admiral Max Harnish, University Laboratory High School Class of 1937; Max's stepmother, the late. Alice Harnish, who taught both Latin and English at Uni; and Max's father, the late Wilber Harnish, who taught Chemistry and Physics at Uni and was head of the Uni Science Department from 1925 to 1955 were honored with the Beberman Award in 1997. The U.S. Navy awarded Max the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal and two Gold Stars in lieu of the Second and Third Air Medals, and the Navy Unit Commendation Medal with one star. He later was honored with some 20 other commendations, including the Decorated Legion of Merit with two Gold Stars and the Korean Presidential Unit Citation Medal Max assumed command of Fighter Squadron 21, operating in both the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets with jet-fighter aircraft, in the early 1950s. In 1958, he returned to the Navy Department for duty in the Special Projects Office, where he served in the Plans Division for the development of the Polaris weapon system. In 1966, he became the Commanding Officer of the U.S.S. RANGER, during which time the ship was involved in strikes against enemy forces in North Viet Nam. Harnish was awarded the Legion of Merit, and his ship, The RANGER, was selected "Ship of the Year" by Our Navy magazine. In September 1967, he became Director of the Office of Program Appraisal for the U.S. Navy. Following his retirement, he worked with Bechtel, Inc., in San Francisco. He died on September 19, 1979, following a short battle with cancer.

Alice Harnish, who was 92 in 1997 when the award was presented, taught English at Uni from 1929 to 1932 and Latin in 1960 and 1961. She taught at many other schools, including Champaign Central, where she was on the faculty from 1961 to 1971. She also taught rhetoric at the University of Illinois.

The late Wilber Harnish taught Science at Uni for some 20 years. He was born on a farm near Carlisle, PA, in 1886. He attended a rural brick school for three or four years and then a grade school in town for five years. When he finished 8th grade, he decided to go to work at a wheel factory. After a year and a half, he decided to return to school and by means of concentrated study was able to complete high school in two and a half years and made plans to attend law school, which he ultimately did not pursue. From 1910, Wilber taught at several schools in Michigan and Illinois before coming to Uni in 1925. He completed some 15 units of graduate credit at the U of I, mostly in education but also in Physics and one in chemistry.


1998 Beberman Award Winner: Iris Chang

Iris was recognized in 1998 for her best-selling book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, published in November 1997 by Basic Books. At age 30, Iris was one of the youngest Uni High alumni to be recognized with the Beberman Award. At the time of the Award, Iris' book had been on the New York Times bestsellers list for four months. With more than 100,000 copies sold, it also was an international bestseller in Canada and Taiwan. An excerpt of The Rape of Nanking was published in Newsweek magazine in December 1997, and the book was about to undergo its 20th printing. She has gone from being the youngest author published by Basic Books, a division of Harper Collins, to being its best-selling author. A 1989 journalism graduate of the U of I, Iris worked as a reporter for the Associated Press and as an intern at The Chicago Tribune before earning a master's degree from the Johns Hopkins University's writing program. In addition to The Rape of Nanking, Iris is the author of Thread of the Silkworm, a definitive biography of Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen, the father of modern Chinese rocketry and the so-called Chinese "silkworm" missile. The book was first published in December 1995. In 2003, she published The Chinese in America: A Narrative History.


1999 Beberman Award Winner: Hamilton O. Smith

Nobel Prize Winner Hamilton O. Smith, M.D. received the 1999 Max Beberman Distinguished Alumni Award. Smith was a microbiologist who was on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University from 1967 to 1998. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1978 for his role in discovering restriction enzymes, chemicals which turned out to be the tools scientists needed to cut and graft pieces of DNA. The discovery is credited with revolutionizing the field of genetic research. After graduating from Uni a year early in 1948, Smith did his undergraduate work at the University of Illinois and the University of California at Berkeley. He earned his medical degree from Johns Hopkins in 1956. By the time he returned to Johns Hopkins in 1967 as a faculty member, his interests had shifted to the field of genetics. Although he retired from the university in 1998, Smith is still active as a researcher - to put it mildly. As senior director of DNA resources at the biotech company Celera Genomics, he and president Craig Venter are leading an effort to sequence the human genome, described by The Baltimore Sun as "one of history's most ambitious scientific efforts."


2000 Beberman Award Winner: Mary E. Jones Clark

Mary Clark was recognized for her more than 25 years of service to the Girl Scout organization, first as a volunteer and then as a professional staff member. In fact, she says she remembers when scouting was mostly about selling cookies and camping rather than the computers, car maintenance, personal finance, science, college preparation and career exploration opportunities that now are hallmarks of the organization. Clark herself was a girl scout from third to sixth grade, while in elementary school. Her mother was a Girl Scout leader in the 1940s before Mary was even old enough to be a Brownie or Junior Girl Scout. Following graduation from Uni High in 1955, Mary attended a local business college and then enrolled in college as an elementary education major. Not long after that, she met her husband, the Rev. Morris Clark. He was the pastor at the Second Baptist Church in Mattoon for 20 years before retiring and now is an associate pastor of Salem Baptist Church in Champaign. The two enjoy singing and were members of the National Council for Negro Musicians, Inc. Clark took voice lessons and from a teacher who traveled from Chicago to teach a group of Black musicians each week, and also took piano lessons for 14 years. The Clarks are the parents of four children, who attended the graduation ceremony with their spouses and children: The Rev. Maurice Clark of Champaign, Katheryn Clark Lewis of Mt. Juliet, TN, - who also attended Uni High in the 1970s - and twins, the Rev. Edward Clark of Stone Mountain, Ga., and Edwina Clark Hendricks of Lithonia, GA. Clark joined the Green Meadows Girl Scout Council professional staff in 1973 as the full-time Field Services Director. She later assumed responsibility for adult training and, in 1982, she received Girl Scouting's top award for adults at the time, the Thanks Badge. She is now Adult Education Director for the Green Meadows Council which currently involves more than 4,000 girls in 400 troops in a six-county region. Two of her granddaughters recently have become Brownies, which means four generations of Mary's family have been or are involved in Girl Scouting.