INSIDE BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY
Wallerstein awarded three honorary doctorates
Immanuel Wallerstein
“I went over for the Lund University annual com-mencement in Sweden to give a talk and they gave me an honorary degree in social sciences,” Wallerstein said. “The other trips were organized because I was already in Europe. At the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, the degree was a special ceremony for me. It’s an elite graduate school.”
While in Russia, Wallerstein was also presented with the N.D. Kondratieff Gold Medal by the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. “It was a new award of some kind and they actually awarded it to me over a year ago on paper, but they wanted to present it to me in person, so they seized the opportunity to officially present the plaque,” he said. “Kondratieff was a great economist and I’ve written quite a bit on him.”
The third honorary degree came from Kharkov National University in the Ukraine, said Wallerstein, and brings to more than a dozen the number of honorary doctorates he has been awarded.
“They’ve been from all over,” he said. “I have them from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Romania and Peru. Basically these tend to be recognition of my work in what I call world systems analysis, but it’s also because of my work on the structures of knowledge and the fact that I chaired the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences and oversaw the publication of its findings, Open the Social Sciences, in 1996.”
