Former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn Receives Honorary Degree
Atlanta (May 3, 2008) —At the Georgia Institute of Technology’s 230th commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 3, at the Georgia Dome, former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn received an honorary degree from the Institute. In presenting the award, President G. Wayne Clough said that, as Senator, Nunn became “one of our nation’s most respected and visionary experts on national defense and security.”
Nunn, who attended Georgia Tech from 1956-1959, joined the Georgia Tech faculty as a distinguished professor after he retired from the Senate in 1997, allowing the Institute “to name our newly created School of International Affairs for him,” Clough said. “Since then, the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs has more than doubled in size and become the home of the biennial Sam Nunn Bank of America Policy Forum. Other initiatives like the Sam Nunn Security Fellows Program also enable Georgia Tech to educate the next generation of national and international security policy advisors.”
A native of Perry, Georgia, Nunn began his academic career at Georgia Tech, “where he was more interested in the Freshman Cake Race than the arms race,” Clough said. “He won the Cake Race, and we’d like to think he learned something about winning from that experience, because in 28 years of elected political office, he never lost a campaign.”
After receiving his law degree from Emory University, he began his political career, defeating “a crowd of veterans to be elected to the United States Senate at the tender age of 34,” Clough said. As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he was a guiding force in reshaping American policy toward Eastern Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
His crowning achievement was the Nunn-Lugar Act, which “provided incentives to the former Soviet republics to dismantle their nuclear arsenals and other weapons of mass destruction.” This effort has been so effective and successful that scholars have hailed it as “the most significant congressional achievement in nuclear affairs since the dawn of the nuclear age.
Since his retirement from the U.S. Senate in 1996, Clough said that Nunn “has continued to crusade against the dangers of terrorism and nuclear weapons. Together with fellow Georgian and CNN founder Ted Turner, he established the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit organization that works to reduce global threats from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. He also chairs the board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.”
In his response, Nunn said that “never in my wildest dreams did I think it would take me 52 years to receive a degree. At the end of my junior year, I realized that three years of law school would be much easier than passing the two remaining courses in mechanical drawing,” so he “dropped into law school, descended in to the practice of law, and finally sank into the depths of politics.
“To complete my life’s story, after leaving the United States Senate in 1997, I decided to return to Georgia Tech once I discovered—much to my delight—that you had dropped mechanical drawing and added women.” He went on to say that “You graduates already know that Georgia Tech is one of the toughest schools in the country. In the years ahead, you will find that it is one of the most highly regarded in the world.”
“One thought for our graduates,” he concluded. “Technology and science are outrunning the world of law, governance, international cooperation, and religion. Bridges must be made between the world of science and technology and the world of human relations. Your Georgia Tech education will give you opportunities not only to ‘cash in’, but opportunities to build these bridges. I urge you to do so.”
Nunn’s honorary degree citation reads, “To all whom these presents may come, Greeting: Whereas Sam Nunn has been recognized as a guiding force in the reshaping of American international policy following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and continues to be one of the nation’s most respected voices in international affairs and defense, now therefore, We, under the authority vested in us, do hereby confer the degree of honorary Doctor of Philosophy with all the rights, privileges, and honors thereunto appertaining.”