Citation
George F. Kneller — son of Worcester and Clark University. Your career has been as distinctive as it is distinguished. Great universities have shaped your mind — A.B., Clark University; M.A., London University; Ph.D., Yale University; Litt.D., Sheffield University; LL.D., Heidelberg University. Great mentors have informed your vision. The idea of a union of education and anthropology, as you have said, first caught your imagination when your studies of education in Nationalist Socialist Germany brought you to grips with questions of race and culture. Your mentor then was Bronislaw Malinowski, and in this collaboration began the development of
a new and profoundly significant interdiscipline — education and cultural anthropology.
Your world, however, has not been confined to ideas. As a public high school teacher; a master in private schools; a specialist in education in Latin America for the United States Office of Education, Professor of Education at Yale University, and at the University of California, Los Angeles, you have shown us a way of embracing the polarities of theory and practice.
As you stated in your book, Existentialism and Education,
… a man may carefully describe a particular object
or living thing, seeking to explain that “certain
something” that constitutes its essence, but in
order to know if it is genuinely alive, or real,
we must personally have an experience with it.
George Kneller, you have been authentically involved as a scholar, teacher, and human being. Clark welcomes you home with pride and affection.
Mr. President, I request that the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, now be conferred upon George F. Kneller.